313: Chikaha Rahma, by Chikaha Rahma

Chikaha Rahma (Algeria)
Chikaha Rahma
6 tracks, 38 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

Perhaps the biggest sound from Algeria on the world stage (as well as at home) is the pop style of raï. Raï has created so many superstars, with Khaled, Rachid Taha, Faudel, Cheb Mami and Cheb Hasni representing just a small number of singers that have thrilled international audiences. You may notice that all of those names are men. This is no coincidence – raï is a predominantly male genre, and female musicians have been met with a lot of opposition for their art. It wasn’t always that way, though. Two of the most direct ancestors of raï are medh and meddaha music – women’s genres that came to prominence in the 1920s and provided the music for women-only marriage and circumcision celebrations. The music on this Awesome Tape is the real roots of raï: it’s the style that came after meddaha, using its aesthetic while singing on profane themes to both male and female audiences in cafés and other such venues of low repute.

As ever, low repute gives us the spiciest music. This is really raw music. There’s not much to it – just two gaspa end-blown reed flutes and a large riqq (tambourine) accompanying Chikaha Rahma’s voice, but each one of those sounds complement each other and still fill the full range of timbre and pitch to leave the ear satisfied on every level: the gaspa are reedy, a sound filled with overtones so that even though they play in quite a low register, their resonances stretch all the way up; the riqq has a similarly broad range from the jangly cymbals to the booming skin. Together, the three instruments push forward insistently and without respite, so by the time Rahma adds her throaty and occasionally raspy Arabic song to the mix, it’s hypnotic to the point where it’s a losing battle to try to keep still. It’s music to move to and it will do its job whether you want it to or not.

There’s also an unnamed man who comes in at the beginning and the middle of each track to introduce the musicians, the record label, the studios and other such important information. It’s a technique that goes right back to the dawn of recorded music as a very basic anti-piracy measure: although it doesn’t stop the album from being stolen, it does make false attribution impossible. It also adds an interesting element to the music too, an ‘in the moment’ vibe of realness, clarifying that these are real musicians making music together in a studio, as is their job. It’s one of those things that you don’t get with most music – especially not pop music – in which the performer often inhabits some sort of character when they sing, and it’s interesting to have that expectation flipped on its head in that way.

There’s always an old behind a new. Behind the masculinity of raï lays the femininity of meddaha – in the middle is the music of the Cheikhas and Chikaha Rahma is one of the best. You can almost hear the folk becoming pop. This all-acoustic album is just a synthesiser and a drum machine away from filling the discothèque, but when you can make all of this noise from just two flutes, a tambourine and an amazing voice, who needs them?

282: Maghreb United, by AMMAR 808

AMMAR 808 (Tunisia/Algeria/Morocco)
Maghreb United (2018)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Together with the last two entries, this week has become a trio of modernised North African sounds, each putting their own unique stamp on the traditions. AMMAR 808 goes probably the most left-field of them all.

AMMAR 808 is Sofyann Ben Youssef, Tunisian producer and synth player and the owner of an incredibly wide range of musical expertise: jazz, metal, rock, Tuareg music, classical music of Arabic, Western and Indian flavours and all sorts of electronica – they’re all in Ben Youssef’s wheelhouse, and they all go towards the headspace that flowers into his work as AMMAR 808.

Maghreb United is Ben Youssef’s first album under this particular moniker, inspired by the upheaval of political systems and societies in the Maghrebi countries – Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco – over the past decade. In this period of revolution and subsequent rebuilding, people are looking to radically different ways of doing things, and with Maghreb United, Ben Youssef takes it to the extreme, creating a musical sci-fi that is indelibly rooted in the region’s musical styles. To create this style of ‘Maghrebi bass,’ he enlisted three singers from different spheres across the region, each adding their own sound and style: Cheb Hassen Tej, a specialist in Targ music from Tunisia; Sofiane Saidi, Algeria’s star of nu-rai; and Medhi Nassouli, a Gnawa musician who also plays the guimbri lute, from Morocco; also involved on several tracks is Tunisian gasba (flute) and zokra (bagpipes) player Lassad Boughalmi.

These musicians all gave their own musical perspectives on each of their respective styles (all but one of the tracks on the album are derived from traditional songs), and from them, together with a studioful of synthesisers, drum machines (especially the fabled Roland TR-808) and a fair few extra samples, Ben Youssef juggles all these influences together to create the new traditional music of the pan-Maghrebi space colony. This is deep bass and dark techno as if they were traditional music, evolving in the urban metropolises and arid deserts over a thousand years or more. Ben Youssef’s personal connection to these styles means that his application of electronica is in perfect harmony with their original musical intentions, while creating music that reaches beyond club banger. The scale is so epic as to render the dancefloor irrelevant – it will hit you where you stand, take you out of your mind and throw you into a world of booming trance, making your limbs move and emptying your brain of all but that most essential reverberating sound.

This is Afrofuturism, North Africa style: a utopian vision of a Maghreb post-revolution, post-nation-state, and definitely not Earthbound. In an exciting time for Maghrebi music in general, AMMAR 808 is a game changer. Maghreb United is just the beginning. Ben Youssef is currently recording album #2, with Tamil musicians – this space journey is set to take a different course. I can’t wait.

056: Au Cabaret Sauvage, by Lo'Jo

Lo’Jo (France)
Au Cabaret Sauvage (2002)
12 tracks, 45 minutes
I can’t find anywhere to listen or download this album in the UK. It’s on Spotify if you’re from elsewhere (might work in France?) and there are some tracks on YouTube and Vimeo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but that’s it. Weird. Hit me up and I can sort you out with a download.

[Introductory note: some versions of this album were called L’une des Siens but I’ve no idea why they decided to change it – the insides remained the same. The cover is also basically the same too, so if you see that one about…it’s this one.]

I can’t remember whether it was myself or my dad (our record collections are basically one and the same by now), but one of us got this album at a second-hand CD shop in Lyme Regis. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that shop – I’ve even been scouring Google Street View to no avail, so I guess it must have gone the way of so many of the best record shops and closed since I was last there. A shame, because over the few times we visited Lyme Regis, we picked up a bunch of great albums there, including several that will feature on this list.

Lo’Jo are long-time veterans of what is easiest (and laziest, vaguest) to call ‘world fusion,’ but where a lot of musicians in the scene went the electronica-with-samples route, Lo’Jo did it all live. With a core of smokily charismatic singer and keys player Denis Péan and Algerian singer-multi-instrumentalist sisters Nadia and Yamina Nid El Mourid, the group introduce as many guests as musical styles, creating their own sound which mixes variously French folk music, classical, Latin, North African, manouche jazz, spoken word, flamenco and even dub and circus music, and anything else that catches their ear. This is chamber music for the internationally-eared.

On Au Cabaret Sauvage, Lo’Jo draw particular influence from Tuareg music, both traditional styles and the essouf guitar music made famous by Tinariwen, foreshadowing the French band’s many appearances at the Festival au Désert in the coming years. Tuareg sounds are all over the album, and it even features cameos from various members of Tinariwen, including Mohamed Ag Illale, better known as Japonais, who gets a track all to himself (odds are you won’t have seen him live even if you’re a big fan of the Tuareg group – he never took part in the touring band, preferring to stay close to the desert).

There are a bunch of great tracks on this album, but the one that stood out in particular on relistening to write this entry was ‘Petit Homme.’ It brings so many of the band’s influences together in a really effective way. The interplay between the guitar riff, Tuareg imzad (one-stringed fiddle) and bendir (frame drum with gut strings) gives a wonderful Saharan-hued bed for Péan’s gruff poetry and Pablo-ish melodica.

Over the years there have been so many projects that aim to mash-up music from everywhere into one whole, but few that do it with the subtlety, class and charm of Lo’Jo, and Au Cabaret Sauvage (or L’une des Siens) shows their work at its strongest.

017: Diwân, by Rachid Taha

Rachid Taha (Algeria)
Diwân (1998)
11 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Rachid Taha was a revolutionary of raï. The style started as Bedouin folk music used for weddings, but when it evolved to take on the characteristics of chaabi and Latin music and European pop styles in the 1980s, it became the all-pervading sound of Algeria, and the Maghreb in general. Then Rachid Taha came along, all anger, alcohol and cigarettes, and kicked down the door. He brought a real punk aesthetic to the music, with screaming guitars, heavy beats and his own growl, as well as his overall demeanour and dress-sense. In the West, he’s particularly known for his brilliant (and Arabic-language) take on the Clash’s ‘Rock the Casbah.’

This album is a bit different, though. Diwân takes Rachid back to his roots, with a bunch of covers of classic pieces from raï’s forefathers and early stars. He hasn’t left the punk entirely behind (the production and electric guitar of Steve Hillage assures that), but it’s not the foundation of the sound this time around. Instead, oud (lute), gasbah (flute), riqq (tambourine) and bendir (frame drum) dictate the whole feel of the album, with Rachid and Steve being able to imprint their own personality on it from there.

The opening track is Dahmane El Harrachi’s ‘Ya Rayah,’ one of the most famous anthems of raï and chaabi music, and Rachid’s take on it here is as definitive a version as you can get for a song that has been covered so many times in so many different styles. His version of the Egyptian film song ‘Habina Habina’ by Farid El Atrache is similarly iconic, with a really well-utilised club beat and heavy bassline laying a great foundation beneath the massed strings and qanun (plucked zither).

Rachid Taha’s punk redefined a genre that was already the biggest musical phenomenon in the region, but for me, Diwân is his best work. The music is unmistakably his but it retains the beauty of the originals, and shows his deep respect (and huge skill) for that classic raï sound.