My primary duty to you, aside from bringing you great new music of my own of course, is to bring you next-level tracks from other artists. This week is no exception.
Usually, when I hear a track I know I’ll like, it will only take one listen. Tracks I really love will take several listens before I’ve truly fallen for them.
This week, I bring you “Nissim” by The Gaslamp Killer, an artist I never knew of up until recently. I’m positive that Nissim is one of the more unique tracks I’ll ever have during my weekly music picks, but I’m positive that if you take it for a spin, you’ll fall in love.
When the song first fell on my ears, a group of friends and I were enjoying some late-night hookah, listening to my curated playlist for these exact nightly sessions. I cannot recall which friend of mine put it on, but I’ll use this Write-up as an opportunity to show my appreciation:
Thanks, friend.
Nissim begins with a clean-cut sitar solo which lasts nearly two-minutes—I can’t get enough of its steadily-building, crazy long intro, but what happens afterwards is perfect: the track breaks into the full beat of grooving drums, sitar, guitar, and piano. Each piece of the song is wildly complimentary to one another, which is reflective of Gaslamp’s true production ingenuity. There are no fancy transitions or pounding 808s; just a pure, Arabic-infused alternative instrumental.
William Bensussen (the real name of The Gaslamp Killer) has an incredible ancestry of Turkish, Lebanese, Mexican and Lithuanian, so it is very clear where he draws his influences from. And I, someone who just discovered a significant sliver of Arabic in my own lineage and no formal knowledge of my own heritage, can certainly say that Nissim is everything I’d hoped for in a modern spin on Middle Eastern music. That’s why it’s my Spotify Pick of the Week.