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).<\/p>\n
Yasmine Hamdan<\/strong> (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<\/strong><\/a> she released last September.<\/p>\n Al-Qasar<\/strong> 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<\/a><\/strong>, their second, is full of good things and loads of variety, which bodes well for the live show …<\/p>\n Maruja Lim\u00f3n<\/strong> is a six-piece band from Barcelona with a fusion of flamenco, pop, and Latin. Te como la cara<\/strong><\/a> 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<\/em> like you’.)<\/p>\n Tickets are reportedly selling fast …<\/p>\n Read our full-length backgrounder on the Tamaas Festival here<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"