"....Featuring Jubran on vocals and oud alongside Hasler on trumpet, machines and electronics, the introduction to the first movement is immediately disorienting due to the discrepant vocal layers oscillating through the house's quadraphonic speaker system. It feels a bit like falling into a dream, where the boundaries between things start to dissolve and language takes on an amorphous quality... genius for creating sounds so unusual that they unhinge the listener from place and time, toppling them into an uncomfortable unknown."
Maha ElNabawi, The Wire, April 2020
".....Avoiding the pitfalls of other such transnational fusion music, disparate textures are not simply placed awkwardly next to one another, but tessellated and interwoven. On the record's most intense, muscular passage, for example, juddering, staccato synths and a fairly straightforward four-to-the-floor drum machine melt into Jubran?s increasingly frantic sprechgesang vocal to create a remarkably unsettling - and unsettled - spiral of rasping syllables and spectral harmonisation."
Luke Cartledge, The Quietus, 15 January 2020
"...Eine reife und ergreifende, emotionale, vielschichtige Musik voller Dringlichkeit und Gegenwart, eine friedlich fesselnde, die nichts dramatisiert, und auch nichts beschönigt, die grundehrlich ist und ohne Netz hoch über dem Boden des Alltags spielt - ein Kunstwerk."
Steff Rohrbach, Jazz'n'more, 2020
In WA (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their expression, their research and their desires, to unravel a musical universe of possibilities; “a unison of timbres, cultures complementing, the complicity of verses, and modes and languages confronting each other” in the duo’s own way of communicating respective origins and contemporaneity. Lyrical, within a sound full of contrast and ornamentation, they pursue an expansion of their repertoire with imaginative interpretation and improvisation.
For this release via Swiss label Everest Records, Jubran and Hasler seek new sonic and phonetic territory, based on the wasla compound form found in the classical repertoire of Near Eastern music and in Western modern and improvised music; a suite of musical explorations within one composition. In the 45-minutes-long piece that makes up the full length album, they gradually unveil to us the tenants of this artistic dialogue, as they deepen a longstanding musical pact nurtured since 2002 based on the probing and opening up of musical modes and traditions. The chemistry between Jubran and Hasler’s exchange gives birth to a singular, original and extratemporal sound.
All compositions and music by Kamilya Jubran & Werner Hasler
Lyrics by Kamilya Jubran except Olfah,
Poem by Abu Abdalla Alhomaidi, 11th century
Recorded and mixed by Sylvain Thévenard
Mastered by Martin Ruch
Artwork by Christoph Stettler
Werner Hasler composer, electronic musician,
and trumpet player working on hybrids of exhbition/ installation and concerts, emphasizing spatialisation and live sampling.
