Strange Glue Meets Khyam Allami (Part One)

Having seen Khyam Allami play an exquisite set of Oud compositions at the Space 2 stage at this year's Supersonic Festival, I was excited by the prospect of interviewing him. Whilst watching him play I scrapped the questions I had written in advance and wrote reams of new ones.

They were inspired by the emotion he communicated and by the contextual reference of a Syrian born Iraqi, who has lived in this country from the age of 9, playing this ancient instrument (which originates in the Arab Middle East) in an old custard factory in Birmingham at what many would call an Avant-Rock/Metal festival.

I intended to write a live review, but much of my response to his playing came out in this extensive interview which we at Strange Glue have decided to serialise in two parts. I began by asking Khyam how he felt when the multitude of photographers, including myself, began taking shots at the start of his set. He was one of very few solo performers at the festival and the photography seemed highly intrusive upon his performance, something that nearly all the photographers realised after a few minutes. Most of them retreated, but not to go shoot another performance, most stayed to watch and listen. Did he find it invasive?

Khyam Allami: A little bit, not so much. For one I wasn’t expecting it and it was a little bit off putting at the beginning. But at every performance I always need a little bit of a time to just calm myself down and get into it so, in a way, that was part of everything that was going on. If I look above the photographers I see everyone’s faces and that’s even more frightening.

SG: I believe I read that you took up the Oud relatively recently?

Khyam: Yeah, five years ago.

SG: What prompted that?

Khyam: Basically I’ve always had an instrument in my hand from the age of 8. After getting into rock music and playing guitar and bass and whatever I fixed myself on the drums from the summer of 96 onwards. Then I got to the point where I felt quite comfortable rhythmically, musically speaking, and I was able to express myself and challenge myself, but melodically it felt like something was lacking and I wanted to be able to develop that aspect of myself. Also I had this real desire to learn and understand music in its whole form. Not just be a drummer in a rock band that plays a specific type of rock.

I was listening to a lot of things at the time, I’ve never been someone who listened to just one type of music, but I didn’t understand it from a musician’s perspective. I wanted to make music my life. So I started learning the Oud because fundamentally its an instrument that is used by all the composers of Middle Eastern music, specifically in the Arab world, more than in Turkey, or Iran. At the same time, there was this real desire to understand, not necessarily eastern melodies but how those melodies were played. It’s not so much about what you’re playing, but how you’re playing it.

SG: The phrasing right? Are you familiar with Ross Daly? I think his phrasing is impeccable.

Khyam: Yeah, absolutely. This is a key part of musics from anywhere outside Europe. It’s how you play with it, how you elaborate it, how you vary it. There’s this thing that I could never understand before; I would listen to a piece of music and all of a sudden this one note would come in and it would just make my heart break. And I could never understand: why is that note so important? How are you doing that? So that’s the thing that led me… mostly it was a musical thing because I wanted to grow and develop. Then after about a year of playing Oud I just got fed up of… not necessarily the rock world but the industry and the fashion and how tedious everything has become. It’s boring, to say the truth.

SG: I agree, writing for a website you become involved in all manner of sickening elements.

Khyam: It’s not so much that rock music is boring, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that what’s been going on over the last five, seven years… so much is about fashion, trends. I got sick of it, I got tired of the lack of musicality let’s say. From the age of thirteen, fourteen I was listening to Tool, Melvins, Killing Joke, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc... and there’s just so much music there to get into. For me, the last band whose début album I got really excited about was Queens of the Stone Age, and their first record came out a fucking long time ago…

SG: 1997 I think…

Khyam: Since then… Mars Volta, yeah good, a bit wanky in places but you know…

SG:You introduced people to your instrument when you played this afternoon and also to the semi-improvised nature of the compositions, that’s Taqsim right?

Khyam: Yeah, Taqsim.

SG: Would you say that the technique of Taqsim differs to the improv technique of contemporary western improvising guitarists?

Khyam: I think it varies a lot, it’s a different world altogether. Because you’re dealing with melody, fundamentally. That means that the structuring of phrases, in the way that they develop melodically and dynamically throughout what you’re doing. There aren’t many people these days who play proper Taqsim. What I was doing today was more improvisation in the sense of it being on the spot. And although it was based on the musical modes of the Arab world and the structural guidelines that are involved within the compositions, I wasn’t performing a proper Taqsim. The word Taqsim itself (in Arabic) means to break something down into pieces. The idea is that you start with a musical mode of choice and you develop it from the lowest octave, near the tonic, the root note, then go all the way through it and show every single characteristic of that mode. Various modulations etc etc... it’s a genre in itself.

SG: Recently I saw a guitarist who called what he played Raga and Flamenco, there were some guitarists at the show who took it very seriously and they said that if he called what he played Flamenco in Seville the crowd would have thrown the furniture at him… and also it’s not Raga, because what you say about exploring the characteristics, that’s part of the Raga style too right?

Khyam: Absolutely. The traditional Taqsim follows very much the same guidelines that a Raga performance would because you have a specific way of developing the mode you have chosen, certain phrasings that have to be involved, certain modulations. In Indian music it’s not about a full modulation but you have certain notes that you only use in certain places which creates the feeling of a modulation, or we could say a ‘key change’.

SG: In one of my favourite Indian classical pieces, a very uplifting piece, they lead to a signifying phrase, giving various flashes of part of the whole. I’m trying to understand this intuitively, but it seems like they put building blocks together, and then they thread it through with that one connecting note you spoke about. It’s a beautiful thing.

There was a release recently called Open Strings (review here), which compiled a disc of early Middle Eastern recordings of Oud, Saz and Spike Fiddle players with a second disc featuring “responses” from what you might call the western Avant-Folk underground. Those responses… for a start they’re playing with fretted instruments and that changes everything (the Oud is not a fretted instrument), but although a few of them explored the building blocks, many of them just went for an arabesque feel… I’m hoping that more players start looking at the technique. I don’t think it would be bastardizing that technique to apply it to different kinds of music?

Khyam: No, no, it wouldn’t at all. I agree with you to an extent. The main problem is that there is no proper documentation of the Arab musical world in English. With Indian music there is so much that has been written and explored, in sleeve notes and books etc. With the Arab world all you have is sleeve notes and most of the time they’re incorrect. There’s no proper, I don’t want to say teaching methods, but there is not a single book you can buy about Arab music, sit and read it, listen to examples on a CD and have a vague idea of what’s going on. This is a big issue, I don’t know how it’s going to get dealt with.

SG: It would be a monumental task.

Khyam: There are certain phrases you can play on a guitar or a piano which will give you this Arabesque vibe, but what that normally lends itself to is this kind of… Egyptian belly dance stuff, which is what is exported… I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place but there’s just so much more out there, but until it can be communicated…

SG: When I first started to listen to this music it had this air of sadness, but the more I listen to it there’s a lot more coming out than just sadness. Initially that was all I heard, then there was wistfulness, other shades…

Khyam: I agree with the melancholic aspect, I think that’s inherent in most Middle Eastern music, well I don’t want to say most, but in a big part of it. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but maybe because of the way the region has been for a long time, that’s infiltrated into the musical expression, I’m not sure.

I’ve had this over the years; when people hear me play they say “it’s really beautiful”, which is a beautiful thing to hear from someone. They also say “it’s really melancholic” or “it’s sad” or sometimes “it’s really depressing” etc...

It seems to me that most people's ears are tuned to very specific, broad emotional expressions. So we have Happy, Sad, and “this one we can dance to” and "this one’s really angry" etc... they’re very basic, archetypal emotions. When you start to break those down and you start to get into the detail of those emotional aspects, it becomes a different story. So for me, something melancholic or sad can be hopeful, can be desperate, can be mournful, can be wishful, can be longing. Now we’re dealing with linguistics and it’s a bit difficult for me to express these subtleties in words.

What I mean to say is that there are many ways you can break musical expression down, it’s the same as learning a new language. If you learn a new language and you know the basic words, you can say “I’m very happy” or “I’m very sad”. Once you get more familiar with a language and you start to understand the poetic nature of some words, the word “longing” for example conjures up various things. You could be missing a loved one, you could be missing your home, you could be missing your instrument. Even “missing” as word has a different connotation, do you see what I mean?

The modes and the pieces that I played today and within Arabic music as a whole try to express those various subdivisions of those emotional characteristics.

SG: You might say that an equivalent would be the difference between “loneliness” and “aloneness”, something which this music weaves together.

Khyam: I should add that I chose a specific modality to stick with for this performance, for all the pieces, in order to have a coherent structure and not put too much pressure on people’s ears because if I start playing with too many microtones etc... sometimes when people aren’t used to it it’s a bit difficult.

Part Two will follow on Monday.

(Header Image From Katja Ogrin www.katjaogrin.com )