Israel’s Orphaned Land is probably the only band from this country that has managed to succeed at building up a huge following among Muslims and Arabian people. These fans communicate freely via the band’s social networking pages, some of them even proudly bearing Orphaned Land tattoos, even though that puts them at huge risk in their home countries! Unfortunately, the ongoing political and military struggles still prevent Orphaned Land from playing in the home countries of its Arabian fans and friends. As recent movies like “A Headbanger’s Journey” and “Global Metal” (in which Orphaned Land was featured) showed: the loudest, heaviest and most controversial music on earth can act as a universal language, bridging between opposites and overcoming all the obstacles that exist in our hearts and minds. The African musician Fela Kuti once said: “music is the weapon of the future” – Orphaned Land is the living proof of that! With the band’s, fourth album, entitled “The Never Ending Way Of ORwarriOR”, an opus that took five years of hard work, Orphaned Land created an epic manifest beyond any political or religious agenda. Vocalist Kobi Farhi states: “As people that were born into the tragedy of our region, we have always been devoted to creating harmony between conflicts, a musical heaven on earth, a tango between God & Satan. Even in the album’s artwork we combined Hebrew and Arabic, regardless of the fight between Jews and Muslims. I found a Jordanian guy, specialized in calligraphic artwork. He took letters from Hebrew and Arabic and molded them in his art to create a symbol of peace. Same goes for our band photo, where we portrayed a synergy between the three monotheistic religions, that believe in the same God and yet, ridiculously have been killing each other for centuries “in the name of God” and turned the holy land into an orphaned land. Naturally we continued this idea of union on a musical level as well and the result is as always crazy, it’s a miracle – in our concerts: our Jewish fans sing in Arabic and our Muslim fans sing in Hebrew, brave friendships have spawned and our Middle Eastern metal music destroys all this political witchcraft we have been trapped in for so long. This is a musical journey of hope in lands of war, creating heaven on earth, building a new Jerusalem.”
