While waiting for the release of their album planned for the beginning of 2016, discover the group A-WA composed of three sisters who will make you dance all day…
Endorsed by renowned selectors such as Acid Arab or Tomer Yosef of the Balkan Beat Box, the three sisters of A-Wa make generations and musical genres dance together on the acidic beats of their unstoppable electro-folk.
Never thought you’d be swaying to traditional Yemeni songs? With their addictive mix of hip-hop, Arabic folk and electro, the three sisters of A-Wa are making a name for themselves with their first single Habib Galbi, which has already been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube. Vocal harmonies and ancestral dialects meet keyboard, midi guitar, drums & samples to create a new and haunting disco-funk châabi groove. The Middle East knows how to delight us. This time it’s A-Wa, pronounced “ay-wa”. This brand new project from the far reaches of the Shaharut desert is a cross between a centuries-old Yemeni oral tradition and Arabian urban pop-groove.
A fresh, oasis, succulent baklava with mint and pistachio nuggets prepared by three sisters, the Haim sisters. Tair, Liron & Tagel come from a small village in the Arava Valley, between Sinai, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but the family’s roots are more precisely in Yemen.
Fascinated by the vocal magic & natural swing of the folk songs of their native land, the three Haim girls decided to add modern ingredients, such as a keytar, keyboard-midi-guitar, drums and samples and bass, to swirl the whole thing into an unstoppable disco-funk shaabi groove. Without being kitschy, the sound is shaped around a refreshing and easy-listening oriental pop with dancehall inspirations.
Either in tune or in canon, the voices of the three sisters are sung in the Yemeni Arabic dialect of their ancestors. These are love stories as well as protest songs, notably borrowed from the repertoire of the Judeo-Yemeni artist Shlomo Moga’a, a little-known figure from the 1960s. Tomer Yosef soon spotted them.
The versatile singer-percussionist of Balkan Beat Box, himself originally from this Yemeni community, took the project under his wing, offering the most radiant possibilities for the production of their first album, scheduled for Spring 2016. Until then, a first EP will be released in autumn 2015, also recorded at Tamir Muskat’s studio (Asaf Avidan, Balkan Beat Box, Firewater).
Discover this first single, “Habib Galbi”, accompanied by a clip as offbeat (above) as it is insanely aesthetic, is about to hit the old continent this summer. The oral tradition has never been so seductive. To discover !
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