Flamingods

Hometown: London/Bahrain.

The lineup: Kamal Rasool, Charles Prest, Sam Rowe, Karthik Poduval and Craig Doporto.

The background: Hyperborea, the new album by Flamingods, sounds like a compilation of snippets of music from countries far and wide, but mainly Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Only you can’t quite place the sources of the fragments or “samples”, giving an already exotic sound an extra-otherworldly aura. How could we have missed this group? They’re quite something. They began a few years back as a bedroom project started by Kamal Rasool, and now he’s got four friends on board, though they’re about as far from the band-as-gang template as you can get. They were never once in a room together for the entire recording of the album; instead, audio files were emailed back and forth between the five players.

We say “players”. Actually, they admit they don’t conventionally play, for example, the Turkish qanun or any number of the percussion instruments picked up by Rasool on his travels to Tanzania and the Amazon; rather, as they told the Quietus, they hit and generally manhandle them until they get the required sound. Not that that means Hyperborea is a cacophony of atonalities and drones – far from it. It just sounds like a mosaic of lovely bits, “songs” suddenly ending or trailing off randomly. Imagine if the Avalanches pieced together their next album from snatches of field recordings of music from distant lands from non-specific points in the past. That’s what Hyperborea is like: tribal folkadelia, ancient jungle, or aboriginal prog. There are moments that are recognisably rhythmic, such as Market Dancer, but they are so unorthodox in structure and arrangement you could hardly play them in a club.

The catalyst for the album was Rasool being forced out of the UK by new visa laws, forcing him to confront his feelings about identity and belonging (hence the longing for a new home, the mythical island of Hyperborea). The result of such thinking was five young men, all seasoned travellers, and in far-flung corners of the globe, transmitting their various experiences in a flurry of you've-got-to-hear-this. You might feel as though you're listening to them all at once, in real time. It’s literally sensational: a riot of sights and sounds. One minute you’re in the Garden of Indra, enjoying old oriental tones and timbres; the next you’re in Manyara, and what sounds like a bustling eighth-century metropolis. Lake Yaylaru, like a lot of the music on Hyperborea, seems to have come from a place – much like the setting for Game of Thrones – based in a fictional present that simultaneously resembles an ancient civilisation. And yet Hyperborea is not, for all that, hard work. In fact, it’s a pleasure; a heady, not heavy, one. But there’s a lot to take in. Prepare to be bombarded by bliss. - The Guardian

Charles Prest and Kamal Rasool, two of the five members of Flamingods, are relaxing before the penultimate show of their summer tour, slouching on a leather sofa in a pop-up bar in London’s Elephant and Castle. They talk happily about what they have achieved this summer, but also look very, very tired. Not surprising, considering that after just one warm-up gig the band had just 72 hours, rehearsing 16 hours a day, to prepare for their debut performance at Glastonbury, and then embarked on a European tour that saw them play 11 shows in two-weeks. To add to the workload, the band suffered two van breakdowns in three days in Spain and Portugal, forcing them to miss a gig in Oviedo.

This evening’s performance will celebrate the imminent release of Moon, a companion piece to their 2012 LP Sun, for which they asked various producers and musicians to remix tracks from their first album. They will then attempt to record their third album in three days, before Prest and Rasool return to Dubai, their current home. The other three members will remain in London.

This kind of hectic schedule is not uncommon for Flamingods, who are certainly not your typical band. Kamal Rasool, Charles Prest, Craig Doporto and Sam Rowe, all in their mid-20s, met as expat kids in Bahrain, where they played music together. But it wasn’t until they all moved to the UK for university in 2009 that Flamingods began to take shape.

It was originally Rasool’s solo project, started in his Bahrain bedroom and developed in his London dorm room. “When I started it, I didn’t really think it would grow into anything,” he says. “It was just meant to be a silly project where I created music in my room with lots of weird instruments.” But soon Prest joined in; then Rowe started to travel up from Southampton for jam sessions; they befriended and recruited Karthik Poduval; and, finally, Doporto became the fifth member of the band.

The band released some low-fi recordings and played a few shows in London, before recording Sun in 2012. But then university ended, and shortly afterwards Rasool had to leave the UK due to visa restrictions. So during the recording of the band’s second album in 2014, Hyperborea, which so impressed The Guardian that it named Flamingods its ‘New band of the week’, the five band members were never all in the same room as each other.

That separation seems only to have added to the band’s unique trans-global relationship. “It’s really important to us that we continue exploring different cultures and sounds and just taking in everything that’s around us,” says Rasool, who has been collecting unusual instruments since childhood. “There’s no limit.”

“We wanted to make music that we thought an ancient forgotten civilisation would have made”

Some influences include Boredoms, a Japanese noise outfit the band discovered at Matt Groening’s All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival in 2010, the year they formed, who particularly impressed Prest, making “a wall of noise with nine drums on stage”; Sun Ra; Pharoah Sanders; Animal Collective; Tito Puente and “a lot of Latin stuff”; and Fella Kuti.

“For the first album we took a lot of influence from Mesoamerican culture, like the Aztecs and the Mayans and stuff,” says Rasool. “Then Hyperborea had a concept: to make music that we thought an ancient forgotten civilisation would have made, in a far away mythical land.”

For the as yet untitled third album, they will be bringing in a lot of musicians from outside the band. “We’re going to introduce strings, clarinet, sax, harp, it’s going to be quite big,” says Rasool. “We’re aiming to make an exotica record, which was a style that was popularised in the 1950s by people like Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny and Les Baxter. A weird exotica record that was forgotten in time.” - Esquire Middle East

"This is the only sound we know how to make".

I'm on the line with Kamal Rasool and Charles Prest from five-piece outfit Flamingods. Our conversation has been circling around the issue of the what genre their music belongs to, throwing out different reference points – the 50s, the 60s, psychedelic exotica – when Kamal finally hits on it.

"This the only sound we know how to make, and it's the only sound we want to make. We have all these different influences, but we don't necessarily want our music to sound like any one thing. The only sound on our records is the stuff that's in our head. That's the stuff we put onto paper and make into records. It happens naturally".

As part of their ongoing exploration of the Dubai music scene, AXE are showcasing some of the brightest emerging talent to come out of the region in their 'Bring the Quiet - The Dubai Underground' film. Which is why I'm talking to Flamingods, who've been hand-picked by AXE as one of the hottest exports to come out of Dubai today.

Founded in 2009 by Kamal Rasool in Bahrain, Flamingods would probably be filed under "ethnic pop" if people still bought physical records anymore. But the narrowness of this definition would do them an injustice. The band is obsessed with cultural exploration, taking inspiration from the extensive collection of instruments they've amassed from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.



This sense of geography is reflected in the band itself, which is split between continents – Rasool and Prest are based in Dubai full time, whilst fellow members Karthik Poduval, Craig Doporto and Sam Rowe live in the UK.

Ahead of the release of their third album, VICE caught up with Rasool and Prest on the phone from Dubai.

VICE: Hi guys! Thanks for talking to me. Tell me about the influences for your new record?

Kamal: We're such cultural nerds. We love reading and watching things and taking it all in. We're kind of hermits really, we just geek out on all the stuff over here in Dubai. On our new record we're channeling a genre called exotica that was popular in the fifties. It's about these amazing musicians putting together instruments to heighten the imagery of faraway lands and mystical concepts. That kind of daydream aspect of it really appealed to us and mixed that in with our own psychedelic tendencies. The new record is meant to be this journey through the jungle in search of enlightenment, with a lot of different inspirations along the way.



Your sound is heavily influenced by 50s exotica and 60s psychedelia, but your approach is so modern. Like you create music across time zones and continents. How do you make a record when the band isn't even in the same country most of the time?

Kamal: It's a little hard! [Laughs]. A lot of communicating online and sending stuff back and forth. It's not ideal at all really. But it definitely shaped our last recording and opened us up to new, different methods of doing things.

Charles: Lots of emails back and forth, lots of Skype sessions. It would be a lot easier if we were all together obviously, but we've got good at making the most of a situation like this. But we see ourselves as cultural nomads anyway. We grew up in Bahrain but never saw it as our home, we never felt we were from one place in particular.

I suppose that makes it better when you get to perform together?

Kamal: Yeah, absolutely. We don't do any full shows without the band being there. Glastonbury this year was really fun, one of my favourite performances ever. We actually played three different stages so we got three very different experiences out of the festival. One of our performances was in this boat stage called HMS Sweet Charity; they put on this amazing tropical experience with lots of weird different acts like ancient Egyptian dancers and stuff. I think Charles went to a dating show too? [Laughs].

Charles: Yeah I did, they had this dating show that was all choreographed beforehand so everyone was in on it apart from the audience members! It was really outrageous – like Blind Date or something.



That sounds pretty crazy. I watched some of the Glastonbury footage on YouTube and I didn't even recognise half of the instruments you guys were playing – where do you find them all?

Kamal: There's this museum in Dubai we love – it has all these different cultural artifacts for sale, like Indonesian Gamelan instruments and stuff. We pick them up and learn our own way of playing the instruments through trial and error – it's important not to fully rip off another culture's traditional sound but rather adjust it to what we know and explore different ways of doing that.

Do you ever feel like there's a risk of cultural appropriation or are you more about paying homage to all these different influences?

Kamal: Yeah, so the whole cultural appropriation thing is a funny one. One of the reasons we can get away with integrating all these cultures into our music is because there are so many nationalities in the band. I'm half Turkish, half Arabic, so I explore both of those cultures and all their wonderful sounds. Charles is half Jamaican, half Nigerian. Craig's half Spanish, Karthik's Indian. Part of what we do is explore all our cultural pasts and understand all of the different sounds that have come from these different areas and put that into our music.



Tell me about Dubai – what's the music scene like out there? Is it all just luxury hotels and lounge music?

Kamal: Dubai's such a melting pot; there are so many different cultures that live here. All these people who've come here for work or a better way of life have also brought their food, their culture, their music, so in the older parts of town you get a lot of really interesting bars and music venues where these traditional bands are playing this amazing music. There's this Nepalese bar we love –

Charles: [Interjects] - it's got this amazing kind of cabaret going on...

Kamal: [Laughs] Yeah so in between the band playing songs they do this kind of cabaret thing with women and it gets kind of bizarre...like one time they tried to add this comedic vibe to the cabaret...[Both laugh]. We go there all the time but they only did it once, this guy came on stage and pretended to take a shit. It was pretty bizarre! We enjoyed it but they never did it again after that.



That does not fit in with the Dubai I had in my head at all.

Kamal: I'm really hoping people realise that Dubai is much more diverse than people make it out to be in the mainstream media. It's definitely split between the new side and the old side.

Charles: There's more to it than people think – I've only been here for a year, and I've already discovered so much since being here in that time, and I'm still discovering more. There's a whole other world in the older part of town that you can discover.

Kamal: It's a confusing place, I've been here three years now and I'm only now have a limited understanding of what this place is and everything that's going on, because it is a bit of a head-fuck. But it's beautiful at the same time.



What aspect of it is a head-fuck? Like, the fact that Dubai didn't exist until recently?

Kamal: Yeah, it's nuts. You can go on this website called Dubai As It Used To Be – it's run by this guy who's lived here from the 1940s. And he's documented all the changes that Dubai's been through, and how much of that change came like fifteen, twenty years ago. It's insane; they literally built this city from sand. It's crazy.

Do you feel like your music reflects that tension between old and new also? You create music across two countries using all this modern technology, but you're influenced by all these older sounds. Kind of like how Dubai is this ultra-modern city with all these historic influences?

Kamal: Yeah, absolutely. We make music with traditional instruments, collected from different places all over the world. But we mix in that newer, electronic sound, too. These are all these different things we've chosen to have an interest in. At our heart we're all about mixing the old and the new. - Vice

Charles Prest, Sam Rowe, Craig Doporto and Kamal Rasool grew up together in Bahrain, a small island in the Middle East. Having been in various musical projects together since high school, they took a liking to Karthik Poduval at a party in London and adopted him as their bandmate. With similar backgrounds and influences, the five-piece embarked on what would be their greatest mission yet.

Pronounced 'fla-min-gods', they see their calling as an otherworldly beast combining their favourite animal - the flamingo - with mythology. Now split between London and Bahrain, the five artists experiment with instruments sourced across the world and never fail to impress us with their exotic, and at times trippy, wondermusic. Forever counting down the days to their show at London's Oslo on 11th May, we are thrilled to present the first single from their forthcoming record, Majesty. Improve your day by hitting play and discovering more about the Jodorowsky-inspired Rhama and Flamingods themselves as we catch up with Kamal…

Read full interview on link. - I-D