Bedouine turns lost homes into lush refuge on 'Neon Summer Skin'

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Set us as preferred Amid the hum of Woodcat Coffee in Echo Park, Azniv Korkejian pauses in front of a wall of family photographs mounted on faded construction paper and tucked into repurposed frames.She points out her mother in a stylish red minidress, knee-high socks and black platforms, posing playfully in a photo studio after getting her hair done in 1970s Beirut.

Nearby, her parents — Armenians raised in Syria and Lebanon — appear young and glamorous in the coastal city of Latakia in Syria, before war scattered much of their family and long before their daughter began recording music as Bedouine in Los Angeles.Korkejian hung the images at the neighborhood coffee shop run by friends as a small, offline extension of the personal mythology captured on her new album, “Neon Summer Skin.”The family photographs preserve the past and also showcase a different perspective of her culture.

People from West Asia are so often shown through images of violence, Korkejian says, that their joy, style and ordinariness can disappear from view.“There was a lot to lose,” she says.

“There was a lot of beauty in those lives.”Bedouine’s fourth studio album (out now via Thirty Tigers), emerged from an equally personal impulse to preserve what was vanishing.Its origins reach back to a 2019 visit to Saudi Arabia, where the Syrian-born Korkejian spent the first 10 years of her life.

Her family moved to the United States in 1995, but her parents returned to Riyadh after she left home for college.Now her father was preparing to retire, and the couple began quietly packing for a move to Armenia.

Only gradually did Korkejian understand that she probably would not be coming back.For the singer-songwriter, Saudi Arabia was her last anchor to childhood.With Syria transformed by war, Lebanon unstable, and Armenia an ancestral homeland ...