Safa explores percussive musical traditions and potential georealities

Animator Sabine Saba pairs textural graphics with the dizzying metres of ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’, a highlight from Ibtihalat, the debut album from musician, architect and researcher Mhamad Safa.

On Ibtihalat, Safa explores the percussive musical traditions from throughout north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, wrestling with geopolitical complexity and musical migrations though at the identical time gesturing toward attainable foreseeable future iterations of these sounds. From North Africa, Safa lifts factors from gnawa, West African, Islamic tunes with ritual significance that spread across the breadth of the continent through musicians forces to relocate to the Moroccan coast, amazigh, polyrhythmic audio indigenous to the Berbers of north Africa, and raï, Algerian people audio noteworthy for its anti-colonial lyrical content and it is adaptation by women of all ages vocalists and performers (cheikas) as emblematic of sexual liberation and hedonism. From the Arabian Peninsula, Safa references Sea Songs, much more typically regarded as New music of the Pearl Divers, function songs devised by the ship builders, seamen and pearl divers of the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, laywa, ceremonial tunes from Bahrain, UAE, Oman and Basra, Iraq introduced about throughout slave trades from Kenya, South Somalia and Tanzania, and samiri, new music connected to Zar rituals of exorcism and spirit expulsion. Drawing from a sprawling, however intrinsically connected, patchwork of cultural exchange and musical custom, Safa threads richly textured percussive compositions, headfuck assemblages of sound structure, micro-sampling, algorithmic sound technological innovation, psychoacoustics, subject recordings, and their graphic interpretations. “The album crafts a multi-patterned sonorous speculation, reflective of percussive musical traditions whose histories and provides shapeshifted with spatial and logistical yet celestial imaginaries,” he points out.

For the dizzying visual accompaniment to the evocatively titled ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd,’ which plays on the complex metres of gnawa, animator Sabine Saba levels graphical texture, manipulating imagery of rock formations, classical architecture and bisected fibre optic cables. “This exercise unsettles the proposal-driven use of computer system graphics by inspecting present georealities initially modeled into currently being,” explains Saba. “It peeks through their shifts and rifts to glimpse for doable potential encounters amongst people and land.” Like Safa’s production, Saba unpicks historic varieties in get to speculate on future potentialities, blurring and blending environmental and technological progress more than speedily expanding and contracting timelines in the immediate evolution of his animations. As ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’ pinballs concerning reduced-slung lollop and significant pressure spring, drilling guttural vocal chops into lots of-metred percussion, robotic arms and precious metals are folded into an jittering landscape of historic caves and rotating coliseums, shining chrome and sand-coloured stone.

‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’ is taken from Ibtihalat, which comes on April 29 by means of Lee Gamble’s UIQ. For extra data about Sabine Saba and her perform you can stick to her on Instagram. You can find Mhamad Safa on Instagram.

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