PRAED

PRAED is a music band from Lebanon comprising Raed Yassin and Paed Conca.

The band was founded by Raed Yassin and Paed Conca in 2006. Their music is a mixture of Arabic popular music, free jazz, and electronics. In the same year, the band made its first public appearance at the Al Maslakh festival in Switzerland followed by a concert at the Irtijal festival in Beirut. Since then, the band has frequented numerous international music festivals and toured intensively in Japan, Europe and Canada.

Through these endeavors, the band has created a large global network with other renowned musicians as musical collaborators. Raed Yassin plays keyboards, laptop, electronics and vocals while Paed Conca plays electric bass and electronics.

The band’s body of work mainly explores the terrain of Arabic popular music (“Shaabi”) and its interconnections with other psychedelic and hypnotic musical genres in the world, such as free jazz, space jazz, and psychedelic rock among others.

Since its inception, Praed has shown a very keen interest in this music as a medium that reflects Egyptian society’s complicated fabric. Through the research it conducted, the band began to discover a strong cultural connection between “Shaabi” sounds and the “Mouled” music that is played in religious trance ceremonies. The hypnotizing psychedelic effect that was embedded in this genre also triggered thoughts around its similarity to other popular music in the world that employ forms of sonic delirium, such as free jazz and psychedelic rock.