Healer Twin Music: just what the doctor ordered

MEDICAL SCHOOL-TRAINED and ready to make you feel better; that's the tale behind Thea and Liana Shengelaia, better known as musical duo The Healer Twins.
Living in Dubai intermittently for the last 25 years, the Georgian sisters initially moved here as a result of their parents' employment, but have since learnt to call the city home.
A musical act for the past five-years and gigging around town in that period, Thea and Liana are just about to launch their debut eponymous album. Here we speak about their influences and impetus to break into the Middle East music scene.  
When did you first get into music and can you describe the work you have done here in Dubai and abroad? How would you describe your style?
We discovered our passion for singing from the age of nine and started performing by organising small gigs in our neighborhood.
We have performed in many places including Georgia and Russia. We used to perform in Georgia even while studying at medical school. We were quite known as the twin medical student singers in our university, but we never had a band.
We formed a duo in Dubai in 2011 and called our band the Healer Twins to connect our profession to our passion. We also believe in the healing power of music.   
We have performed at many artistically-driven events here, such as The Fridge, The Music Room, Fete De La Musique, DIFC Arts Night, Freshly Ground Sounds, SIKKA art fair, and the Gulf Music Festival.
Our Style is more experimental combining baroque pop, dream pop, neo soul, trip hop, indie rock and world music genres. Our biggest influences are oldies such as: Nancy Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone.
Tell us more about your new album and the way it is being funded? Can people help?
First we thought of releasing a few songs on EP (Extended Play), but then we added a few more original songs and are now looking forward to releasing our debut album. All the songs in the album are written by us and produced by our friend Rayan Bailouni, who recently came into music production full time. A few days back we did a small music video for one of our songs, which is included in the album! We are expecting to release the album around September 1. We are also collaborating with a great Jordanian musician called Kamal Musallam, who is also helping us to produce our album.  It will be released under his label K&G .
We decided to create a campaign to raise some funds for our album release, it's on Zingohub.com.

Does the fact you're twins help when working together and writing songs?
The fact that we are twins helps us to connect easily. We both have the talent to write lyrics, perhaps it's because it runs in our blood (our father writes poems).  We never stop writing or thinking about new ideas every day and we complement each other. If for one of us becomes passive, the other is always there to "wake the other up".
Do your Georgian roots influence your music at all?
We still like to fuse Georgian folk to our music and make it sound really interesting. Every second Georgian sings and dances traditional Georgian dances. For us music is more than just music it's a tradition and a religion.  

Do you derive any musical inspiration from living in Dubai? Do you think there is enough support for the musical community here? What would you like to see change?
Dubai really gave us freedom and opportunities. We appeared at exactly the time when the music scene was starting to stand on its feet here. It still needs to develop and become more collaborative with Dubai people. Unfortunately, there is not much of support for musical communities. There are very few listeners and mostly people just tend to attend the small gigs, enjoy the moment and leave and most probably forget the next day.  I think the reasons are that they are totally soaked in their day jobs and also musicians support from radio stations or local TV shows, which is the best way for local musicians to be discovered by the public.

What is your ultimate musical ambition?
We would love to do tours and hopefully our music will reach more people worldwide and make their lives filled with love and joy.
What do you do outside music?
We were involved in the shooting of Star Wars 7 in Abu Dhabi. It got a lot of publicity and we were even  invited to do many TV shows in our home country.  We continue to act in short film projects and we are open to act in feature films too in the future.

You can purchase the Healers' recently released songs Birdman and Instinct on iTunes, Bandcamp, and Amazon or listen to them on YouTube and SoundCloud and the website www.healertwins.com.  
david@khaleejtimes.com