Love and Revenge (Beirut/Lebanon)
This year’s oriental treat at Gradić Fest is destined, first and foremost, to those who have never been to the Middle East, but who greatly desire to feel its exotic colors, smells and sounds. This music project of two Lebanese musicians is intended to bring their artistic and cultural milieu closer to the “global village”, and it combines two counterposed worlds: electronic beat matrices and traditional folk music of the Orient.
Love and Revenge is the joint project of Lebanese hip-hop pioneer Rayess Bek and visual artist Randa Mirza. It is a musical reflection on their cultural identity, aiming to give a second life to old Arab popular songs and movies by adapting them to the principles of modern music production and modern visual aesthetics. They find the material for their visual and audio samples in the artistic works of the so-called “golden era” of Arab culture, in Arab music and films from the 40s and 50s of the 20th century. They perform live, in front of a screen onto which romantic scenes from classical Arab films are projected during the show, and there are four members in the band: besides Bek and his electronic beats, and Mirza with her visual effects, there are also Julien Perraudeau on keyboards and Mehdi Haddab, a virtuoso on an electrical version of Arab string instrument oud. Their work is a seductive music-visual invitation to the world on the other side of the Mediterranean, behind the curtain which leads directly to Arabian Nights and other similar fairytales about love and revenge.
