Safar

“If they ever remake Midnight Express, this is the music they should use”. “Will do for contemporary Arabic music what Gotan project did for Tango and Latin”. Imed Alibi make world music. Modern world music. A world of rhythms, beats, melody, ideas, transformation, technology and passion. In a world where everything is fluid, they transcend all notions of time, space and musical genre. In short, they’re the soundtrack for a new Arab vision of the 21st Century. The brainchild of percussion virtuoso, Imed, former member of The Boukakes, who’s played with everyone from Mamdouh Bahri to Watcha Clan, theirs is a music built on the percussive foundations of Berber and Sufi rhythms, a violin surfing an orchestral wave, digital beats lapping at its feet, a heavyweight bassline grounding its race to the shore. The violin is Khaled and Sultana collaborator, Zied Zouri from Iraq; the beats are Zé Luis Nacimento, the Brazilian percussionist of choice to such as Titi Robin and Mayra Andrade; and the bassline is Speed Caravan’s Pascal Teillet. From all corners of the world, this magical project fuses one progressive musical vision. No strangers to the studio, these four musicians set out on a journey to find, capture and crystalise the music they knew the project had the potential to inspire. But no journey was necessary, as, immediately, the music found, captured and crystalised them. With sympathetic and innovative production input from Justin Adams (JuJu, Tinariwen, Robert Plant), Imed Alibi are now set to release a ground-breaking debut album on IRL Records on February 10th next year. Beautiful, sensual and captivating, this is modern Arabic music of ambition and courage, where culture and geography have merged as one, taking us to the heart of hope and the source of being human, offering an intimate meditation on the meaning of our lives.