Land of Kush - Sand Enigma (180g Double Black Vinyl)

Renowned Montréal/Cairo-based composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre-bending big band Land Of Kush. The trenchantly-titled Sand Enigma is the orchestra’s long awaited fourth album – its first in six years, following 2013’s The Big Mango, Shalabi’s critically-acclaimed love letter to Cairo, written and recorded during the Arab Spring. While the intervening years have obviously been devastating and disenchanting in so many ways, Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross-cultural expression. The album is a wildly diverse and hugely compelling tour de force of modern composition that pulses with emotion and experimentation, blending avant-garde, psychedelic, Middle Eastern, out-jazz, electronic and improv/free music tropes to stunning effect. Sand Enigma is peak Land Of Kush: the band’s most accomplished, acute and accessible album to date (though don’t expect ‘easy listening’ from this boundary-pushing hydra-headed entity).

Premiered at a rapturously-received concert in spring 2018 at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Shalabi entered Montréal’s Hotel2Tango studio later that year to record Sand Enigma with producer/engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Matana Roberts, Suuns, Big Brave, Sarah Davachi) and a cast of over twenty of Montréal’s finest out-music players, many of them veterans of Kush and of Shalabi’s various other projects. This 75-minute work (spread across two slabs of vinyl in the deluxe 2x180gLP edition) brilliantly captures a band on fire, flowing through composed set-pieces, improvisational turns, harmolodic gestural and textural interplay, bursts of fervent groove, and fearless, feral experimentation.

Deluxe double 180gram LP pressed at Optimal (Germany) comes in a wide-spine jacket printed on heavy uncoated 24pt/450gsm paperboard with the inside of the jacket finished in black ink and the 2 vinyl LPs housed in audiophile polylined black paper dust sleeves. The 2x180gLP edition includes a pair of full colour 12”x24” pull-out art inserts featuring photography by Hicham Chadly (Nashazphone) and Frédéric Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête), printed on uncoated140M archival paper. Includes digital download card.