Ninety Nine Eyes

Freefalling into the labyrinthine textures of the unconscious, sipping and sampling at the founts of psychic sounds at the center of the world's tale, the fields of reed beneath the Afro groove waves that Yunis, the Egyptian experimental artist, has been riding since a formative residency in Uganda a few years back, what the haunted caravanserai between wakingness and nothingness feels like on vinyl, limbs loose, heart flying in a seeker's abandon in a mystic's dream,Ninety Nine Eyes,released by Amman based record label, Drowned by Locals, casts its instrumental shadows into the background hum of being, a stranded jinn yearning in loops in the endless black, an all-too-human prayer out of the hidden silence upon every lovers' lane, as the love and the lover and the beloved and the loving sway to the void and back one in the many, and the many are drunk in a celestial synth-drenched carnival, of the joy and terror on the doorstep of the beyond, of altered temporalities of consciousness, a half-disembodied desire tumbling higher and higher through a lush and strange sound-design underworld, the whispers and sirens and screamy tongue-rolls in the bowels of the deeps, an empty screeching highway with deserts and long lost suns all around, a restless, compounded, warm polyrhythmic percussive-revel on which the melody floats touched and possessed, wordless ways of knowing, a belief in the possibility of a moment's, an artist's, a dancer's communal transformation, the gossip of angels of fate stuck in a wailing decolonial keyboard, the invisible train about to leave to the station of no-station.

The kernel forNinety Nine Eyeswas a Takhmira (a collective memory poem upon which a Zar ritual is based) Yunis stumbled upon in his research, and which immediately took hold of him. It turns on this line, translated from the original Arabic:

The land, the seat of which is light, where is it?

And from this line, this question,Ninety Nine Eyescame fermenting into the world over a 3 year journey, a question and an answer of an album that saw Yunis evolve a shy little 4 minute track into an unruly half hour journey, mainly through playing the piece live and seeing where it goes with audiences from all over the world, where the movement is flowing in search of this land the seat of which is light, where it stops, where is it for the artist and where is it for every listener and every dancer and every time it's performed. This Yunis says he hopes for: for the piece to be a sort of aid and sustenance to whoever wants to go out searching within for this mythic place. The album is a caravan in the desert, trying to reach the sacred land, sand-stormed into the trippy quest, willing to take the path of ascendancy whichever way beckons. And it all goes back home.

…did you see it with your eyes, O Arabs, or in your dreams?

To disappear swirling in a vortex out of linear time,Ninety Nine Eyes, a marriage of written and improv music, goes loud and thickly laid-on like the surreal urban fabric, the grainy music of the spheres, and the perennial philosophy from which it's spun, the dark night of the soul finally glimpsing the very source of light, carny and ethereal, the EP's maximalist sensibility both a means and an end, structured like a Sufi Hadra, undulating peaking soundscapes pulling at the hearts of traditions of ecstasy, of old, old ways of communing with the divine still pulsing through the messiness of our alienated disenchanted days, pulling, as Yunis says he aspires to do, from the unsaid, the underlying, embodied, lived-in values and practiced truths and absorbed meanings in context, you in the tradition and the tradition as it plays out in you and through you, tapping the content not just the form to see what leaks out, through the alive usage and onward breathing of this multidimensional, open-ended heritage. Sentient and machine, past and future snuffed out in the eternal here and now, that is, eyes closed, head swinging, the tenderness and violence of the sublime coming down to meet the flash of energy coursing through the house of God, through the rave, well after midnight.

…I came down from an eye, and the One sent me from an eye…

Part II of the EP floats off Part I as though from a fractured dialectical mirror, opening up frenzied horizons from an at-a-slant electric take on the condition explored in Part I. For Yunis, who experiments off a base of classical training,Ninety Nine Eyesis one long-form piece, split in two, with a slowing down, a moment of recovery, a psychedelic oasis break in the middle, to get ready for the journey for which there is no end. 99 is the missing number that gestures towards and longs for wholeness, the detonation in Part II the final trip from which there is no going back, no holding back, all the elements in for the alchemy, the gates pushed wide open. Ninety nine eyes. Ninety nine faces of the real. Ninety nine ways of approaching the pilgrimage in the shredding, whirling, hypnotic, almost-breaking-down mizmar line, through the drowning tombak and duff. But the completion, Yunis insists, is in the hands of the listener, only they can close the circle. And the desert is now neon lights flickering on tangled alleyways, an almost elicit communal rite taking place in a corner out of sight, a flight from the margin, the noise of the city closing in, merciless, greedy, chaos about to break out, a sensory overload, a manic romp along the Milky Way, a Zar escape, this liminal state of mind whichever the cultural scaffolding it takes, the shattering of the ego into a thousand shards glinting in the moonlight, the stillness in the mellow pads at the core of an unfettered trance.

Before it all goes to dust, that is, to die before we die under a seat of light.

­­­- Omar Refaat