Bachar Mar-Khalifé - Who's Gonna get the Ball from behind the Wall of the Garden Today?

Stylistically, Who's Gonna get the Ball from behind the Wall of the Garden Today? is an impossible album to pin down. Starting off with a two-minute organ dirge worthy of a Giallo flick, second track "Yas Nas," a traditional Kuwaiti song, is an irresistible Arabic stomper with a heavy piano riff, blistering percussion and a kick-drum that recalls the organic dance music of Brandt Brauer & Frick. Bachar Mar-Khalife is a classically trained, French-Lebanese pianist and percussionist who started out as a professional concert performer. Conceived of as a meeting of East and West, the stylistic and linguistic split presented herein illustrates Mar-Khalife's feelings of a dual nationality and complex identity. "Machins Choses" (which features a duet with singer Kid A), a cover of a Serge Gainsbourg number, is contrasted with "Marea Negra," another cover, this time of a revolutionary song concerning the Arab Spring, with lyrics by late Syrian poet Ibrahim Qashoush. A heady mixture of Arabic and French, stompers and ballads, it's a superb and uniquely musically schizophrenic album.
(Infine)

Bachar Mar-Khalifé is a free man.
With him, freedom is not a state of affairs, it is a state of mind. At a time when questions of identity are central and civil status doubles as a service record, Bachar keeps shaking up the registers, sending labels flying.

First of all, he stresses that being born in war-torn Lebanon is no justification for trying to look good by claiming martyr status. And yet, like a whole generation of Lebanese and, more generally, Middle-Eastern kids, the war has always been part of his life. But war is certainly not something to dwell on. Which is why in France – the ally his family escaped to when he was 6 – he readily empathised with the silence of those who had lived through war. 
The old dichotomy, resistance or collaboration, is very simplistic. People should not be so quick to judge, there is no such thing as heroism.


 Tracks :

01. Memories 
02. Ya Nas
03. Mirror Moon
04. Machins Choses (feat. Kid A)
05. Marea Negra
06. Xerîbî
07. Progeria (Solo Version)
08. Requiem
09. K-Cinerea
10. Distance (Solo Version)