Rûwâhîne (2017)
9 tracks, 44 minutes
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Ifriqiyya Électrique are responsible for one of the most intense musical experiences I've ever had – twice. This record – their debut – gives a good idea of the sound of their music, but it cannot convey the sheer power of its live performance.
The Banga are black Africans, descendants of West African slaves, who live in the Djerid desert in the south of Tunisia. They are a Sufi community, and as such they use their music as worship, reaching out to Sufi saints and the spirits of their ancestors in large-scale healing ceremonies, where initiates fall into ecstatic trance, vehicles for the unknowable forces.
Ifriqiyya Électrique is a collaboration between four Banga musicians and Italian-French industrial noise duo Putan Club, with additional electronics from Pierpaolo Leo and extensive samples from on-the-ground recordings of the rûwâhîne (spirit) ceremony. On the face of it, these collaborators may seem to have very little in common, but their musical aesthetics align in wonderful ways. Both use sound to break the brain. Banga music and industrial noise are both used to confuse the ears, to detach the listeners from mundane reality and occupy the entirety of body and cranium.
Together, they create an overwhelming wall of noise. Clattering krakebs, wildly distorted bass, pounding Tunisian tabla barrel drums and naghara kettle drums, smashing cymbals, anguished massed cries of religious utterances, wailing electric guitar, garbled synthesised sound, low-pitched rhythmic chanting and authentic sounds of late-night ceremonial hubbub. All of it combines to create something terrifying, exhilarating, raw and passionate. The intensity comes in waves – sometimes the noise is all encompassing, but at others it is smouldering, tension building and just as captivating, and both modes work to increase the impact of the other.
In live performance it is ear splitting. In the dark, shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans, moving together, sweating together, it becomes an assault of simultaneous sensory deprivation and sensory overload. The only way the feeling could be more acute is if it were conducted in the ceremony’s rightful location, in the deserts and tiny huts, surrounded by candles and in air suffused with many incenses, teas and highly-spiced food.
You won’t get that from this album, but you will get a flavour of it. Play it as loud as possible, turn off the lights, turn up the central heating and bring your neighbours around and you’ll get closer. But, if you can, experience Ifriqiyya Électrique in the flesh. There’s nothing quite like it, and you may never feel quite the same again.
