As someone brought up on the concise innocent perfection of the pop single, I have to confess I’m a bit of a hard sell when it comes to sprawling instrumentals. They feel like unfinished songs to me; empty landscapes that need figures in them to create context, narrative, or just a focal point to give meaning to the whole. But there have been a few primarily instrumental acts over the years that have convinced me, and the multicultural five-piece Syriana have now joined their ranks.
But having said that, it was something of a disappointment that it was only a five-piece that took to the stage of the Purcell Room last night, given that their debut album, The Road to Damascus, suggested they could easily be a small orchestra. At first I suspected that my artsdesk colleague Graeme Thomson’s theory - voiced at the beginning of his Shelby Lynne review last week - was pertinent here too: that this stripped-down Syriana were just another victim of a financially castrated music industry. But then the band’s main spokesperson, double bassist Bernard O’Neil, explained that the Syrian musicians involved in the project simply weren’t allowed to leave their country because “they didn’t have the right political connections”. So in this instance we can’t blame our Government, even though later in the evening O’Neil gave us the shocking statistic that 44 arts centres in Britain will have closed before the year is out. But that’s another story.
My main concern last night was the absence of the Pan Arab Strings of Damascus. The strings they provided on the album don’t just function as a simple background wash, as might be the case, say, on a parallel Western project. They are an integral part of the arrangements, a signature sound, even - one minute the sonic equivalent of palm trees bending this way and that in the breeze, the next - as the intensity of the music builds - the swerve and twitch of the belly dancer’s hips as she works the room. So it’s something of a relief when, after the first song, a button is pressed on a laptop, and that emotive sound swells and contracts, then swells and contracts again, filling the modest space of the Purcell Room.
Yes, it was still a disappointment that these master musicians weren't there bowing away in person. But as partial consolation, Niccolo Piazza’s films – each one tailormade for a particular composition - were a mesmerising diversion. Subtly hypnotic, kinetic collages, by turns nostalgic, political or kaleidoscopically abstract, they never became irritating or over-insistent. In fact, because Syriana’s compositions veer between Cold War chill and widescreen James Bond heat, they were crying out for some moving images to add that extra dimension.
And from the moment Nick Page (pictured right) gently strummed his first spring-water-clear vibrato-ed 
guitar chords, it became an irrelevance that half the music was on a backing tape. As a founder member of the still-innovative Transglobal Underground, and the central force behind the intelligently realised dub reggae/Ethiopian fusion project Dub Colossus, Page is one of the UK’s most underrated musicians. With Syriana he seems once again to have found another culture’s music that fits him like a glove while also giving him the opportunity to experiment without losing the essence of what he's experimenting with.
My one minor criticism of the night was that Mr O’Neil, charming and amiable as he was, did talk a little too much. Yes, some background information on the recording of the album was interesting, and a story about a legendary ice-cream parlour or the glittery jacket he had tailormade for next to nothing by the Captain of the Syrian football team, were amusing. But I just would have liked the opportunity to have become more fully immersed in the wonderfully atmospheric music, rather than be pulled back to the present moment, once every five minutes, by more chatter.
Find Syriana on AmazonWatch a short film on the making of the Syriana album
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