Diaspora (1995)
12 tracks, 72 minutes
Spotify • iTunes
By the mid-90s, British-Belgian-Egyptian-Israeli singer Natacha Atlas was already a star within the UK’s world dubtronica scene. She was the lead vocalist with several pioneers of the scene, most notably Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, and had guested with everyone from Loop Guru, Nitin Sawhney, Not Drowning, Waving and Apache Indian. With Diaspora, she struck out on her own with her first debut album…sort of.
Thing is, a Transglobal Undergound album under any other name sounds as sweet, which is good, because that’s basically what Diaspora is. It features a classic TGU line-up, with contributions throughout from Alex Kasiek (also known as Tim Whelan), Hamid Mantu, Count Dubulah (now mostly known as Nick Page), Neil Sparkes and Satin Singh, and the production is literally credited to TGU. That’s not to take Natacha’s influence out of things, as this album has its own sound; that is, very much influenced by the Arabic classical styles of her ancestral homeland of Egypt. Together with the standard TGU instrumentation, there’s also those wonderful massed strings of the Egyptian orchestra as well as oud, accordion and even some klezmer clarinet for good measure.
There are a few tracks where they go more down the traditional Arabic route, but the album is at its best when that dubtronica really comes out. The stand out track is ‘Dub Yalil'. It’s a slow one and it smoulders. Over its eight minutes, it builds and builds, first with drones and overlapping clarinets, then with drum loops, tabla and Arabic percussion. The bass comes in, with an incredibly simple but absolutely perfect stomach-wobbling bassline, and then the accordion, sounding just like a South Asian harmonium. Natacha’s voice soars in, over, across and through. And it continues like that, the layers increasing in their depth and complexity, a spot-on balance of Arabic dub, the styles making a great marriage. The track is marred slightly by Natacha’s opening verses, taken directly from the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer). Musically, it works wonderfully, but the use of the text and the melody of the adhan in this context is quite ethically unsound. I think today, they may not have included that bit. That aside, ‘Dub Yalil’ is such an excellent track and a triumph of world dubtronica.
Natacha eventually left TGU and went on to have a really successful solo career, often focusing most closely on those Egyptian classical styles. Everything comes around though, and she has been playing with them again quite a bit recently together with a few other original members. They will be playing a gig together, along with Nick Page/Dubulah’s Dub Colossus at the Islington Assembly Hall on 18th May – I hope I’ll catch them, and you, there!
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