By Daniel Larios
Staff Writer

July 31, 2014 – Syrian folk electronica artist Omar Souleyman – whose sound changed the vibe of weddings throughout the Middle East – will headline the summer’s fourth Twilight Concert Thursday on the Santa Monica Pier.

Best known for the Shaabi street sound he brought to the West through music festival appearances, Souleyman plays an electrified form of rural folk music called dabke, a form of line dancing originating hundreds of years ago.

Omar Souleyman will headline Thursday's Santa Monica Twilight Concert. Photo from Santa Monica Pier.

Born in 1966, Souleyman began his career in 1994, working with musicians that include his long time music partner Rizan Sa'id, who also serves as Arabic-speaking Souleyman’s translator.

Since then, Souleyman has released some 500 studio and live albums. However, around 80 percent of those releases are recordings made at weddings and presented to the married couple, which are later copied and sold at local kiosks as bootlegs.
 
“Occasional Allah invocations notwithstanding,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Will Hermes, “this is party music, to be sure – it's a hot, fresh and, given our domestic Arab-phobia, radical sound.”

"Omar unwittingly became the first-ever Syrian — or Arabic singer — to break the Western barrier on the scale he did," Mark Gergis, who was responsible for introducing Souleyman's music to a Western audience, told Spin Magazine.
"And it wasn't the result of producers trying to add global beats and fusion into the equation. This was the real deal from rural Syria, and it had a power of its own."

In 2011, Souleyman recorded three remixes for international music star Björk's Biophilia, and last October, his newly recorded album Wenu Wenu was released by UK label Ribbon Music.

The album was described by Louis Pattison from NME Magazine as “a high-speed collision of folk tradition and electronic instrumentation that sees him chanting and singing sincere love poetry in his native tongue over breakneck dabke rhythms, keyboard stabs and blazing electric saz solos.”

Later that year in December, he performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway.

Last month, Souleyman performed at The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Earlier this month, he performed at Roskilde Festival, Denmark and at the Mostly Jazz, Funk and Soul Festival, Birmingham, UK.

Opening the concert will be the Glendale-based music group De Lux, a self described post-disco dance-punk DIY duo, and Alternative Rock band The Slightlys.

The Twilight concert series takes place every Thursday night at 7 p.m. and will run for ten weeks through September 11.