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Praed + VED

Psychedelic shaabi from Beirut. Malmös own VED sets the mood.

They sound like nothing else around…anywhere. Sure they’re mining an exotic aspect of Arabic popular culture, yet they’re doing so in such an exciting and groundbreaking way, referencing freejazz and electronic music and in the process creating new and hitherto unknown genres of sound that sets the pulse racing.

You can’t ask for much more than that.

Praed:

Founded by Raed Yassin and Paed Conca in 2006, “Praed” is a band whose musical oeuvre can be described as a mixture  of Arabic popular music, free jazz, and electronics. In the same year, the band made its first public appearance in Al Maslakh  festival in Switzerland, immediately followed by a concert at the Irtijal festival in Beirut. Since then, the band has frequented  numerous international music festivals and toured intensively world-wide, spanning Japan, Europe and Canada.

Through  these endeavors, the band has created a large global network with other renowned musicians as musical collaborators. The band consists of two regular members: Raed Yassin playing keyboards, laptop, electronics and vocals; and Paed Conca  on clarinet, electric bass and electronics.

The band’s body of work mainly explores the terrain of Arabic popular music (“Shaabi”) and its interconnectedness with other psychedelic and hypnotic musical genres in the world, such as free jazz, space jazz, and psychedelic rock among others.  Since its inception, Praed has shown a very keen interest in this music as a medium that reflects Egyptian society’s complicated fabric.  Through the research it conducted, the band began to discover a strong cultural connection between “Shaabi” sounds  and the “Mouled” music is played in religious trance ceremonies. The hypnotizing psychedelic effect that was embedded in
this genre also triggered thoughts around its similarity to other popular music in the world that employ forms of sonic delirium, such as free jazz and psychedelic rock.

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