01. Moonlight (3:57)
02. Emotional Twist (3:42)
03. Open Sesame (3:21)
04. Wanderlust (3:18)
05. Trouble Watan (3:20)
06. Pretty Woman (3:30)
07. Kiss (3:32)
08. Babe (3:13)
09. Ya Ghali (4:02)
10. Red Sea Disco (2:53)
11. Stone Heap Of The Wild Cat (3:51)
12. Remote Love (4:15)

This inventive duo of brothers from the Golan Heights – Hasan and Rami Nakhleh – return with an infectious re-imagining of their sound. Jammed full of pop hooks and quarter-tone melodic lines, “Migrant Birds” unleashes a disco whirlwind that pays homage to the Middle Eastern dancefloor scenes of the 80’s. Retro funky meets hi-sheen contemporary.

It’s 1980. You’re in a disco, maybe in Beirut or Cairo, almost anywhere in the Middle East, lost in the colours and the lights, overwhelmed by the sound of drum machines and keyboards. It’s heady, it’s beautiful…but those days are long gone; maybe they were only ever just a fantasy. Real or not, they provide the inspiration for Migrant Birds, the new synth-powered album from TootArd that takes them to the dancefloor, about as far from the spare, guitar-driven desert blues of their highly touted Glitterbeat debut Laissez Passer, as it’s possible to go.

“After that record, Rami and I started listening to different things, dance music and old disco,” explains keyboard player and guitarist Hasan Nakhleh. “When we were little, we had compilations of 80s hits that we played over and over. We didn’t know the artists, but we knew all the melodies and harmonies. A lot of that was dance music. Back then, our family had an Arabic synthesizer with the quarter-tones, called a PSR-62, Oriental Model that I loved to play as a kid. My family still has a similar one. I bought an Oriental and began messing around. That was how Migrant Birds was born.”

The 80s may be the catalyst, with the glittering, hedonistic party vibe. But the real roots of the music here run deeper, to musicians like keyboardist Magdi al-Husseini and Ihsan Al-Munzer, who were the first to introduce synthesizers to the Arabic classical style, or Omar Khorshid, who pioneered the addition of electric guitar and worked with the legendary Umm Kulthum. They brought Arabic music firmly into the modern age.

“They were definitely big influences on me,” Nakhleh says, “I write to carry on and do more with the sounds they brought.” Migrant Birds winds all those strands from the past together into a very intricately-crafted whole with a full sound. While Nakhleh plays synthesizer on every track, he doesn’t completely ignore the guitar that was his trademark for so long. It’s there, but this time buried below the surface to bolster the rhythm, while the drums, played again by Nakhleh’s brother and co-conspirator Rami, are a carefully layered mix of machine and kit.

And under the beats and the joy, there’s a dark contrast, a sorrow that casts its shadow all across the lyrics.

“There’s a melancholic feeling to the writing,” Nakhleh agrees. ‘The subjects are darker. Arabs are people who have boiling emotions, they write sad love songs. Maybe it’s how we cope, to try and understand the struggle.”

The album’s heart is simple idea – freedom; of being those Migrant Birds and flying away. But perhaps that’s as natural as breathing for people who remain officially “undefined” and stateless. Those who are born in the occupied Golan Heights – like the Nakhleh brothers – have no passport, depending instead on a document called a laissez passer to be able to cross borders. It is a situation that has existed since the late 1960’s when Israel took control of the region.

“We talked about birds migrating, and it began as something political,” Nakhleh recalls. “It grew into more – social, love, freedom and women, queer freedom. I left my village on the Golan Heights when I was 19, went to Jerusalem, then Haifa, before I moved to Europe six years ago. That’s going for freedom. We’re the migrant birds looking for find ourselves. But our parents are still back in the village and their life isn’t ours any longer.”

That feeling of leaving, of knowing the emotional distance from where you began, is perfectly captured in “Wanderlust” with its Kerouac images of existing on the road: now let the car count the miles, I’ve got my cup of coffee/Driven for a far unknown challenge, I shall never find my way back home.

In “Babe,” the thoughts of escape come from an Arabic woman, desperate to flee her dominant husband: Oh my love/ You are soft as a tank/ So narrow has become our universe… I swear I will fly away with a balloon/ Abandon my husband and country.

That sadness which ripples through the lyrics is a perfect fit with the album’s two slower tracks, “Ya Ghali” and the stately closer, “Remote Love.” Both look back on beauty with warmth, from a place where “love turns into memory.” It’s another kind of flight, a freedom from the past. But “we tried to do something new for our audience,” Nakhleh admits, “some soft, slow-down dance tracks. It’s another facet of the emotions here.”

All through Migrant Birds, the focus is on songs that have plenty to say. Only one is an instrumental, the enigmatically-titled “Stone Heap of the Wild Cat.” It’s the name given to Rujm el-Hiri, a megalithic stone monument on the Golan Heights, as old as Stonehenge, close to where the Nakhleh brothers grew up. A glance over the shoulder from a distance.

While proudly rooted in the Middle East, Migrant Birds is infectious and globally accessible. But, Nakhleh notes, it was always meant to be “a basic pop concept, keeping the songs short and well-produced. A lot of that comes from the 80s Lebanese and Egyptian influence. If I wrote a straight Arabic melody, more like classical music, it would be too long for many people. This keeps the flavour, but it appeals to a broader audience.”

Live the songs will stretch out longer and will be buoyed by a full band. At gigs and festivals across Europe, Nakhleh will strap on the guitar he built with extra frets and take some soloes. He also hopes that in 2021, TootArd will be able to play all across the Middle East for the first time.

“There are around 22 Arab countries, and we’ve only been able to make it to four of them so far,” he says. “But we haven’t been able to tour anywhere else in the region because all we have are laissez passers. It’s a crazy situation. But next year I can become a Swiss citizen. For the first time in my life, I’ll have a proper passport.”

Then TootArd will be free to fly away wherever they choose. Until then, though, the Migrant Birds can fill the dancefloors.

 

01. Laissez Passer
02. Musiqa
03. Sahra
04. A’sfur
05. Nasma Jabalyia
06. Oya Marhaba
07. Bayati Blues
08. Roots Rock Jabali
09. Circles
10. Syrian Blues

 

A Laissez Passer. Let him pass. That’s the document the stateless carry. It’s all that those from the occupied Golan Heights possess. Since 1967 the area has been part of Israel, but the inhabitants aren’t Israelis. They don’t have any citizenship. They don’t have passports. Just a Laissez Passer. And for the members of TootArd who all grew up in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan, it’s a very apt name for their new album.

“Laissez passers are special situation papers,” explains singer and guitarist Hasan Nakhleh. “It took us a while to realise the effect. We’re permanent residents in Israel, but not citizens. We have no travel documents. When we travel we need the laissez passer. With no nationality, we’re officially ‘undefined.’”

But in statelessness, the five-piece has discovered musical freedom. TootArd grew up understanding that borders are something imposed by governments, lines that only exist on a map. On a disc, in concert, they can go wherever their imagination carries them. They carry their citizenship inside.

“What we do now is the result of everything we’ve ever done and heard,” Nakhleh says. “We began listening to Tuareg music and we fell in love with it. It resonated with us. North African music is something we’ve heard since we were children. We all grew up with classical Arab music.  In finding our own sound, we’ve discovered things from all over.” With Laissez Passer, the past has helped create the future.

On the title cut, Nakhleh notes, “the first verse is the reality, the second is our solution. Our people are stateless. We have no flag, no sense of belonging. It also reflects our emotions. We feel undefined, we don’t know where we belong, when everything in the world tells us we should belong. People always want you to say who you are.”

With its insistent riff that evokes the space of the desert, glorious driving, funky percussion, and an electric guitar that Nakhleh modified with extra frets to sound like an oud, the song builds a manifesto that bonds West Africa and the Maghreb to the Levant. It’s a thrilling opener; more than that, it’s a very catchy one, with the subtle reggae flourishes adding a very organic, international feel. But those were a natural touch for the band, a nod towards their musical beginnings.

“When we started out in Majdal Shams, we played reggae covers,” Nakhleh recalls. “My family is made up of musicians, I learned classical, then Western classical, and discovered more, especially Bob Marley. With reggae, we learned how to make a groove. Then we started to experiment.”

Beginning in 2010, TootArd played all over the Golan Heights, then travelled further, to Jerusalem, Palestine and beyond.

“We gigged a lot. But by 2014 we felt it was becoming a loop, and we all wanted to change things in our lives. We just needed to stop. I moved to Europe, first to Berlin, then to Bern. Others went elsewhere. But when we’d all go home, we’d get together and perform a concert in our village.”

Two years passed, and the band members missed the spark of working with each other. The time was right to pick up the reins.

“My brother Rami, who plays drums in the band, and I had been preparing things. We had new material that we thought was different, that said something unique. Everyone came together and we recorded the album in four months. We all have more life experience now. The music is fresher. We feel we’ve moved ahead.”

Laissez Passer is the sound of a band that’s found its voice. The songs seemed to be pulled from the air, to have found them, whether it’s the catchy optimism that transports “A’sfur,” the biting groove that propels “Oya Marhaba,” or the flickering shadows-and-light shifting guitarscape of “Sahra.”

“That one’s very simple,” notes Nakhleh. “The lyrics are just one sentence, on the chorus. Sahra is the time when it turns dark and everyone comes together. That’s what we used to do in Majdal Shams, because there’s nothing else to do. We wanted to give a sense of place and time.”

The album closes with the yearning “Syrian Blues,” a gaze across the Golan Heights into the distance and history of another country.

“It’s something calm to finish, a very emotional quality. Our region used to be a part of Syria. Historically we’re Syrians, but I’ve never been to there. I feel the music has an emotional quality, and sadness in the harmonies. I even wrote it in the Rast scale, the one that’s most used in Arabic music. I thought it would evoke Syria.”

The result is an Arabic blues, the quiet, sad music of people who have a home but no nationality.

With music I become a flying bird

I change my feathers, I change my strings.

TootArd are not ‘undefined’; they’ve fashioned their own identity in their music, creating a bond of the stateless that reaches from the Levant to the Tuareg – another people without a real home –  and reaches out far beyond. Let them pass.