It’s been almost a decade since Mohammad Syfkhan, temporarily living in an Irish holiday camp having just arrived from Syria, chanced upon Lankum’s Cormac Mac Diarmada. Mac Diarmada was among a group who’d been asked to perform a few tunes there on Christmas Eve, and Syfkhan asked if he could fetch his bouzouki and join in. “When he played,” Mac Diarmada told us in a profile of Sykhan last year, “we were all totally stunned, he was unreal! I’ve seen him play a couple of times since and each time I’ve been absolutely entranced. He has a beautiful, melodic, driving style that weaves in and out. He’d switch between melody and verse for ages, never missing a beat.”
A few years after that, now settled in the small town of Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim, Syfkhan walked up to the DJ booth at a local community centre, bouzouki in hand, and asked once again if he could play. Willie Stewart, who was playing records for a family crowd, didn’t think twice and let him plug straight into the mixer. “He just went for it,” he told tQ in the same piece. It was to be the start of a friendship and creative relationship that would see Syfkhan – who had been playing wedding parties, festivals and concerts in Syria from the 1980s until he fled to Ireland with his family amid the country’s civil war – release of one of last year’s greatest albums, the imperious I Am Kurdish, via Stewart’s Nyahh Records.
In the meantime, Syfkhan had continued performing both for both the diaspora and the wider Irish underground, playing festivals in both Sligo and Dublin as well as many shows and community events such as weddings in Ireland and Germany. In 2023, he’d support Lankum to a sold-out crowd of 1,000 at Cork Opera House, winning over each and every one of them.
All of which is to say – Syfkhan’s live performances are always utterly captivating.
It’s why we’re thrilled that our latest release exclusively for Quietus subscribers features one of them, recorded at 2024’s edition of Acid Horse Festival in Pewsey, where Sykfhan’s driving melodies weave their way in and out of spartan percussion, his voice sonorous and charismatic as it alternates with the bouzouki. In the background you can hear the joyous exclamations of those in the audience being converted before your ears. Listen to this album, and it’s almost certain you’ll be joining them.
To hear Live At Acid Horse ’24 by Mohammad Syfkhan, support the Quietus with Subscriber Plus.
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