Browse by Artist: HALL & MUSHTAQ, TERRY

Artist:	HALL & MUSHTAQ, TERRY
Title:	The Hour Of Two Lights
Label:	ASTRALWERKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	ASW 90990CD

"Terry Hall's career has always been one of spotting trends and breaking new ground. Now, together with Mushtaq, a UK-based, Middle Eastern musician with a background in hip-hop, reggae and r'n'b, Terry Hall has created an album no less groundbreaking and arresting than anything he has done in his career. Terry Hall and Mushtaq's album couldn't be more in tune with today's headlines, fusing the Jewish and Arabic musical cultures which draws upon the duo's own lineage -- Terry Hall being a Polish refugee with a Jewish background and Mushtaq being a Middle Eastern Muslim. In some ways, the album is a return to Terry Hall's musical roots (you'll recall The Specials' breakthrough hit 'Gangsters' was based around a Middle Eastern-influenced melody). Yet, together with Mushtaq, the album breaks bold new ground by creating a stunning topical tapestry of music. This melting pot of sounds features Jewish Gypsy music (from the group Romani Rad), a Mongolian throat singer, an Egyptian violinist, an Algerian rapper, a Turkish percussionist, a Syrian oud player, an Arabian pianist, and a Jewish Clarinet player whose resume includes being a sessions musician on the original Pink Panther theme. Even Blur and Gorillaz front man Damon Albarn provides guest vocals and instrumentation."

Artist:	HALL & MUSHTAQ, TERRY
Title:	The Hour Of Two Lights
Label:	HONEST JON'S RECORDS (UK)
Format:	2LP
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	HJR 005LP

"This is an album of genre-bending that fuses Arabic and Jewish musical forms, Asian and East European sounds, hip-hop atmospherics and wild gypsy passions and slamming beats. In short, an album quite unlike anything you've ever heard from Terry Hall before. That in part is because The Hour Of Two Lights is not a Terry Hall solo album, although it may have started that way. First, Mushtaq, once of British-Asian pioneers Fun-Da-Mental, came on board as an equal partner. Then the cast list expanded to include a Tunisian singer, a Syrian flautist, an Egyptian who had settled in Iraq, Hebrew vocalists, Turkish musicians, a 12 year old Lebanese girl called Natasha, a blind Algerian rapper from Paris, a troupe of Polish gypsy refugees and a septuagenarian clarinetist famous for playing the Pink Panther theme. And Blur's Damon Albarn is also in there somewhere. And yet The Hour Of Two Lights is not a world music record, or a DJ album. It's not even a DJ album with world influences. 'I don't think it fits with anything, really,' Hall says. 'I don't really know what it is. Or what it isn't.' Which, of course, isn't very helpful in a world that demands instant categorisation and easy pigeon-holing. Yet there is a unifying thread that comes from a shared humanity. 'We wanted to take influences from everywhere,' Hall says. 'But it's not a bish-bosh of other people's cultures. Everybody had a sense of something in common in their minority and oppression and struggle. In the end, it felt more like we were editing a film than making a record.' As the songs took shape in all their unconventionality, more and more voices were added. Lyrics were translated into different languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Romany, with music as the esperanto that united different cultures, traditions and temperaments."

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