Speed Caravan
Kalashnik Love

In any desert...

Alone, with incessant sound storms. Lips cracked from the sun and a throbbing head. Disoriented and enchanted by continuous mirages. Imagined and vanished oases. Promises resolved into repressed anger.

Suddenly, the surprise. The fast caravan passes before my incredulous eyes. I do not delude myself.

I remain still. I close my eyes.

The sound of the Oud shakes my eardrums. Infernal instrument. Electricity increases in intensity in the surrounding air. The rhythm rises, beats straight to the heart. We dance, merging with nature, with all human culture. Echoes of wah-wah and sensual Hendrixian distortions bring me back to the dawn of the music I believe I know. They rewrite history in my memory. They rewrite and reread all my memories. Distorted whiplashes move my hips, making me sway and move freely, within new notes, oases in my desert. Not mirages.

Unconsciously, I find myself with them. The journey begins.

They are four musicians. Mehdi Haddab (DuOud, Ekova) and his faithful electro-Oud, Pascal Teillet (numerous collaborations including jazz musician Archie Shepp) and his multifaceted bass, Hermione Frank the electronic queen (Ekova) and Mohamed Bouamar, seductive singer and skillful percussionist. Each brings with them a baggage for a heterogeneous load. They travel for Real World Records. Peter Gabriel...

 ...ab assuetis non fit passio.

They play with music, with emotions, with mental images and with my certainties. They nullify my judgments, reintegrate old visions, and redirect millions of my established synapses.

I only recognize old reminiscences, such as Killing An Arab and Galvanize.

Tedious genre discussions fall away to give space to imagination and free expression. An enormous Pandora's box, very dangerous. Fortunately, containing only Elpìs.

Through multiple musical territories, aided by splendid idioms, by bursts of adrenaline and contrasting emotions. Foggy or lashing atmospheres, flashes in the flat and clear sky. I think back to the Nile, the surrounding civilizations, North Africa, the Arabian peninsula, spreading like an oil slick to the antipodes.

The desert is no more, swept away by the skilled use of an infinite palette of colors.

Now I'm well.

Sooner or later, though, the desert will reappear...