Sussan Deyhim, Out of Faze (Venus Rising)

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One has to wonder what got in the way of this album´s release, since it was recorded a full fourteen years ago and seems more potently commercial than any of Sussan Deyhim´s brilliant subsequent work.

I am not on strong footing about this history of Out of Faze. What I have been able to ascertain is that it was recorded in 1995 in London together with producer Adrian Sherwood using the most reliable studio men in all of dub UK, Keith LeBlanc, Skip Macdonald and Doug Wimbish. Deyhim´s partner, multi-instrumentalist Richard Horowitz, of course also appears, as do a complement of background singers (all of them Deyhim).

After its completion it seems to have been buried away somewhere only to be dug up and put on disc (together with four other projects) when Deyhim founded her own boutique label Venus Rising last year.

What an archeological find. This is the "profane" Deyhim (she has made a lot of music out of Persian classical poetry, often from the Sufi tradition). She possesses a banshee scream that claws away at the deep, sultry tones of her foreground singing over the course of the opening, media-apocalyptic tale of ”Live and Learn”, but this in no way deters from the accessibility and melodiousness of the song. The range of personalities co-existing in her vocal cords is astonishing, and she can effortlessly move from seductive to militant, make you melt just as easily as scare the pants off you. Out of Faze is also one of the best showcases for her English-language lyrics (though there are generous dollops of Farsi as well), provocative, demanding, and vivid in imagery.

Despite one of the greatest female singers of our time being at the centre of things, on this album, everybody stars. The drummer (what a tour-de-force on ”Tell Me”), the bassist, and the producer all do some of their tightest work ever.

To round things off, Bill Laswell is brought in to perform some remixing and drags his brother-in-bass Jah Wobble along with him. Despite the fact that the original sessionists are all reggae men, Laswell´s remix of ”Tell Me” is really the only dubbed out number on the record.

A collaboration with DJ Spooky called ”Azadi (The New Complexity) was recently released on the Internet to coincide with the international day of protest against the regime in Iran and will appear on the latter´s next album. And Deyhim has many more new and varied projects in the works, including the launching of a new label, IsleX, and a non-profit organization to promote experimental art.

http://sussandeyhim.com/