Yasmine Hamdan became known with Soapkills, the Arab indie band she founded in Beirut with fellow musician Zeid Hamdan in the nineties. Soapkills’ music quickly became the soundtrack to a vibrant, young arts scene which developed in postwar Lebanon, and the band gradually acquired an emblematic status. To this day, Yasmine is considered Yasmine Hamdan lived in the Gulf countries and in Greece. She is considered as an underground icon throughout the Arab world. The amazing thing about Yasmine is she got to live and make music in two cities that Arabs like to lump together. Paris and Beirut--the Arab Paris.
After moving to Paris, Yasmine wrote and recorded the "Arabology" album with musician/producer Mirwais (of Madonna fame), under the Y.A.S. moniker, and also collaborated with CocoRosie for a while.
Yasmine Hamdan then joined forces with Marc Collin (Nouvelle Vague) to write and produce her first solo album (for Kwaidan Records), which is coming out internationally (in a revised version with five new tracks) in 2013 on Crammed Discs, under the title Ya Nass.
I enjoyed her music, but I must say, you have to be curious to appreciate it. It's not easy, and everything has a story behind it like the song about the different way folks pronounce tomatoes. In Lebanon there was a time when on some checkpoints, they would stop a car and ask the passengers to pronounce it as a way to know what their ethnicity is. As for the artist, when she speaks to my ears, she is Lebanese when she sings she is a citizen of the world.
Yasmine Hamdan 2013 - Aleb
Yasmine Hamdan - ياسمين حمدان
.jpg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment