ROGER FAKHR Schallplatten & CDs

Review: East Of Any Place is a treasure trove of songs uncovered alongside Roger Fakhr's acclaimed 2021 album, Fine Anyway. These tracks, hidden for decades and only passed between a handful of people, offer a glimpse into Roger's musical genius and the vibrant scene of Lebanon during a period marked by civil war and social upheaval. This release serves as a companion to the former LP, flaunting studio tracks that didn't make the cut of the previous album. Recorded in single day sessions in the late 1970s, the songs remain untouched, preserving the rawness and authenticity of the moment with impeccable folk-driven arrangements and lyricism shining throughout East Of Any Place.

Review: Arabic funk, soul and folk specialists Habibi Funk are masters at digging deep to find extremely rare and unreleased music. Even so, their latest offering is particularly obscure. It's a retrospective of 1970s material by a Lebanese singer-songwriter called Roger Fakhr, who put out one self-released tape in the mid 1970s, of which only 200 copies were ever made. Some of those songs feature on this retrospective, but the majority of the material is unreleased tracks from Fakhr's archive. Interestingly, the majority of the music on offer is sung in English rather than Arabic and sits somewhere between American railroad blues, English revivalist folk of the sort popular in the late '60s and early '70s, sun-soaked Californian folk, and gentle folk. A genuinely eye-opening musical treat.