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Hassaniya Music from the Western Sahara and Mauritania
Various Artists SF 083LP
In 2006, Hisham Mayet returned to West Africa to continue his search for an unknown musician he had heard six months earlier on the radio in a Morocco hotel room. Knowing only that it was Sahrawi music -- music of the south -- he headed down through the vast and remote desert landscape of the Western Sahara and Mauritania in hopes of finding someone who could identify these revelatory recordings. The story of how he finally found this elusive artist is the stuff of ethnomusicological legend. But he also found much, much more as he wandered from Laâyoune, Western Sahara, to Mauritania's capital city of Nouakchott. From intimate, sinuous home recordings by Group Marwani, to a sublimely devastating track by the enigmatic Abdul Rahman Al-Gheid, to the inimitable tidinit artistry of Sadoum Ouled Aida, the performers on this album exemplify the haunting and intoxicating qualities of Sahrawi music. Featuring Mayet's first recordings of the electrifying Group Doueh, as well as dizzying field recordings from Nouakchott's Marché Capitale -- where relentless traffic noise swirls together with fragments of melody from countless cassette vendors' PA speakers --Hassānīya Music from the Western Sahara and Mauritania is the evocative soundtrack to a chimerical journey that is also documented visually in Sublime Frequencies' breathtaking filmPalace of the Winds (SF 047DVD). It not only traces Mayet's own passage through these barren and beautiful lands, but also charts the evolution of Sahrawi music from sung poetry accompanied by traditional acoustic instruments to electrifying modern grooves drenched in reverb and phase effects. Limited edition pressing with Stoughton tip-on full-color gatefold jacket.
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SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations. SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is focused on an aesthetic of extra-geography and soulful experience inspired by music and culture, world travel, research, and the pioneering recording labels of the past including OCORA, SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS, ETHNIC FOLKWAYS, LYRICHORD, NONESUCH EXPLORER, MUSICAPHONE, BARONREITER, UNESCO, PLAYASOUND, MUSICAL ATLAS, CHANT DU MONDE, B.A.M., TANGENT, and TOPIC.
