TThe debut album by Syrian producer Obay Alsharani, 30, Sandbox, is impressive. Its textural layers and floating fragments of melody easily combine with the skills of Burial or Boards of Canada to convey devastating emotions with dreamlike lightness. But where many talk about ambient music and virtual worlds as a sanctuary and help, for Alsharani, the reality of this is deadly serious. Sandbox was conceived and written while he was stuck in limbo at a refugee center, north of the Arctic Circle and about 2,000 miles from home, struggling to cope with the terrors that brought him there.
Speaking by Stockholm video chat, Alsharani is as disarmingly gentle as his music, maintaining a friendly and practical tone when discussing his tastes or the Syrian realities of Bashar al-Assad. “Since when I was eight,” he says, “my father worked in Saudi Arabia, had a good job and I got used to moving, which is useful for me now”. The family lived in four different Saudi cities, returning each year to Damascus in the summer.
Alsharani’s father worked for a Japanese automaker, so despite Saudi conservatism, he had access to stacks of foreign CDs: “Beatles, hits from the 80s and 90s, Arab metal,” he says. “Metal became my favorite in my teens.” When he returned full-time to the more culturally cosmopolitan city of Damascus for college in 2009, he “wanted something different” – and followed a path familiar to Generation Y teenagers around the world: through alternative metal as Tool and Melvins, in Cure and Radiohead, Flying Lotus and Burial.
He started experimenting with old Arabian vinyls and tapes for hip-hop beat skits, lining up with a SoundCloud “Arab beat” scene. Then, in 2011, there came the Syrian revolution and cruel repression – and Alsharani began to value the creation of his own worlds. Like his music community, he was one of the first to adopt the “sandbox” video game Minecraft. “Assad admired Ceaușescu’s North Korea and Romania: he wanted to control everything,” he says. “You felt that not even your thoughts were free. But in Minecraft, when you build the world yourself, it seemed like you could also think freely. “
This escape did not last forever. “I studied with my cousin,” recalls Alsharani, in an almost firm voice. “We did civil engineering at the university in Damascus together. But there was a university council that monitored everyone, they knew that my cousin was a politician, they knew that I did a lot of demonstrations too. I fled Syria in 2014 because I knew that my name would appear; shortly after my departure, my cousin was arrested and died under torture ”.
He was fortunate to leave before “the great wave of escapes in 2015”, he says. “And I could fly to my family in Saudi Arabia and so on.” He went slowly via Jordan and Turkey to Cyprus, where he waited a year before getting permission to do Erasmus studies in Sweden. This failed again, and in 2017, he was sent to a refugee center for 200 people in a small town with minus -35 degrees Celsius. “For the first two months there, I was in a mild panic,” he says. “Although we had good food and medical attention, the system seemed chaotic. There were people who had been there for over a year. I was scared. “
Just creating, he says, kept him sane and “restored some sense of familiarity”. Instead of hip-hop beats, he leaned towards the cold textural music of the Scottish Board of Canada and the Swedish Minecraft composer C418. “I didn’t understand that song before – there’s so little there,” he says. “But then I realized that it gives you space to put yourself. And I kept thinking, ‘What am I doing here? Everything is different here, this feeling of alienation, even the trees look different. ‘I wanted to express this feeling instead of being in a one-sided image of myself and where I come from with the Arab beats. “
So, your Sandbox album. Alsharani was already in contact with Brighton’s Hive Mind label, specializing in global mergers and, in 2017, came across his tracks oriented to the Arab beat on SoundCloud. When, after 12 months, he finally got his asylum approved and moved to Stockholm, he finished the album and gave it to them complete. He now works long shifts in a warehouse, but continues to compose and make video art, still creating that safe space of “familiarity” as he reconciles with his new life, the music capturing the bittersweet tension between the survivor’s guilt and relief from escape. “I still can’t understand it,” he says of his last years in Syria and the death of his cousin. “Sometimes it still feels heavy, but I’m lucky to be alive, and I know that.”