Strange Glue Meets Khyam Allami (Part Two)

In part one of our exclusive interview with Khyam Allami we talked about the early beginnings of his upbringing and how he has only recently began playing his now trademark Oud.

In part two, we delve a bit deeper into the music surrounding Khyam and where he thinks it will venture in the coming years.

Part one of the interview can be read here.

SG:You mentioned the Egyptian violinist, who composed the third piece you played, which had quite strong rhythmic differences than the other pieces because it got into some heavier strumming. You talked about his lifestyle, smoking big spliffs and playing music till the sun rises with big groups of musicians. You also mentioned Tool, I used to listen to Tool a lot, smoke lots of dope and think I was a mystic…

But now, growing older, I’m starting to feel that the best music has nothing do with drug states. But it’s obvious that people with a heavy drug habit are able to make great music, what are your thoughts on that? You know, Eastern music crossed over to the west in the 60’s, Indian music mostly, and it was highly associated with drugs.

Khyam: I think with Indian music, it wasn’t the music itself that had anything to do with drugs, but the people who were taking the drugs were really into it because it was so far out and expressive. I mentioned this thing about the composer (Abdo Dagher) more as a joke and a bit of banter to be honest. I don’t think he would approve of my way of playing that piece, it was a bit too forceful maybe.

I don’t see anything wrong with drugs and music but personally I can’t work that way. I have to really get into something, be transported away by music in as pure a sense as possible. Although some people might say that when you smoke, or take a trip or whatever, that you’re getting into a state that’s more aware, that you’re more able to let yourself go and experience those kind of things. I would disagree; I’d say that it’s actually the easy option.

I remember hearing an interview with Maynard James Keenan (singer of Tool) and he was talking about drug use. He mentioned that for him, the point of LSD was that you take it once and you spend the next ten years of your life trying to figure out how to get to the same place without it…

SG: I took acid once, it scared the shit out of me, but I needed to experience that fear.

Khyam: If you want to explore emotional aspects of music, you have to be sensitive to it. To be sensitive to it, you have to open up a little bit. This is a personal thing, it doesn’t mean you have to open up and be really vocal about how it makes you feel to everyone around you. You, on an internal level have to open up to the music and listen to it and interact with it.

The harder that you listen, the more energy that you give to your ears to understand the sound, the more that you’re going to be able to react and hopefully the more pleasant the experience is going to be. Even if it’s something depressing. For example, I could listen to Joy Division all day and really feel it, really be into it and it might make me really down at the same time, but, in that state you’re experiencing an emotion that will always be linked to you and your life, your past, your friends, your family. It’s not the music that is making you down, it’s the emotional associations you have to that emotional expression through music that makes you react.

I think more people should try and develop that ability to enjoy music and art in all its forms without the need for anything to get them into that state. It’s more pure. I think it’s more personal. It becomes about you reacting 100% with what you’re experiencing, as opposed to having a catalyst or a middleman involved. It’s true when you smoke a joint and you listen, your ears open up a lot more, you hear things you don’t usually hear, BUT, there’s no reason you can’t hear those things when you’re in a normal state as well.

You know what I think the real problem is? That so many bands are so shit that you need the drugs to enjoy them!

SG: One of my favourite live acts, Sunburned Hand of the Man, whenever they’re written about people reference heavy psychedelic drugs, but having met them I get the distinct impression they’re not about that as a lifestyle, and although their music is often ragged, dissonant and at times straightforward juddering noise, it seems that they are exploring in the way that you spoke of. Sure they’re pretty far out people, but they don’t drop acid before every set…and you don’t need to be high to go a long way out with them.

Khyam: Let’s take Jarboe (who played earlier that day) for instance, unfortunately I had to leave her set halfway through. The music was okay, but it’s so evocative, the way that she works is so…  it’s twisted, and it gets to you. If you really listen you can get to the place that she’s trying to take you to. If you like it or you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter, the point is that she’s really trying.

Master Musicians of Bukkake who played yesterday (review here) were also awesome and very expressive. That was the first time I’d seen them and heard them.

SG: Same here.

Khyam: And it was beautiful, it was really beautiful.

SG: It was, I didn’t dislike the costumes or particularly like them, but it worked with their music. The riffs were exceptional, the percussion…

Khyam: What they had was absolute musicality. In each piece they only had pretty much one riff, they never moved from it, but the point is in the detail and this is one thing for me that was really missing in a lot of music, and that was why the lure of Eastern music, that means everything from North Africa all the way to India, was so powerful. It’s the detail that makes it. If you play one phrase in a certain way it has a certain power, if you play it another way it has another kind of power.

Once you get into playing an instrument and getting into the detail, you realise that every single movement that you make, might not have a grand impact on a macro-cosmic level, within the context of that phrase, but within the context of an entire piece the way that you play every single phrase, the way your hand moves, the way your fingers move, the way your finger touches a string, it makes all the difference.

SG: When I play an instrument, I have an innate sense of when I have done justice to a string of events and when I haven’t, however simple. Obviously in Eastern music there are a great many examples of musicians achieving amazingly long strings of movements, requiring such incredible consciousness and ability.

There was a Tibetan lama, called Chogyam Trungpa, who says very similar things about day to day behaviour in life. He doesn’t suggest that you should concentrate non-stop of every little thing that you do, but that via training, meditation, practicing an instrument or whatever, that this inbuilt sense can become far more intuitive and integrated.

Khyam: When you get to the point where you don’t have the energy or don’t have the will to just sit and really concentrate on the detail…which I think as a society we’ve come to, you really lose a lot. We want everything handed to us on a plate, and very quickly. It’s all like that, even with food.

Those things apply anywhere, take a band like Burning Witch, I went to see Thorrs Hammer and I saw some of The Accused yesterday, and I didn’t actually know that the singer from The Accused used to play drums in Burning Witch, anyway… I love Burning Witch precisely because of the detail. When that drummer plays, the tempo, the gap between each beat, the way that he hits each snare, each cymbal. The same was with Zu yesterday, those guys are far out and crazy, but if you really listen to them you hear the detail in what they’re playing. The rolls the guy was doing on the snare drum, they’re not there for no reason and however natural they might be for him as a musician those details make that band. Same with a band like Asva or Neurosis.

SG: Thorrs Hammer was a big moment for me (review here). I felt ecstatic, elated, but not over-excited. Corrupted were good too…

Khyam: I have to say I enjoyed Corrupted more, because they had this real powerful, innate harmonic sadness. I don’t want to break that down into subdivisions because it was a great experience.

SG: I loved that C chord they threw in during the second song.

Khyam: This is a thing I really love about Taint for example, they’re not afraid every now and then to whack in a massive E chord, or a G, at which point you get a real power of music and harmony, this rich sound. It’s the same with Fugazi, I really love them, they’re not afraid to just stand there and bang out a really simple basic chord.

SG: Davy Graham passed away last year; he’s credited with introducing the DADGAD guitar tuning to British folk guitar. Does that come from the Oud?

Khyam: I think that’s a slight variation of a Turkish tuning. I think what he tried to do was to find a tuning that would allow him to explore that modality a little easier, because he had a bunch of Turkish themes that he played with.

SG: When I started playing guitar I didn’t know any musicians, and until I found dropped D tunings via looking at tablature, everything I played in standard tuning came out sounding like Counting Crows or Oasis… But I read that Davy Graham, unlike me, never tuned open then played around, that he chose the appropriate tuning for something he had composed in his head?

Khyam: If he was credited with that, and I don’t know if it was him, I think it’s a natural thing to do, to tune an instrument so that the strings resonate with each other.

SG: I think the Norwegians invented the Hardanger fiddle (which has resonating strings beneath the fingerboard), I would love to try playing one. Werner Herzog used it for the score of his latest film (Encounters at the End of the World) and it was perfect for those shots of people and places on Antarctica. A beautiful sound.

A lot of people trace Flamenco back across to the East. With the composers you have studied with, do you think they are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Western music?

Khyam: I think maybe Abdo Dagher to an extent. Not much, because he doesn’t listen to much classical music anymore, but I think that… the Arab world has this kind of minority complex and they seem to think that Western classical music is the best thing in the world and that their own music isn’t worth anything. What Abdo Dagher tried to do, from the start of his career, was to present an instrumental Arabic music, that didn’t exist really before, that would have the same level of detail and complexity as Western Classical music has. So in that sense yes, he is influenced by it because he was trying to get to a certain level, musically.

Actually the composition of his I played, all of his compositions in fact, were written for an ensemble, they’re not written for solo instruments, so it makes it a challenge to render it for a solo instrument. That’s why I do it.

I can’t stress the amount of very, very Egyptian Arab phrasing, modulation and detail that’s involved in his music. His compositions have preserved a very specific style of Egyptian Arab performance that is dying, absolutely. He’s the only one alive who’s still doing it. That’s a fact.

SG: That reminds me of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World again, there Is a moment when he is interviewing a linguist who used to study dying languages. He talks of how it fried his brain and he had to go to Antarctica and now works in a greenhouse. I got the impression that he felt that it was perverse to study these things while they disappeared. It’s part of that ongoing trend towards cultural homogenisation.

Khyam: There is a threat and it’s obviously real and it’s active. But at the same time there are a lot of people who are keeping a lot of things going, in little corners, in little pockets. The problem is that there a lot of things, let’s say traditional things, or older things that just have no relevance to today’s lifestyle so why would or should they stay alive? I made a point tonight by saying that tradition is not static, it is dynamic and if this is the way the world is changing, everything else will evolve with that change, whether it will be a natural or unnatural change. There’s not much you can do about it.

There should be as much effort placed into the development of things as there is into the preserving and archiving of things. The Arab world hasn’t really got to that, the Turks are amazing at it, the Iranians are amazing at it, but the Arab world still lacks a lot of this. There are some movements now in Lebanon, in Syria, even in Cairo too but people just aren’t so interested and it’s not so relevant to their lives.

I don’t know... how is some Arab music from a hundred years ago relevant to the Arab people today? It’s the same with Classical music. The reason why it is relevant to some people is that it has been contemporised and lots of crazy music is going on. But if you go and see who are the audiences for performances of Verdi or Handel, they’ve been petering out for ages, that’s why orchestras like the London Symphony Orchestra have to try so hard to do so many other things to make themselves seem interesting to people, because most of their repertoire is just not relevant anymore.

SG: Classical music was never really engaged me, but recently I heard The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams and that connected, made a spark.

Khyam: There have been a handful of composers like him that have done a really good job of trying to bring that music to a wider audience and get them to react to it. Michael Nyman and Phillip Glass too I guess.

At the end of the interview I started to broach some difficult territory, enquiring if Khyam felt there was any connection between a perceived rise in interest in Arab and Middle Eastern music (and those cultures as a whole) amongst people who feel a sense of guilt, or despair at the way Western foreign policy has recently type cast, and more importantly, bombed, various parts of the region. He told me that he agreed, to an extent but that…

“I don’t think there’s a point in going down that line. A certain place in the world has been placed in our faces on a much more regular basis than it was before. Therefore it’s obvious that people will have an interest. Around the time that India was getting its independence, India got put in our faces, when the Beatles were hanging out with Ravi Shankar it got put in our faces. It happens all the time. If Turkey comes into the E.U, Turkey will be put in our faces… It’s a good thing at the end of the day, but it is just sad and unfortunate that the circumstances weren’t better”.

Khyam Allami: Myspace / Twitter

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