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SPEED CARAVAN
Better hold on: with Mehdi Haddab behind the wheel of Speed Caravan you know you’re in for a ride. Electrified, amplified and fuelled by creative fire, the Paris-based quartet charge towards a psychedelic horizon; slaloming through rock, dance, electro, hip hop, world and other music – blazing a trail with raised fists, a hand brake turn and a sharp spray of desert sand.
Haddab is a virtuoso of the classical oud, that fretless Arabic lute beloved of Middle Eastern orchestras and an instrument with a history stretching back over 5,000 years. Inspired by traditional players such as post WW2 sensation Udi Hrant Kenkulian, Haddab mastered the instrument and took it with him into French global electronica trio Ekova and the acclaimed experimental duo DuOud.
Speed Caravan’s debut album Kalashnik Love – its title track a furious homage to Udi Hrant - combines tradition and future, ancient and urban, beauty and fury to stun-gunning effect. Laden with special guests and throbbing with raw rock energy it references everyone from The Cure and The Chemical Brothers to Algerian rai and other Arabic influences. The sublime result of several year’s worth of incendiary live touring, it is fusion - but not as we know it.
Kalashnik Love boasts an army of like-minded collaborators. Sound engineer and sonic architect David Husser. Rachid Taha, the rai rebel himself, weighing in on an urgent version of The Cure’s Killing An Arab. A cover version of The Chemical Brothers’ Galvanise grabs by the scruff and doesn’t let go. Adding their own rage to the already considerable fury of the Berber-music-sampling original are Spex MC ex member of Asian Dub Foundation, Algira, Rabah and Deymed of Algiers-based hiphop outfit Micro Brise le Silence; and civil rights activist Paul Kendall “The Chemical Brothers were using Arabic music to shock,” says Haddab of the English electro rock duo. “We’re hitting them back with another interpretation, like you would in a racquet game.”