Faiza

Faiza Ahmed — Allemetny El Donia

When I moved to DC after college I knew just one person. That dude had a roommate who became my second friend in DC, Dan. He went to Egypt for work and came back with some tapes. This is one of them.

We often used to eat at this incredible restaurant near their apartment called El Khartoum (a Sudanese spot I presume). The music they played in there sounded roughly like this.

Scariest album cover I’ve ever seen + dramatic, meslimatic female vocals + sweeping violins = totally sweet.

Many thanks to Dan Haab for this one….


Side A

Side B

12 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

joshuareply
June 25, 2007 at 12:35 pm

sick….

Invalidated, or, I Dated Invalidsreply
June 25, 2007 at 6:31 pm

Hi Mr. Thursday Born, Please e-mail me, I would like to talk away from the blog…

Best wishes,

Maxwell.
maxwell [at] tokion [dot] com

Richard S.reply
August 26, 2007 at 12:47 pm

I tried to send a version of this comment before, but it would not go over. If it does this time, good. If there are multiple copies in the end, sorry about that…

Anyway, as I said in my own blog (which comment Thursdayborn has seen as well), I think that there is a section near the beinning of this tape that sounds just like the beginning of “Taal Zaman” by Transglobal Underground. It could be that the latter (which came out in the early ’90s) took this from the former, or maybe they both were covering something else, or maybe they just sound too much alike to my (western) ears. But I did detect a real similarity – which was kind of nice.

Though it should be no surprise that there are some resemblances here and there between this Faiza Ahmed and Natacha Atlas…

And it is a sweet tape.

Spinningreply
October 16, 2007 at 8:19 pm

Hi,

Faiza Ahmed is from Lebanon.

am sure you know that Cairo is the center of the Arabic music world, and people from all over go there to establish their careers, record, produce, etc.

The oudist in your recent post looks very familiar to me, but I cannot read Arabic… you might want to stop over at this blog and post a query: http://kanzaltuhaf.blogspot.com/

Best!
Spinning
http://spinninginair.blogspot.com

Anonymousreply
June 11, 2009 at 7:03 pm

Wow, interesting tape. Really great.
She looks like Bette Midler’s zombie

outrenoirreply
July 14, 2011 at 6:29 pm

damn this is really great. Any chance of a re-up on side A?

thanks for all the tapes!

Brian Shimkovitzreply
May 10, 2015 at 9:32 am
– In reply to: outrenoir

fixed now!

outrenoirreply
December 11, 2011 at 5:03 pm

I realise Lebanon is not in Africa but would you be able to give this a repost anyway? :)

Anonymousreply
May 8, 2015 at 12:26 am

Hello,

Unfortunately, the Side A mp3 link is broken.

If anyone has a copy mirrored somewhere, I’d be delighted if it could be reuploaded.

Brian Shimkovitzreply
May 10, 2015 at 9:32 am
– In reply to: Anonymous

OK i fixed that link now!

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