A New World (ANNIHAYA RECORDS END 15) was sent to us by Lebanese composer Marc Codsi from a Paris address, and it’s released on the Annihaya Records label which is based in Beirut, and carries a select catalogue of music including composers such as Rizan Said, Rabih Beaini, Praed, and Shalabi Effect. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Alan Bishop’s name is up here too, on the Nurj Al Imam album. The label has high hopes, describing its aims as “conceptual”, and the overall mission is to do something with interesting with popular and folk music culture, mainly in the area of taking it apart and putting it back together again in a rotund way.
Marc Codsi is no less ambitious – he wants to change the whole world. He’s fed up with the existing one and made this record to start a process of “transformation”, as he calls it, by combining movement and non-movement in one place, perhaps hoping to shift the spinning globe off its axis and the devil take the hindmost. That’s about as specific as Codsi seems to get, and apart from alluding to the “deficiencies” of the modern situation, it’s not quite clear whether his motivation is political, religious, geographical, or financial…but no matter. The music is suitably abstract too, but it is very good. On the long tracks ‘Encounters I’ and ‘Encounters II’, he works wonders with the arpeggiated synth thing and manages to weave a pattern as dense as any carpet, and while you might associate this with the Glass-Riley school of keyboard patterns, Marc Codsi has an urgency to his music that carries quite an edge, as though he were hastening towards a rendezvous on which depends the fate of the world.
He contrasts this with slower drone pieces like ‘A New World I’ and ‘A New World II’, where at least a fellow can catch their breath and contemplate the filtered changes that pass over the keyboard with their regal-sounding mixed chords. I’m beginning to discern the careful structure to the album…these Encounters and New Worlds are sandwiched in between the two ‘Invocation’ pieces, whose melodic sense is (to my untuned ears) closest to some sort of Middle-Eastern inflected inspiration with its eerie half notes, and then the album ends with ‘The Departure’, arguably the most conventional piece here and one which points to Codsi’s other career as a file score composer. However, even so, I like the ever-so-slightly out of tune quality of the lead synth, which lends a keening tone to this farewell. I’m left with a feeling of an enigmatic riddle of an album. The very strong geometric cover design is embossed with metallic ink. Very good. From 13 June 2019.