Bedouine

Sid The Cat Presents

Bedouine

As a child, if you’re lucky, summer afternoons stretch out like a yawn, pool waves are as warm and engulfing as a blanket, the safety of your mother’s arms feels endless. On her new album, Neon Summer Skin, Bedouine, the project of Azniv Korkejian, explores this feeling of safety long before one can fully understand the concept. Written with vivid, honest and intimate imagery after visiting her family in Saudi Arabia, it tells the story of family and upbringing, and mourns the end of her childhood. There is a singular resonance and newfound heft in this music previously unheard in Bedouine’s discography.

Bedouine is known for making gentle, lilting folk songs that build fingerpicked guitar melodies into tsunamis of emotion. Her masterful songwriting and timeless melodies have earned her praise from publications like Pitchfork, who said her music “boasts a surreal calm and lived in glow,” and Rolling Stone, who lauded her “humble folk-pop brilliance,” plus an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and tours with the likes of Fleet Foxes and Father John Misty.

As personal as her songs have been, they’ve often built upon universal experiences. The writing here, however, is full of specific memories: a neon swim suit, beads of water dripping down tangled hair, the blood of a lamb, often sacrificed at Syrian weddings, oozing across the pavement. “It was the first time I had the inclination to write a record about one main subject which gave me a clarity and motivation I hadn't quite had before.”