CULTURE | Syria: Aleppo’s Metal Bands Tour Europe, but Not the Way They Hoped
December 2015 | Archive | DANIEL J. GERSTLE
Originally published in Middle East Eye
Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine
Syrian heavy metal singer Adel Saflou asked to meet at the maximum security prison in Alphen-aan-den-Rijn, Netherlands, where he was writing his new album. Bearded and balding, with eyebrow and nose rings, Saflou carries both the toughness of an aging rocker and the sweet charm of a small town student.
Now, at 22, he’s writing lyrics for his band, Ambrotype, from a prison cell overlooking a closed yard where dozens of Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, and other refugees play football. The Netherlands had received so many refugee applicants in the past months they needed to use any facility available, so the prison, despite its foreboding atmosphere, was just another vessel on their journey.
“When I was in Aleppo during the war,” Saflou tells MEE, glowing with nostalgia, “we were doing a festival or concert a month. We had a really big following and a lot of people showed up, thankfully. The scene was alive. Everyone was happy. It was a really big escape for everyone. I was there until the end of the scene, what I mark as the end of metal in Aleppo. We finished the last U.Ground [the company run by Bashar Haroun which produced the events] concert, that big festival, and I never expected that this would be the last concert I ever do in Syria. It’s really heartbreaking to know that I can’t play in Syria again.” http://humanitarianbazaar.org/partner-story-syria-rock-in-a-hard-place/
Growing up in Idlib, Syria, Saflou collected heavy metal and rock music, artwork, and books. That love for loud, rebellious, and forbidden music drew him and others to cluster in the underground clubs in nearby Aleppo. Youth who were on the fringes found doom, death, and thrash metal as a way to cope with growing violence. The songs allowed them a covert way to criticize warlordism and fanatics who claimed holiness as they killed, or to sing with biting honesty about heartbreak, as well as to make some distant link to the European metal scene they dreamed of touring.
In Aleppo, Saflou teamed up with concert producer Bashar Haroun and best friend, guitarist Jawdat al-Atasi, to perform as Orchid, a melodic metal band that combined dark, powerful guitar with choral vocals. What a rush it was to sing “Such a Creep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B54hVzW_8AY,” a song about a man who realizes he’s no good for the girl he loves, to a crowd, in a city where metal heads could be arrested and harassed, while several armies were battling to take over the city around them.
But while Saflou was performing with Orchid, his home town of Idlib was taken over by Jabhet al Nusra, an extremist rebel force, and one of their units moved into his family’s house. Saflou’s uncle told him by phone that when the extremist fighters found his teenage bedroom full of metal fan books and art, they claimed it was Satanic literature and said that if they found him they would cut off his head. The family had to tell the fighters that Saflou had left long ago and was no longer part of the family to save themselves.
Meanwhile, in Aleppo, the war finally divided the city, forcing Orchid and other bands to fall apart as their members escaped. Saflou and many of the others couldn’t go home. Thus, began Syrian metal’s exodus. Some, like Haroun and al-Atasi, headed for the government-controlled coastal towns of Latakia and Banias and continued running concerts. Saflou and many others fled to Lebanon where Saflou began recording for pioneer Rudi Messih’s Arab metal project, Rasas (bullets). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C39WzPngpFY
https://www.facebook.com/rasasband
When more news came out about extremist groups murdering musicians, banning music, and doing public whippings and instrument smashing, Saflou and al-Atasi and many peers realized they would be continually threatened and, with still more troubles in Lebanon and Turkey, headed on the “death” boats to Europe.
As Monzer Darwish, a Syrian filmmaker, musician, and friend of Saflou, explains in his coming feature documentary film, Syrian Metal is War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lkg2q7n8J8, the Middle East’s long-misunderstood metal bands and their fans, especially in the war-affected areas, represent something far more symbolic about the fate of the region than simply a music subculture.
Outside the relatively softer and more public Damascus groups like Anas & Friends (now Khebez Dawle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16wr2CKPywc), Gene Band, or Tanjaret Daghet, who mostly fled to Lebanon and quickly got media and some support, there are these doom, death, and progressive metal bands like Ambrotype, Orchid, The Hourglass, and Eulen who faced even more threats and attacks and became magnets for youth who refuse radicalism and, in most cases, refuse to fight.
Political and religious leaders claim holy virtue as they conduct war and condemn these youth for their dark arts. But these youth, who see their growls, moshing, and skull art as something akin to Shakespeare’s murder classics or Hollywood horror films, condemning evil by making artistic thrill out of it, represent arguably the Middle East’s most dedicated anti-extremist subculture.
But in the end, armed groups proved more powerful than unarmed youth, attacked some of them, including Darwish who was beaten over the head and left for dead, and forced most of them to flee the country. Now they are arriving in the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, applying for asylum and wondering how to rebuild their music scene in exile.
Darwish, in his own complex journey of survival, survived filming on the front line and made it with his wife all the way to the Netherlands this past summer. Since Darwish had been directly attacked and was launching a risky film, he applied through the Dutch system and won asylum. This writer joined Saflou on a reunion trip to meet Darwish to talk about the film, and Saflou’s part in it.
“When I was in the camp,” Saflou explains, now with Darwish at his new housing near Amsterdam. “I heard about these Paris attacks and it was the day after they happened. I was like, Oh my God. Now it’s going to lash back at us. They’re going to be really cautious when they’re dealing with the new people coming as refugees.”
The Dutch, like other EU governments facing hard pulls both from pro- and anti-refugee lobbies, had offered Saflou and thousands of other newly-arrived refugee applicants a stressful, confusing mix of good and bad news. Some would stay in basic rooms in the global city of Amsterdam. Others would be rotated around rural, sometimes isolated, housing centers all over the country, and still others would stay at Alphen prison. Sometimes, like in Alphen prison, they had a private room for two with a desk and a TV, football yard, music room.
Other times they would be piled together in a large military dorm mixed women and men of all ages sleeping beside each other. More comfortable perhaps than the migrant camps from Greece to Serbia, or the notorious Jungle settlement in Calais, applicants still had to risk having their belongings stolen, or being harassed or threatened by other applicants. Some groups stood together to protect each other, watch valuables, and send each other messages if their names or some urgent announcement were posted on the board while they were staying in town.
But the most stressful factor was timing. While some got interviews and decisions within a month or two, others waited well over a year. Not permitted to work, that meant borrowing from people back home in the war, or finding work off the books. Most would eagerly pay taxes for legal right to work while an applicant, but few countries would allow it, preferring to force applicants to borrow or work illegally. All of these factors – timing of interviews, timing of decision, location and format of housing – seemed to have no relation to the urgency, seriousness, or nationality of the case, from the point of view of the applicants. But this was the only way to apply. Otherwise, they may be forced back home where they could be targeted or forced to fight.
“Ambrotype https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lVtvoA5Jc0 is my prog rock, prog metal slash jazz band,” Saflou explains at the Alphen riverside, watching Dutch barges pass by in the cold night. “I’ve been trying to mix the three genres in a way that hasn’t been done before. I’ve been trying to get some oriental, twisted, really evil sounding scales on there. Really evil sounding riffs on there which are influenced by my Syrian background, not in a cheesy way. I think Ambrotype is my whole life’s video, documentary, or whatever. If you listen to Ambrotype, it talks mostly about my life the things I’ve been to, the war I’ve witnessed. Even though they’re all metaphoric, you can still get an idea. What I’m trying to do with Ambrotype is influence a lot of people, make them feel something.”
Now that the Aleppo metal scene is spreading out, many coming to Europe, what basically destroyed these guys’ families and lives has opened new artistic options. While death metal growler/ producer Bashar had to shift U.ground to the coastal city of Latakia and now wanted to teach music to youth, that meant he had to bring on his students’ style of music to his festivals he still runs in Syria. Al-Atasi ended up in Italy, Darwish in Amsterdam, other bands like Netherion and Eulen were heading to Germany. All were finding themselves suffering huge losses, and a lot of pain, while at the same time having doors open that were not expected.
As for Adel, now that he’s forced to rebuild his music in the Netherlands, he no longer feels like Syrian metal has to be hardcore, or with Syrians, so he has shelved Orchid band, continued to record remotely for Messih’s project, Rasas, and now focuses on his current project, Ambrotype. There will always be legend and nostalgia about Aleppo’s metal scene, and it could come back one day, but now with everyone forced to flee into new countries, why not also escape into new music projects like a Syrian-Dutch metal-jazz hybrid? Country and life in ruins, at least musically, Saflou now feels free.
Humanitarianbazaar.org