Rizan Said comes from the Jazeera, the north-eastern borderland of Syria where Kurdish, Arab, Syriac and Armenian communities live side by side and where weddings could last for days. A child prodigy on percussion and reed instruments, he became the region's master of the keyboard when electronic instruments transformed the local music, programming Korgs to imitate zurna, saz, tanbura and buzuq and compressing a whole traditional ensemble into two very fast hands. For almost twenty years he built, night after night, the sound that carried Omar Souleyman's voice from the cassette circuit of Hassake, Deir Ez Zor and Qamishli to stages around the world.

Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi ('Beyond Shaabi') is his third solo album, after King of Keyboard (Annihaya, 2015) and Saz Û Dilan (Akuphone, 2019). It was recorded at Sundlaugin in Iceland in May 2026, produced by Randall Dunn (who also plays Minimoog bass), co-produced by Mark Gergis of Syrian Cassette Archives and Sublime Frequencies, with Úlfur Hansson as engineer. The heat and speed of the wedding tapes open up into something wider and stranger: cosmic, electronic dabke.

It is also a reunion: in 2011 Dunn and Gergis had worked with Said and Souleyman on the Souleyman versions of Björk's 'Crystalline'. Seven pieces over four sides, released by Kou Records.