Noor, by Geoffrey Armes

Noor

by Geoffrey Armes

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1.	Take Me Up 03:30	buy track
2.	Yasmeen 08:37	buy track
3.	Child 02:52	buy track
4.	Anima Camera 07:14	buy track
5.	Noor 09:19	buy track
6.	After Dark 10:56	buy track
7.	Witness 07:43	buy track

about

Noor reveals itself to be rather like a hybrid Arabic, Indian, West-African world music nod to prog, an avant-garde progressive world music, if you like labels. These are longer length songs (five of the seven songs range from 7-11 minutes) often parsed together using movements, which helps Armes to flesh out these musical vignettes. They are primarily driven by keyboards that shift through jazz inflected electric piano vamps, textured synth washes, and a wide variety of dialed-up sounds such as xylophone and Egyptian oboe with tempered microtones. Modal acoustic guitar riffing skirts the periphery but jumps to the forefront in the right spaces, and is underpinned by a melodically insistent bass joined by what has become by now, Armes hallmark admixture of strongworld percussion this time featuring talking drums, dumbek, ubang and udu. He spotlights each song s lyrical content with provocative running commentary in an impressive eight page CD booklet, and then brings the poetry to life through his signature vocal style, marked by a yearning emotional intensity and intonation ornaments that evoke early David Sylvian. --Todd Evans