Omar Souleyman

Hailing from rural northeast Syria, singer Omar Souleyman became an unlikely icon in the 2000s and 2010s for his stripped-down, drum-machine-driven take on the music that accompanies a Levantine folk dance called the dabke. Souleyman was born in 1966 in the Syrian village of Tell Tamer, where he grew up working in fields doing manual labor. But he loved singing folk songs, and by the mid-’90s he was performing regular gigs at local weddings. His international breakthrough came in the late 2000s, when the Seattle-based label Sublime Frequencies released a string of compilations featuring lo-fi Souleyman cuts that captured a cathartic, cassette-warped energy similar to punk and psych rock. A groundswell of buzz led to UK and European tour dates and a public thumbs-up from Björk, and in 2013, the raspy-voiced, kaffiyeh-and-sunglasses-clad singer teamed up with electronic producer Four Tet to put together his first internationally released album of new music, Wenu Wenu. Despite the higher production values, Souleyman has always stuck to his original format, with collaborators like Rizan Said helping to whip up a folksy frenzy of phase-shifted synths and Turkish saz licks as he bemoans lost loves and honors his conflict-stricken homeland.