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PRAED پرائد Psychedelic Shaabi from Beirut |
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| photo by Tony Elieh(Raed Yassin and Paed Conca) | |
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Founded
by Raed Yassin and Paed Conca in
2006, “Praed” is a band whose musical oeuvre can be
described as a mixture
of Arabic popular music, free jazz, and electronics. In the same year, the band made its first public appearance in Al Maslakh festival in Switzerland, immediately followed by a concert at the Irtijal festival in Beirut. Since then, the band has frequented numerous international music festivals and toured intensively world-wide, spanning Japan, Egypt, North, Central and South Africa,
Europe and Canada.
Through these endeavors, the band has created a large global network with other renowned musicians as musical collaborators. The band consists of two regular members: Raed Yassin playing keyboards, laptop, electronics and vocals; and Paed Conca on clarinet, electric bass and electronics. PRAED did also perform under the name PRAED PLUS or PRAED extended as a big band together with Axel Dörner, Johannes Bauer, Hans Koch and Stephane Rives or with different
cast. PRAED had the premiere with a new big
band project, the
PRAED orchestra, November
3rd 2018 in Sharjah with the extended line up of Nadah
el Shazly, Maurice Louca, Hans Koch,
Martin
Küchen, Christine Kazairan, Ute Wassermann, Alan Bishop,
Radwan Moumneh, Sam Shalabi, Michael Zerang and
Khaled
Yassine. In 2022 the PRAED Orchestra was invited to the
Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerb, Belgium
with additional musicians and a slightly different cast. The band’s body of work mainly explores the terrain of Arabic popular music (“Shaabi”) and its interconnectedness with other psychedelic
and hypnotic
musical genres in the world, such as free jazz, space
jazz, and psychedelic rock among others.
Since
its
inception, Praed has shown a very keen interest in this music as a medium that reflects Egyptian society’s complicated
fabric. Through
the research it conducted, the band began to discover a
strong cultural connection between
“Shaabi”
sounds and
the “Mouled” music is played in religious trance
ceremonies. The hypnotizing psychedelic effect that
was
embedded in this
genre also triggered thoughts around its similarity to
other popular music in the world that employ
forms
of sonic delirium, such as free jazz and psychedelic
rock.
Bob Baker Fish wrote in the cyclic defrost on July 15th 2016 : They also sound like nothing else around…anywhere. Sure they’re mining an exotic aspect of Arabic popular culture, yet they’re doing so in such an exciting and groundbreaking way, referencing freejazz and electronic music and in the process creating new and hitherto unknown genres of sound that sets the pulse racing. You can’t ask for much
more than that.....
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