AEM067 SAADI

It’s one thing to be exper­i­men­tal, quite another to per­form a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment. The first is a com­pul­sion, a per­son­al­ity quirk like gen­eros­ity or reck­less dri­ving. The sec­ond is some­thing peo­ple other than your mother should pay atten­tion to. Boshra al Saadi, a song­writer with vision­ary aes­thet­ics and a voice in the birthing stages of becom­ing leg­endary, from Dam­as­cus, Pitts­burgh and cur­rently the Lower East Side, is some­thing everybody—even, maybe, your mother—should be pay­ing atten­tion to. For every shit­headed musi­cal algo­rithm you could throw this artist’s way, like if Cor­nelius had a sex change and re-recorded Tusk, or if, you know, Regina Spek­tor had ousted Aaliyah at the Tim­ba­land audi­tion, there is really only one accu­rate way of encom­pass­ing the emo­tional kick these tracks deliver. Maybe it’s a thing about epony­mous musi­cians, Prince, Madonna, what­ever. But here’s the catch: I don’t want to just lis­ten to SAADI songs or go to SAADI shows; I want to be SAADI. After you hear the A and B sides, you’ll prob­a­bly feel sim­i­larly, and we can start a creepy sup­port group for one another where we dress up and write bor­der­line fan fiction.

Let’s start with “Pollen Seek­ing Bees,” avail­able in phys­i­cal for­mat this March on the Bad City 12” released by our bud­dies at Seri­ous Busi­ness. What’s cool here is how poten­tially ter­ri­ble that open­ing piano bang could have become. Think about it. No one really needs more fey, post-post-post K Records kiddy-ness on his or her iPod even if 10th grade was ter­ri­ble and you never got to build that tree­house with your best friend before he moved to Utah. But here, from the four-second mark on, we know we’re in the hands of a mas­ter tech­ni­cian, a per­former who knows not only how to exco­ri­ate a cliche but how to twist one into all kinds of cool new bal­loon ani­mals. That expertly syn­co­pated scratch, those eter­nal Glaswe­gian “aaahs”…it’s the kind of mix-up that allows you to accept that this song, like a par­tic­u­larly charm­ing drunk or a Higgs boson, will prob­a­bly do what­ever the fuck it wants.

A promo page on Seri­ous Busi­ness says that SAADI, “draws from sources as diverse as Bob Dylan, clas­sic 80’s synth pop, tra­di­tional Ara­bic music, punk rock, Niger­ian music and Brian Eno.” That’s all well and good, and she prob­a­bly does. But the point here is less the speci­ficity of these taste-wise impulses—did you hear that Chief Ebenezer Obey sam­ple?, and so on—than the sense of sonic tran­sience and muta­bil­ity their even-illusory pres­ence inspires. We are get­ting to the point in pop­u­lar music—thanks Internet!—where genre has become an essen­tially empty cat­e­gory, and all that really mat­ters is pos­tur­ing and shout-outs. Record dig­ging, for most of us, is a dead art, and Google is the new back of the CD store. It’s no big deal that one band can sound like Dinosaur Jr. meets Cybotron, or The Byrds meets John Cage. On the other hand, it is a big deal when influ­ences stop being pre­dictable, where the his­tor­i­cal fab­ric of lay­ered tracks and takes slides off the sewing machine. “Pollen Seek­ing Bees” sounds like a bunch of things: rainy-day pop music, club rap, musique con­crete. But the fusion is fluid, not forced. The songs set their own terms, and the clas­si­fi­ca­tion scram­bles to catch up.

B-side “3 am (Black Lodge)” is sim­i­larly, um, dif­fer­ent; an acoustic gui­tar fig­ure, an elec­tric wash that sounds like divid­ing cells look like under a micro­scope, SAADI’s cen­tered voice the con­stant that holds it all together. It’s not hard to imag­ine this as some late-career live record­ing by an artist you’ve been told a mil­lion times to lis­ten to but never have. There’s an effort­less con­fi­dence at play here, a sort of fan ser­vice for fan-base that’s still being cre­ated. It catches you up like an Amer­i­can at a Euro­pean soc­cer match, shows you slides of an imag­ined com­mu­nity that you sud­denly feel and will for­ever feel a part of.

SAADI, in the vein of other tran­scen­dently forward-thinking female artists like Bridgitte Fontaine or Lizzie Mercier Descloux, doesn’t have a hypoth­e­sis of what might sound amaz­ing if inter­laced at the right ratios. The exper­i­ment is con­cluded. Here are the results.

Ben Las­man

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