Tamaas Festival – Yasmine Hamdan | Al-Qasar | Maruja Limón

The Arts Center’s mini-Womad for artists who mix modern/Western ideas with traditional/regional styles returns with three good-looking acts (each of whom will play for about an hour, which makes the door price a bit of a bargain).

Yasmine Hamdan (above) is Arabic-indie royalty: she’s been music since the late 1990s, earning international acclaim as a solo singer-songwriter, producer, and composer; her apparently effortless merging of elements from a variety of sources from pan-Arabic pop and poetry to clubby electronica via soul and West Coast guitar is seen to good effect on the rather good album she released last September.

Al-Qasar was started between Los Angeles and Paris in 2016 by US-French producer Thomas Attar and now has a core of Turkish psychedelic rock singer Sibel, Iraqi-French drummer Adrien Al-Aiedy and French bassist Guillaume Theoden. It’s clever rock ‘n’ roll, mainly guitar-led with propulsive drumming and more than a touch of North African trance (no obvious drum machines, though). 2024’s album Uncovered, their second, is full of good things and loads of variety, which bodes well for the live show …

Maruja Limón is a six-piece band from Barcelona with a fusion of flamenco, pop, and Latin. Te como la cara is the band’s latest album, released a year ago; you’ll recognise flamenco, salsa and rumba, but also electronica and pop. It’s fast, super-rhythmic, good fun and very danceable. (Incidentally the album title translates literally as ‘I eat your face’ which my Catalan friend tells me is slang for ‘I really, really like you’.)

Tickets are reportedly selling fast …

Read our full-length backgrounder on the Tamaas Festival here.