Halfway through a scholarly monologue on the misleading limitations of the term “experimental music," Wael el-Sayed, accordionist for new local band Puzzle, was suddenly interrupted by the obnoxious quacking of a cartoon duck. Embarrassed, he hesitated before pulling his phone out from his pocket, and muttered apologetically, “It’s shameful that a musician would have such a ringtone.”
Taking a deep breath, el-Sayed barked into the phone, “I’m sitting here, pretending to be an artist, and you had to go and embarrass me! What do you want, damn it?”
This unexpected shift in tone would not surprise those familiar with el-Sayed’s work in the enigmatic–and possibly “experimental"–band, Puzzle. And the ranks of "those familiar" with the band are growing, along with the band's repertoire of quietly captivating sounds.
In spite of having only officially formed less than one year ago, Puzzle has managed to generate considerable buzz–helped, in part, by the individual reputation of each member. El-sayed, 35, has long been a familiar and reliable name in Egypt’s underground music scene. Thirty-one-year-old Hossam Ghalib, Puzzle’s bassist and frontman, has also been known to perform with various onstage acts, such as Gypsia, Black Theama, Dima, and the now defunct 'Adad Digital with current bandmate el-Sayed. And, despite his relatively young age, 21-year-old percussionist Mohamed Raafat can already boast of his place in backup bands for classically trained and well-established musicians, such as Ahmed Ali el-Haggar.
With its warm sense of nostalgia and undertone of bass-driven electronics, the band’s music is original without being flashy; a combination of different sounds that feels organic, never forced. “The name ‘Puzzle’ came out of a sense of mystery,” explained el-Sayed. “The idea of separate pieces fitting into each other to create a cohesive whole.” Like those pieces, el-Sayed and Ghalib’s seemingly disparate musical styles fell together, fuelled by a chemistry the two discovered during the time they spent living together.
“We would spend most of our time practicing together,” el-Sayed recalled. “We kept coming up with new compositions, and eventually, Hossam suggested we do something with them.” Pleased with the direction their previously aimless jamming was now taking, the pair still felt a nagging void, a missing component, which, as it turned out, would only be filled by the addition of Mohamed Raafat, who quickly became the younger sibling of the trio, filling the role of percussionist.
“I was stuck in traffic next to a microbus and I noticed the ticket boy banging on the side of the bus with an impressive sense of tempo,” said Ghalib, holding back a smile.
El-Sayed immediately jumped in. “He seemed like a nice kid so we took him in, raised him, and now he’s a fine young man, bless his heart.”
Accustomed to his bandmates’ constant ribbing, Raafat shrugged. “It’s true," he said. "I owe them everything.”
Although an immensely gifted percussionist, Raafat’s talent wasn’t all that secured him a place in Puzzle. El-Sayed and Ghalib were searching not only for a drummer, but for someone who possessed a certain “energy.”
“You need to have strong chemistry with your bandmates,” said el-Sayed. “If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what instrument they play, or how well they play it–things just won’t work out. You need to share a vision and a goal. You need to feel that energy buzzing between you. But most importantly, you need to click.”
And click they did, with the trio quickly piecing together a sonic collage of sounds that draws listeners in with an evocative, familiar sense before taking them to strange and unexpected places. Their most popular composition, “El-Feel” (“The Elephant”), is light-hearted, confident and mischievous, like a Cheshire cat strutting through the streets of Cairo. Despite its name, “Felucca” sounds more like a joyously jolty ride in a horse-driven carriage over increasingly uneven terrain. “Safari” effortlessly combines a sense of coziness and adventure, like listening to an eccentric uncle’s greatly embellished accounts of lion-hunting and crocodile-wrestling, while “Space”–rarely a source of comfort for musicians–slowly drifts through the great unknown before ending up, against all odds, floating lazily down the dark waters of the Nile.
While the members of Puzzle enjoy the process of collaborative experimentation, their compositions are, as el-Sayed explained, in no way coincidental. "Hossam will come up with a bass line or a beat, and we’ll add to it together, gradually building it piece by piece," he said. "When it comes to songwriting, Hossam is the main spark. More often than not, he’ll give us a song that’s almost complete–and we just polish it off together.”
Occasionally, Ghalib will enhance live performances by bashfully approaching his microphone and quietly singing lyrics provided by the group’s friend, poet Mohannad Hawari. More often than not, though, Puzzle’s pieces remain purely instrumental, as they were intended to be.
Whereas a significant number of new bands are content with aping their influences, Puzzle manages to assimilate theirs into a deceptively simple style that, upon repeated listenings, is clearly one of their own creation. They intentionally blur the lines between jazz, chill-out, and folkloric Arabic music, and the impressive result sets them apart from most other bands who claim to have similar influences.
“It’s hard to pinpoint our specific influences as a band, because we each have such different backgrounds,” said Ghalib. “With Puzzle, we’ve been trying to come up with a singular line of logic to absorb all these separate elements.”
Integral to this logic is the challenge of incorporating their influences while staying true to their traditional Egyptian roots. As Ghalib explained, “We’re always conscious of having our work classified as Arabic music, with a strong Arabic flavor. Bit that doesn’t limit our sound. We can still make jazz or rock music, but it’s jazz and rock that sounds like it was made here in Egypt.”
The concept itself, as the members of Puzzle are quick to admit, is far from groundbreaking. “Ask any band today to describe their sound, and they’ll tell you it’s a ‘fusion of Western and oriental music’,” frowns Raafat, explaining that merely adding a tabla to a rock band doesn’t make its sound anymore unique.
“Most bands today are more concerned with being called ‘different’ than they are with the actual music they make,” said el-Sayed, fiddling with his foldable walking stick (el-Sayed has been blind for most of his life). “And that’s the wrong attitude to have. What is ‘different’, anyway? I can strip naked and walk down the street–that would be different, but not necessarily of any value to anyone.”
The "value" of music is something the trio takes very seriously, a fact reflected in their relatively small collection of compositions. The members of Puzzle are perfectionists, who have no problem working on a composition for as long as it takes in order to get every last detail right. "When you claim to be an experimental band or musician, you have to work extra hard to prove that you're not just messing around, and that's what a lot of new bands today don't seem to realize," el-Sayed said. "They think they can suck and call it experimentalism, and then blame the audience for not being sophisticated enough to get it. But you have to really understand the fundamentals of something before you can begin to experiment with it–and most of these bands don't have a clue about the fundamentals of music, particularly traditional Arabic music."
"When you fail to connect with your audience, it's always, always, your fault, never that of the audience," el-Sayed asserted.
“I really feel like we make a type of music that hasn’t been heard before,” Raafat nodded. “There might be some comparisons to certain types of electronic music, but that’s not really what we do. We’re only semi-electronic, and more heavily influenced by world music.”
The influences of world music and electronica can be heard in their work, but the members of Puzzle should be proud that–despite its intergalactic tangents and artificial flourishes–their music is still firmly rooted in the streets of Egypt, with their individual compositions serving as an appropriate soundtrack to the chaos of Cairo, as well as the antiquated charm of Alexandria, where both Ghalib and el-Sayed hail from.
It's not just the band's sound that takes inspiration from the local environment. When "El-Feel" is performed with lyrics, they tend to describe the widespread frustrations of last year's crippling hashish crisis. "We performed that song on one of those television variety shows once," Ghalib recalled. "The producers were really worried about it, and kept trying to get us to change the lyrics, which didn't even include the word 'hashish'. They weren't too thrilled with the idea, or the song itself. But the camera crew and technicians all came up to us after the show to give us high fives and share their woes–and ask us if we knew where they could score any hash."
“We’re trying to be honest,” el-Sayed said. “To make a soundtrack to all the stuff that’s being said in the street. We try to express on stage what our friends say while sitting in a coffee house. Of course, there has to be a difference between the stage and the coffee house, otherwise, why go to a concert? But we try to capture that spirit and present it on stage in an honest way. I think that’s the essence of our band.”
Refreshingly, the members of Puzzle are taking all the time they need to perfect their work, as opposed to rushing into a studio to record a premature and underdeveloped debut. “It’ll happen eventually,” said Ghalib, when asked about the group’s plans for their first album. “Right now, we’re still enjoying putting things together and playing live.”
El-Sayed agreed, describing the band’s recent performance at El-Sawy Culture Center. “I love festivals. They’re always messy and chaotic, the sound’s terrible and there are too many bands for any one act to stand out,” he explained. “But there’s a spirit and energy that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s not necessarily about the music, but about what the music means, and what it can do.”
“It’s not how the notes are played,” el-Sayed concluded. “It’s the energy behind them.”
