- Thrilling, creative club music built from the traditions of North Africa and the Persian Gulf.
- If you really dive into folk music, it's easy to realize how little you know about music in general. I'm not talking about Mumford & Sons—rather, traditional music, the kind embedded in the customs and practices of various peoples. Think about it: all music is folk. Reggae started with folk from Jamaica, hip-hop started with folk from New York and house started with folk from Chicago. Those are three styles that have been hugely influential to dance music today, but notice how they've all stemmed from Western societies. There's a huge portion of the world's culture that has been ignored. Researcher, architect and musician Mhamad Safa addresses this by weaving traditioins from the folk of North Africa and the Persian Gulf into thrilling dance music on his debut LP, Ibtihalat.
Ibtihalat poses and almost answers two broad questions. What could electronic dance music sound like if we started somewhere other than Chicago or Detroit? If you took the complex structures found in the likes of Moroccan gnawa, or samiri from Bahrain, and morphed their acoustic sounds into electronic ones—would that create something interesting and new to dance to?
Rather than relying on these instruments to add intrigue, however, Safa uses snippets of their sounds (microsamples) like a pointillist painter employs color. Each unique timbre is fragmented and warped so that it's never heard in isolation. Instead, as Safa told The Quietus, he uses machine-learning algorithms to transform and organize these microsamples into an intricate portrait of the future made with the sounds of the past.
On "Terminus Messaoud," for instance, you can hear this gradual shifting through time. It opens with a foreboding call-and-response between what sounds like a single-stringed guitar (rebab) and a frame drum (bendir). Their funeral march grows more and more unsettling as the song progresses, until they merge into one deep pulse, neither rebab nor bendir.
That track's origins lie in Amazigh music, which is the oldest musical tradition in Morocco, performed by the Amazigh people of High Atlas. It has two important subgenres, ahwash and rwai. Ahwash is the typical style enjoyed by each village across the mountains, and features dancing and singing along to an ensemble of bendirs. Rwai also includes dancing, but the performances are carried out by a traveling band of songwriters, who use it as a way to share news from one village to the next. With the arrival of the internet, rwai is becoming obsolete. There's no need for people to spread news from one village to the next via music, so the way that the rebab and the bendir gradually form a new sound on "Terminus Messaoud' resembles an intertwining—and eventual washing away—of tradition.
Aside from its tone of impending doom, Ibtihalat also has its fair share of awe-inspiring, turbulent jams. In an interview with If-Only, Safa says that "Ouda And The Strikers At Najd" is meant to imitate gnawa's rhythmic meter in how it moves from triple time (three beats in a bar) into double time (two beats in a bar). Gnawa also includes microrhythms—a hotly debated topic of music theory that some consider better left to just feeling rather than explanation.
It's these characteristics of gnawa that make "Ouda And The Strikers At Najd" so baffling to the inexperienced ear. At the start, you can just about make out the triple time hidden amidst a gambol of electronic sounds. But as it transitions into double time, the structure starts to dissipate as unpredictable volleys of percussion erupt over a resonant synth, their timing and timbre eluding you every time. The trickery is delightfully provocative.
That's not to say Ibtihalat is just track after track of complex structures and mutant sonics. Some of its most profound moments are much simpler. A raging juggernaut of clinks and clanks opens "Proto-Ismael" with well-oiled efficiency, but this machine suddenly stops, replaced by a prayer-like vocal, with a chorus of "Allah" in response. It fills the space and aligns with the distorted chords beneath it, and cranks the track back into gear with renewed vigor. It's enough to make you wonder if there could have been other equally emotive crossovers between vocals and mechanistic electronics elsewhere on the album.
Making you wonder is Ibtihalat's greatest strength. The title roughly translates as "invocations," something to introduce a sermon or a prayer to God. To my mind, a prayer has two parts: a moment where you reflect and are thankful for what you already have, and a moment where you make a wish, a hope for the future. By creating an album for today that uses ancient sounds and molds them to pioneer something for the future, Safa has done exactly that. And he's not alone in this new tradition. Uwalmassa recrafted gamelan's sounds and used its heterophonic structures in their dark and dissonant experimental album Malar, which came out this year. Albums like these show where electronic music could end up if there was a wider appreciation of folk from all corners of the world. Ibtihalat is a forward-thinking dance music masterpiece whose origins lie not with Western folk traditions, but those from North Africa and the Persian Gulf.
Tracklist01. Terminus Messaoud
02. Supranomadic
03. Liturgies For Cyborgs
04. Bel Abbes
05. Proto—Ismael
06. Hydrobenediction
07. Ouda And The Strikers At Najd
08. Fugues
09. Gazelles
10. Coastal Worship