Sand Enigma is a vision. Not in the sense of a future or even a past, but of a roiling, tempestuous, and contradictory present. Composer and bandleader Sam Shalabi has created a movie—and without trotting out the cinematic tropes, this release has a comprehensive narrative, one that has as much to do with Guillermo de Toro as it has to do with Frederico Fellini.
It starts with “Aha,” a daybreak of shimmering, multitracked, Middle Eastern plucked strings that’s later subverted by a chorus of voices in sympathetic tonality, but that slowly twists into a disturbingly queasy vertigo. That is the first example of the theatricality of the presentation.
Voice is by its nature the instrument that most quickly dives into our emotional centres—and Shalabi is keenly aware of this. The voices in Sand Enigma serve as a Greek chorus as well as a solo expression, well documented in the traditions of Middle Eastern music, and is both soothing and profoundly disturbing.
Shalabi has incorporated a vast array of sounds and forms into Sand Enigma, all working almost more as a structure of context, challenging the listener to follow and internalise the contradictions. The ebb and flow of rhythm and tonality with dense and aggressive bursts of noise is present throughout this work but, again, serves a compositional direction of context as much as the instrumental virtuosity readily apparent in the execution.
“‘Broken Maqams,” a wonderful noise mashup of EQ-deadened pulse, thickly deconstructs into a sparkling traditional Arabic presentation ending in a viscous bowed-overtone contrabass by Jonah Fortune, which sets the stage for . . . a piano boogie woogie eventually torn apart by saxophones!
“Recuerdo” is a gorgeous song beautifully rendered by Katie Moore, with classical guitar and slide guitars in accompanying mode as it morphs into the three-part “Bone Mass.” One can only understand that it presages the disturbing field of schrei opera at the end of “Bone Mass Part III” because the listener has been there before.
Sand Enigma is a work of totality: while its songs and segments stand on their own as separate elements, it is a profound and integrated work that should be received as such.