329: Halalwood, by U-Cef

U-Cef (Morocco/United Kingdom)
Halalwood (2008)
10 tracks, 59 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Having spent portions of his life in Rabat (his hometown), New York and London, producer and DJ U-Cef absorbed the sounds of all three, and his music is a testament to the world-meeting potential of both Moroccan and club music.

Halalwood, U-Cef’s second album, is littered with guests, and every track is credited as ‘U-Cef feat.’ up to three musicians at a time, the only exception being ‘Ya Rayah’, his remix of the Rachid Taha recording. But it doesn’t sound cluttered as you might expect. U-Cef’s production binds it together so well that the first two tracks can be as different as a downtempo techno-trance take with darbuka and synths imitating oud and ney (with the help of Steve Hillage’s Mirror System) followed by hip-hop metal based around the deep roots Gnawa of Said Damir with Bizmatik on raps, and they flow together as smoothly as anything. The whole album goes along this way, with contributions from artists as diverse as Natacha Atlas, Damon Albarn, UK Apache and Dar Gnawa.

This is a great album to not think too closely about and instead let the music give your body an education on Moroccan music of all styles and club music of all flavours. When it works, it works and sometimes that’s all that it needs – Halalwood works through 15 guest musicians and one producer who knows each of the styles at play through first-hand connection to bring it all to the dancefloor as one united sound.

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.

281: Lalla La’roussa, by M'hamed Dammou

M’hamed Dammou (Morocco)
Lalla La’roussa
4 tracks, 35 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

More Moorish music! Yesterday we looked at the modern sounds of the Bidhan people of Mauritania, today we’re going a little bit further north to Morocco, and the music of the Amazigh – or Berber – people.

In particular, this tape is a set of wedding music. Most modern Amazigh weddings now usually feature music that is heavily influenced by chaabi and rai music and made using heaps of synthesisers and drum machines, M’hamed Dammou instead brings a modernisation to the traditional Amazigh sounds. All instruments on this album are real – lotar (lute), electric guitar, ribab (one-string fiddle) and another higher-pitched steel-stringed lute that I can’t identify creating the accompaniment for Dammou’s song, and tbilat (bongo-like drums) and iron scraper holding down a delicious swinging rhythm.

I’m particularly interested in the instrument that Dammou is playing on the cover of this tape. Namely, what is it? From his online presence, his usual instrument appears to be the lotar (although I’ve also found pictures of him playing the banjo and guitar), so I assume it is some adaptation of that instrument, but in a way that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. It’s a sort of inverted trapezoid – or even triangle – with a handle extending from the instrument’s neck to its body. Looks cool, whatever it is, and maybe it’s even that mystery lute I’m hearing too – makes sense – in which case it sounds cool too.

This is definitely music that would get me up onto the dance floor of a wedding much quicker than any Abba tune would – in fact, so would all of the other wedding music I’ve already covered on this blog so far, from Kurdistan to Bulgaria to China to India – and it’s always inspiring to hear traditional music forms kept alive in their original contexts by bringing them into modern parameters. Synths have their place, but that place should be alongside – not instead of – the wonderful music that already exists.

253: Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche, by El Hanaouate

El Hanaouate (Morocco)
Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche
7 tracks, 44 minutes
Download from Awesome Tapes from Africa

It’s an album courtesy of that beautiful blog again, and this time it’s from the very north of the continent, from Morocco.

To be honest, I know incredibly little about this album or its artists, and the little bit that I do know comes from the comment section from when the tape was originally posted on AFTA. And even those comments are contradictory! The most accurate-seeming explanation comes from user K7al L3afta, who explains that the artists are a duo called El Hanaouate, who perform a style of halqa. Halqa – meaning ‘circle’ and named for the crowd of onlookers that inevitably form around a performance – is a type of improvised long-form storytelling based on the life of Sufi saints and marabouts; there are many styles of halqa and the stories can be told in many ways.

El Hanaouate are, for all intents and purposes, a comedy duo. Their performance of halqa is half-musical and half-spoken, setting the scene and the main plot points with song, and then getting to the finer points in dialogue. So this one is an interesting listen for someone like me, who can’t speak Arabic. I can (and very much do) enjoy the music – it’s a simple but effective pairing of the wtar lute, which sounds kinda like a half-and-half between an oud and a banjo, and the bendir, a frame drum with a gut snare that makes a gnarly, throaty rattle when struck, over which the duo sing bluesy, ornamented melodies – but then there are sometimes lengthy spoken sections that, of course, leave me very much out of the loop.

This is comedy! The words are all important and I’m understanding none of it. I reckon I’m only capable of appreciating about a third of the art this album has to offer…but that music third that I do get is really good, so imagine what the rest is like. If you know Arabic, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this album – who knows, maybe I’m best off not knowing what they’re saying! But for now, I’ll appreciate the Moroccan groove and revel in the mysteries of the storytelling of El Hanaouate.

176: The Birth of Dar, by MoMo

MoMo (Morocco/United Kingdom)
The Birth of Dar (2001)
6 tracks, 41 minutes
I can’t find anywhere to stream or download this one online, unfortunately. However there are a few copies going for very cheap on discogs if this blog sufficiently piques your interest. I’d definitely recommend it…obviously.

Moroccan music has always seemed to me to have a bit of a darker edge to it than that of other Maghrebi countries. I don’t know what creates that feeling – it could be something as subtle as a unique tuning system, a small difference in timbre or a slightly lilted rhythm, but whatever it is, Moroccan music always seems particularly suited to a dark room of writhing bodies. It’s also one of the reasons that make its fusion with techno and other electronica work so well.

The name MoMo stands for ‘Music of Moroccan Origin,’ and that’s a great – and accurate – declaration of intent. The music of Morocco is their starting point, and after that, anything goes as they make their sound relevant to their UK-based context. That means elements of Berber music, Arab-Andalusian music and Morocco’s most famous Gnawa music, performed by the band-members and hacked up into samples, all provide grist for the mill for this album of psychedelic techno and breakbeat. Most satisfyingly, MoMo manage to maintain their source material’s dark edge and fold that into electronica carefully crafted to hold the same ever-so-slightly menacing vibe while still providing extremely dance-worthy rhythms. They pronounced this wonderful mix dar, or, as they described it succinctly on the album sleeve, ‘Dar Music is bloody foreigner music.’ The style as laid out on The Birth of Dar is a bold statement of (what was then) modern life: it’s uncompromisingly British and defiantly Moroccan, and neither gives way to the other, nor does it need to.

Calling this album The Birth of Dar gave a tantalising prospect of a new musical movement waiting to proliferate. But that never quite materialised. MoMo played gigs for a few years but then seemed to fade away into non-existence for the longest time. I had thought that MoMo as a project was completely dead, but it actually turns out they had some stirrings recently, and released an album last year with Jah Wobble, which you can hear on Spotify. Admittedly the only musician uniting these two albums is singer, percussionist and guimbri player Tahar el-Idrissi, but it’s still good that the spirit of MoMo continues in some form.

Although short-lived, the concept of dar still resonates as an important mindset and an ultra-cool, ultra-danceable and ever-so-slightly dark album in The Birth of Dar. It still has the power to resonate; hopefully the movement will get another chance at moving the world some point soon…or at least, that this album will be made easily listen-toable again.