Emerging from Cairo’s experimental underground, Mi3raj is a duo comprising poet/vocalist Mohamed Tarek Moussa and producer/muti-instrumentalist Abdelrahman Shaat. Their hypnotically immersive album, Callings of the Owed, centres on six poems written in contemporary Arabic by Moussa, which ventriloquise the thoughts of characters drawn from Cairo’s fringes.
‘I write to the locusts / whistle into bare air,’ claims one. ‘Pluck the fog from my joints’, pleads another. ‘At my naming feast / widows intoxicated me,’ another confides. The texts are rich and full of mystery, brought to life by Moussa’s dramatic delivery, using multiple overdubs to suggest a Babel of voices: at once pleading, declamatory and ritualistic. Shaat’s accompanying…

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