PRAED Orchestra! - The Dictionary of Lost Meanings

A Closer Listen

For nearly two decades, Lebanese experimental musicians and composers Raed Yassin and Paed Conca have been developing a thrilling hybrid of Arabic working-class popular music and psych-adjacent free jazz as PRAED, fusing their love of Egyptian shaabi with fried electronics, minimalist composition, and adventurous ambition. For Antwerp’s Summer Bummer Festival in August 2022, the duo assembled an international cast of players – many of whose names will be immediately familiar to followers of contemporary avant-garde currents rooted in the MENA region – to work up the exhilarating suite that comprises The Dictionary of Lost Meanings.

Three elaborate large orchestral compositions are interspersed with more exploratory and open-ended structures across the album’s hour-long run time. Opener “Mirror House” introduces the players atop a tense, pulsating drone, before “Djinn Dance” lurches into a gritty industrial dabke, its sinuous central theme ricocheting off lithe interventions from horns and strings. The title track begins with a soaring vocal line from Jerusalem In My Heart’s Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, short-circuited by sharp delay and a haze of reverb, before moving into a free-jazz rave-up that finishes with an almost maniacal howl courtesy of Alan Bishop. Dictionary then reaches near-ecstatic heights with riveting album centerpiece “The Spell,” which builds from a dextrous horn riff into a dizzying interplay of melodic figures atop a base of muscular syncopated percussion, proof positive of this ensemble’s formidable capabilities. 

This is followed up by a pair of more understated pieces that allow the group to catch its breath before a triumphant finale. For the most part, “Fragmented Realities” eschews definitive shape, though it’s not without intrigue and intricate detail, while “Three Dimensional Spirits” feels almost mantric, passing a descending three-note pattern through different sets of hands until it concludes in a haunting choral repetition. If these passages meander slightly, somewhat diminishing the momentum built up by the album’s front half, this is more than made up for by epic finisher “El A3saab.” It’s a slow burn, the orchestra locked into a sultry big-band groove as Alan Bishop once again plays the diva, by the end exploding into a stunning and chaotic release. 

Though perhaps most compelling when the ensemble is rallied to its full strength and amplitude, there are few dull moments on Dictionary of Lost Meanings. While the title’s gesture towards the unspoken or the ineffable finds some reflection in the almost eerie tone of “Djinn Dance” or “The Spell,” on the whole the music captured here feels rooted in grainy, playful, sensuous experience. Electronic elements and organic performance elegantly intertwined, the album captures the fluctuations of a tightly controlled chaotic energy, channelled by turns towards both expert precision and propulsive exuberance. (Graham Latham)