Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As a German living in the Middle East I truly appreciate NATASHA ATLAS' music !, 1 Jul 2008
As a German living in the Middle East - Gulf region: Oman, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, ... - I truly do appreciate the music from that area. The rhythm is always mystical and very highly personal. You can feel the instruments and the musical tones which the artist wants you to feel. The musician wants to take you on a trip. They want to take you to a world unlike any other. And in this album, the very popular female singer NATACHA ATLAS manages to do just that.
Her song "Mon amie la rose":
on est bien peu de chose
et mon amie la rose me l'a dit ce matin
à l'aurore je suis née
baptisée de rosée
je me suis épanouie
heureuse et amoureuse
aux rayons du soleil
me suis fermée la nuit
me suis réveillée vieille
pourtant j'étais très belle
oui, j'étais la plus belle
des fleurs de ton jardin
on est bien peu de chose
et mon amie la rose me l'a dit ce matin
vois le Dieu qui m'a faite
me fait courber la tête
et je sens que je tombe
et je sens que je tombe
mon coeur est presque nu
j'ai le pied dans la tombe
déjà je ne suis plus
tu m'admirais hier
et je serai poussière
pour toujours demain
on est bien peu de chose
et mon amie la rose est morte ce matin
la lune cette nuit
a veillé mon amie
moi, en rêve, j'ai vu
éblouissante, émue
son âme qui dansait
bien au-delà des nues
et qui me souriait
crois celui qui peut croire
moi, j'ai besoin d'espoir
sinon je ne suis rien
ou bien si peu de chose
c'est mon amie la rose
qui l'a dit hier matin."
..... A poem written by Cécile Caulier and Jacques Lacombe, originally performed by FRANCOIS HARDY in 1964. It became one of Hardy's most popular songs. An electronicworld music version performed by Belgian singer Natacha Atlas was also released in 1999. The song was produced by Transglobal Underground for NATACHA ATLAS' third album "Gedida" (1999).
..... A Portrait: NATACHA ATLAS
Natacha Atlas (born March 20, 1964) is a Belgian singer known for her fusion of Arabic and North African music with Western electronic music. She once termed her music "cha'abi moderne". Her music has been influenced by many styles including Arabesque music, drum 'n' bass and reggae.
Atlas, the lead singer in Transglobal Underground and solo artist, uses her multi-ethnic background when singing lyrics a hybrid of culture and the Arabic world. She personally calls herself a "human Gaza Strip," reflecting her diverse background and thoughts relating to the Muslim and Jewish world. For example, her lyrics say "Why are we fighting/When we're all together/Let's return to peace/Let's make peace, we are brothers" (from her song "Laysh Nata'arak"). In her music, Atlas makes many political statements regarding Islam and Judaism and often takes a middle ground approach advocating for peace and harmony. Moreover, she personally considers herself a Muslim and phrases from the Quran are intertwined in her lyrics. Even her fan website reflects Atlas's personal identification with Egypt and the Arabic culture. During an interview with Muslim Wake Up! Online magazine, Atlas talks about her identification with her European and Arabic roots by saying "There will always be two identities living within me: Arabic and European. When I was very young, I tried to ignore the Arabic side, my father's side, because I saw it as foreign. But something happened in my late teens. I was at a nightclub in Brussels and I heard Arabic music, and I knew then that there was something inside of me that I wanted to go back to. So I ended up going to the other extreme. But as you mature, you realize that you have both inside you. That's how God made me. These days I dream in two languages, and not a day goes by when I don't end up using Arabic" In 2001, Atlas was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Conference Against Racism.
It's all about roots, really. If you don't know where you come from, and explore that, then you're pretty much just drifting into the future. Natacha Atlas, who's recorded with Jah Wobble and been a vital part of Transglobal Underground, knows all about roots. Understanding her Egyptian ancestry and her place in the world - she lives in London - has been the stuff of her three solo albums. On the most recent, Gedida (the Arabic word for new), she's really brought all her past into focus, balancing all the elements to give something that's, well....new. The past meets the present and creates something rather thrilling, and decidedly more organic.
"I like to augment music with technology, because I think it's good to be in the here and now."
"I suppose it was a natural thing," she explains. "I was never a techno kind of person. But I like to augment music with technology, because I think it's good to be in the here and now. You have to represent this time and age, but that's the extent of it. I don't even know how to use a sampler."
Natacha Atlas released her first solo LP, Diaspora, in the summer of '95, and in time honored fashion, the critics scrambled for superlatives. The LP saw Natacha combining the dubby, beat-driven global dance of her longtime associates TransGlobal Underground, with the more traditional work of Arabic musicians like Tunisian singer-songwriter Walid Rouissi and Egyptian composer and ud-master Essam Rashad. The result was a collection of songs of love and yearning which genuinely fused West and East. Her second LP, Halim, sees Natacha exploring further her deeply felt affinity with Arabic musical heritage.
Natacha Atlas was born in Belgium, the daughter of an Egyptian father and an English mother. Natacha grew up in the Moroccan suburbs of Brussels, becoming fluent in French, Spanish, Arabic and English, immersing herself in Arabic culture, Egyptian "shaabi" pop and learning from childhood the raks sharki - belly dance - techniques that she uses to devastating effect on stage today. Even more striking than Natacha's dance moves, though, is her voice, which swoops and soars, blending unfettered talent and the complexities of Arabic musical theory into a burst of sound that is thrilling, immediate and evocative.
Natacha moved to England as a teenager and became Northampton's first Arabic rock singer. Since then has involved herself in a wide variety of musical projects. Dividing her time between the UK and Brussels, she sang in a variety of Arabic and Turkish nightclubs, and spent a brief stint in a Belgian salsa band called Mandanga. As she shuttled between Northampton and Brussels, however, she began to attract the attention of the Balearic beat crew ¡Loca! and Jah Wobble, then assembling his Invaders of the Heart. Wobble was looking for an eclectic Middle Eastern singer and fell in love with her voice.
In '91, both these projects bore fruit. Timbal by ¡Loca! started out as a track on Nation Records' Fuse Two compilation and became a massive club hit, while Wobble's Rising Above Bedlam - five tracks which Natasha co-wrote - attracted much critical acclaim and a Mercury award nomination. The success of Timbal cemented Natacha's relationship with the ground-breaking Nation Label, who introduced her to TransGlobal Underground (TGU), at that time enjoying Top 40 success with the anthemic Templehead.
First guesting with them in 1991, she became, two years, later, a member of the core quartet of Transglobal, as lead singer and belly-dancer (the latter not some kind of limp tourist-pleasing wiggle but the real raq sharki). A couple of years later, it was the band's Tim Whelan, Hamid ManTu and Nick Page (a.k.a. Count Dubulah, now of Temple of Sound) who helped her to make her first solo album, Diaspora.
In parallel with the success of her solo albums she remained a full-time TransGlobal member, and TransGlobal constituted her backing band, until they left Nation in 1999, and they have remained allies throughout her subsequent career. Atlas has appeared on most TGU albums and its members are usually involved in the production of her solo albums.
Diaspora was released (in the UK by Beggars Banquet/Mantra, as are all her albums) in 1995. It combined the dubby, beat-driven global dance approach of TransGlobal with the more traditional work of Arabic musicians, and the result was a critically acclaimed collection of songs of love and yearning.
1997's Halim followed, and then Gedida in 1999 , both intelligently and naturally fusing Middle Eastern and European styles, and delighting an ever-increasing audience in both territories.
2000 saw the release of The Remix Collection, in which material from the first three albums was given the treatment by a variety of remixers, including Talvin Singh, Banco de Gaia, Youth, 16B, Klute, the Bullitnuts, TJ Rehmi, Spooky and TransGlobal.
Natacha's fourth album Ayeshteni was released in 2001. It bears, as its only English-language song, a particularly splendid example of how this singer can take on a classic and cast new light and excitement on it - a mighty rendering of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put A Spell On You."
2002's album, The Natacha Atlas and Marc Eagleton Project's Foretold in the Language of Dreams, was a considerable departure. No beats; a calm, shimmering album, involving a slightly smaller cast than usual, including Syrian qanun master Abdullah Chhadeh, whom Natacha married in 1999.
Apart from her own projects, Natacha remains very much in demand as a guest singer for the recordings and performances of a remarkably wide range of musicians, including Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook, the Indigo Girls,...
Read more ›
|
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed, 25 May 2000
By A Customer
In this third album Natacha seems to go for a slightly more western, modern sound. It's okay, but for me she doesn't play to her strengths enough, like on previous albums "diaspora" & "halim" where her awesome voice shimmered accross warm sandswept arabian nights perhaps hundreds of years ago... But then again, this album does contain the song "The Righteous Path", what an awesome song - produces the effect I descibed above X 100.
|
|
|
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shimmy On Natacha!, 14 April 2003
As a bellydancer, I am no stranger to Ms. Atlas's sultry tones and the wonderful haunting oud and nay....not forgetting the pulsing of the percussion instruments which are essential to the dance.In this album Natacha goes from the sublime Mon Amie the Rose to the tabla beats of mahlabeya. This album conjures up warm desert winds, harems, nomads, Ali Baba and the forty Thieves, spice markets,veils and coin belts. An A to Z of Arabia, then just for good measure Natacha throws in One Brief Moment which sounds like a French-Morrocan caberet grande finale. You don't need to be interested in bellydance to own this album, although I would say it helps. Natacha sings with such passion and intensity on some of the tracks you just can't help swirling and shimmying around the living room go on live... give it a try!
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
~ Natacha Atlas
~ Natacha Atlas
~ Natacha Atlas
~ Natacha Atlas
~ Natacha Atlas & the Mazeeka Ensemble
