Shalabi Effect is free improvisation. This does not mean atonal noise, although atonality and beautiful noises are ever present; it also doesn’t mean that there is no melody, but the melodies are rarely if ever known ahead of time. The base sound comes from a combination of Middle Eastern modes, played by Sam Shalabi on the Oud, and the cinematic psychedelic style of Anthony Seck. Add to this concoction the experimental influence of Avant Guardiste Alexandre St. Onge, as well as North Indian percussion by Will Eizlini, and you get the current core sound stew; often spiced with special guests and their influences.
The best sound of Shalabi Effect is always from the first take, when the ideas have their spontaneous freshness: any attempt to “hard-code” an improvisation produces at best mediocre results. Attempts to actually recreate pieces always fails. At most Shalabi Effect will decide what key and mode to play in, some skeletal structure and ideas in the form of images or moods, or timing and transitions, as though they were scoring a movie. Even the more studio sounding tracks always begin with a free improvisation: any song like structure, as in On the Bowery (from Shalabi Effect’s self-titled release), was a creative layer added to the original raw improv.
Shalabi Effect was named after Sam Shalabi, but shalabi effect has no leader: A piece is always the construction of the ideas that come into the minds of the members and guests at the time of playing/recording. The sound is the resulting sum total of the aesthetics and communication between the musicians. Perhaps this is the significance of the name Shalabi Effect, which sounds like something drawn from an engineering text-book: [the] Shalabi Effect happens as a result of plugging all kinds of stuff together and turning the machine on to see what it does. Sometimes it’s slow and sublime, sometimes it’s scary...
Thank you for the request! I've actually been a fan of your work for some time now (since I heard the self-titled release on Alien 8). Obviously I haven't spent much time browsing through the denizens of MySpace looking for quality music seeing as how you found me first...
Many thanks, huge respect to Shalabi Effect, you don't hear stuff like this very often. It's also a safer alternative to psychoactives, bless you for keeping my brain preserved!
