mudd up!

secret google keep codes

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take country music which already seems psychedelic to the urban audio mind, add dramatic video effects, multiply by the bad-math pile-up of several compression codecs.

this is first Algerian Berber material i’ve posted here, all the other stuff has been Moroccan Berber. Clip Kabyle a top-notch videoblog for Kabyle pop. This next video comes to us from 1989, a few years before the videographers tamed their landscape with a sense of scale.

the clip below features the same artist, Hamidouche, in concert. Note the live mix levels: the rock drumkit is buried, you can’t even hear the cymbals. the galloping, tonal darbouka playing is foregrounded. it’s a nice alternative to standard rock sound-level conventions.

This Thursday I’ll be DJing in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. That sudden world city.

I wrote a longer post but the machine ate it. This song - Berber vocoder mountain pop with dapper strings - has nothing to do with the Persian Gulf.

Najmate el Rif - Diwana (fassiphone)

buyable, sort of. On the cover art below, a woman tries to hide her titillation and subsequent shock upon stumbling into the Slave Leia Appreciation Society. A chunky photoshop chorus unites the gayish singers beneath her.

hi-rez footage of an entire Najat Aatabou concert!
from a Flash-y site, sorry.

(Track 4 is the one the Chemical Brothers sample, previously muddied in my Berber post here.)

& what you missed if you weren’t in Olympia this weekend:

“Don’t ask me about any of these Berber cassettes,” said Rachid’s asssitant at Nassiphone (BCN’s best shop for Maghrebi sound) as he hefted a milkcrate from behind the counter. “I know as much as you do.” Meaning: very little.

the cover of this cassette depicts Mr Tamount seated, a capoed & fretted banjo loose in his hands. The orange photoshop blur behind him anticipates vocoders and drum machines coded into Berber patterns. Imazighen.

Idriss Tamount - ? (Box Music)

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For those who prefer less processed roots…

Amazigh band and dancers in the Atlas foothills, scattering timeless sound into the air with generator-powered amps. I enjoy watching the notion of a mainstream dissolve into a trillion scattered data-bites. Let’s dance on a red rug in wilderness!

The best part about YouTube is the impressionistic quality of its compression algorhythms… YouTube is always more storytelling than documentary. Suggests, does not inform.

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In this clip, a string player & vocalist the size of Godzilla perform over a rich evergreen forest while alien geometries intersect the landscape. Visuals a strange but not unsatisfying partner for the ensemble’s Berber folklorix.