Superflyrecords Interview and Profile of HISHAM MAYET: SUBLIME FREQUENCIES

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES COMMUNIQUÈ

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES 

 PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com

https://www.facebook.com/SUBLIMEFREQUENCIES

Original piece is here: 

http://blog.superflyrecords.com/storyboard/hisham-mayet-sublime-frequencies/

HISHAM MAYET: 

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES

 
 

Each month, we are focusing on a record label founded by an active digger. This month, Hisham Mayet, co-founder and co-owner of Sublime Frequencies, a label which, since 2003, has been documenting many obscure scenes, from eastern psyche pop to sahel post folk, from ancient to more futuristic.

When did you start digging records?Early 80’s, in my early teens.

What LPs did you buy at first?I was buying punk and post punk LPs. Some early hardcore singles, stuff on SST (Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Black Flag, UK shit, early Cure, Joy Division, New Order, Mekons, Gang of Four, Wire…).

Do you still listen to them?Not so much, but I still have most of it.

Do you have any particular style or favorite period?I don’t have a particular style that I collect. I’m into so many styles and genres. I collect Calypso, Free Jazz, ethnographic records, international sounds from around the globe from the mid-50s to the mid 70s, late 60’s psych from around the world and 60’s/70’s Italian/Euro soundtracks and library LPs… The list is endless. My collection is staggering in its diversity.

Why Sublime Frequencies ?I think it perfectly captures the mission of the label.

What was your first issue?

We released five titles at once. Three albums (‘Folk And Pop Sounds Of Sumatra Volume 1’, ‘Radio Java’, ‘Night Recordings From Bali’) and two DVDs (Nat Pwe: Burma’s Carnival Of Spirit Soul, by Alan & Richard Bishop, Jemaa El Fna: Morocco’s Rendez-vous Of The Dead ‎by myself).

Were you at the beginning of story, with Alan Bishop ? How and when did you meet him ?Yes, I approached Alan about the idea to start an ethnographic style label. When we discussed it further, we launched Sublime Frequencies officially in 2003. But, we had already been discussing and collecting for many years prior. I was a fanatical fan of Sun City Girls (Alan’s along with brother Richard and Charles Gocher’s unclassifiable musical universe for some 30 years)… We started communicating with some regularity in the mid-90’s.

What could be the editorial/esthetic line of the label ?We release things we’re passionate about. We all have our own particular aesthetic and the collective is diversified enough to make it interesting moving forward.

What could be your leitmotif for the label?I think our mission statement sums it up pretty well. « 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. »

How do you decide on the choice of reissues or new releases? Is it a team decision?Alan and I often discuss and have a final say on what is released. We both have very similar tastes so there really is a unified vision moving forward.

or is it more complex ?

If you look at our discography, you’ll see that we are well beyond « oriental/arabic music ». We have outside of SF released (Alan with Abduction/Myself with Outernational/Assophon) over 100 other releases outside of SF. So, we – me as Alan – are not confined to certain geographic regions.

How did you discover musicians like Group Doueh ? Rumors? Listening to a tape?All the rumors are true. I landed in a house in Dakhla un-announced and a cassette and boombox later, history was made.

Were you surprised by the success story of Dabke groover Omar Souleymane?Yes we were. So much so that we decided he was too big for us.

Are you still digging, buying vinyl, visiting record shops?Yep. Still digging. I’m writing from Trinidad now and just spent a day digging in a storage space. I was just in Paris and digging at Superfly. I know Paulo, Manu and Nico and have been shopping there over the years…

What is the best deal/business : to make reissue or to produce new records?Both!

Are they two different jobs?It can be. Re-issues sometimes deal with dead artists or defunct labels and their archives. Sometimes, there is a lot of missing informations when you are dealing with obscure material from a forgotten location. Lots of archeology in that process. Contemporary artists require a different approach and the variable can be much different. There is touring and new material and a host of logistics involved.

There are more and more reissues of old LPs. Do you think that the LP reissue market could ever reach saturation point?I think there is a saturation point, but it is always exciting to see what coming out via the mafia of reissue labels. The production values are amazing as well. I don’t know as a collector, it is an exciting time. But then again as a collector it is always exciting!

What are your next releases ?We are excited about the debut LP of Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band and releasing Thai Pop Spectacular for the first time on vinyl.

What is the LP you dream of reissuing?An 8 LPs boxset of Ennio Morricone conducting a pygmy orchestra playing free jazz.

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

GROUP DOUEH European Tour Dates July / August 2012

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES COMMUNIQUÈ

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com

GROUP DOUEH

Group Doueh from Dakhla in the Western Sahara, are a band who morph effortlessly, just like the vital and heavy sandblasted music they make. Their live set-up can switch from soaring and hypnotic rocking and rolling guitar songs with huge choruses to meditative and transcendental acoustic folk tracks. The group’s ancient/modern is rooted in the traditional foundations of Sahrawi/Hassania music, but one that is also entirely its own. It shares its roots with the neighbouring styles of Mauritanian music, however Group Doueh have managed to transcend the classical limitations of that music with a fiery, independent, and individualistic approach that incorporates a distinctly rock element anomalous in the region. This is a sound that can only come from the land that inspired it: the Sahara desert.

The now legendary Group Doueh have been playing in and around their native Dakhla, in the Western Sahara for over 27 years. The discovery of the group by Sublime Frequencies , via a song snatched from a AM radio broadcast in Morocco in 2005 (as well as an exploratory mission in 2006 that landed Hisham Mayet in the group’s compound after chasing an overland trail all the way to the Mauritanian border) sealed the band’s relationship with the label. A successful European tour with label mate Omar Souleyman in 2009 ensued and western audiences were finally able to witness the power of the group’s mighty live shows. Doueh’s guitar heroics and wife Halima Jakani and Bashiri Touballi’s soaring vocal interplay entranced all who were present. In 2010 Doueh hosted Tony Allen in his home town and joined in on some of his dates in Europe. Then they returned to Europe in triumph in May 2011 with new album Zunya Jamma in tow, delivering a blistering set at the Animal Collective ATP and sending the atmosphere skybound everywhere they traveled.

GROUP DOUEH European Tour Dates July / August 2012

JULY

Friday 20th -  Festival of Cultures - Augsburg / Germany

Wednesday 25th tbc - Marsille/France

Thursday 26th  La Marquise - Lyon/France

Friday 27 –  Studio de l'Ermitage - Paris/France

Monday 30th - 4AD - Diksmuide/Belgium

Tuesday 31st - Compilotheque - Brussels/Belgium

AUGUST

Wednesday 1st  –  Festsaal Kreuzberg - Berlin/Germany

Sunday 5th  - OFF Festival -  Katowice/Poland  - http://off-festival.pl/

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. SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

NOW OUT! GROUP DOUEH: ZAYNA JUMMA LP

SF066

LP Vinyl Gatefold Edition - Group Doueh's latest record is here and the plot continues to thicken! From the gorgeously cracked yet all-embracing opening drum roll of Zayna Jumma (the title track), it's evident this band is hell bent on redefining the sound of its influences and in turn, shape the future sound of its surroundings. It's musical alchemy in its purest, most remarkable form, pushing at the boundaries of geographical divergence while simultaneously speaking to the shared resonances between Western rock rhythms and the pulse of the Saharan trance tradition.

Since its inception, Group Doueh's ability to craft pop hooks from a foundation of saharoui roots music has been a manifestation of sheer song craft and innovation. The tracks on Zayna Jumma are a deeper excavation of the group's forged terrain: a collision of contemporary Afro-Saharan grooves balanced with the searing modalities of Doueh's desert origins, finally nuanced by the transcendental pop/rock/desert blues elements honed from gestating in the fringes of the Sahara desert. 

For the latest installment of this Dakhla family's musical dynasty, Doueh recruits his next eldest sons El Waar (synth) and Hamdan (drum kit) , and wife Halima is augmented by three female backup singers. The band keeps evolving and this album reveals its newest phase - that of a formidable ROCK unit. 

The songs on this record were recorded in 2010, a busy year for Doueh, maintaining its day job as the go-to group of the Saharan wedding industry while still managing recording sessions and a tour with Tony Allen (Fela Kuti's long time drummer). On the heels of this momentum, Zanya Jumma is released to coincide with the group's 2011 spring/summer tour of the UK, Europe and a first ever US tour. 

This band continues to redefine the musical landscape and keep listeners amazed and transfixed. It's the perfect ecstatic music for the impending apocalypse, a rogue sound rooted in the past and yet boldly harnessing the aural possibilities of the landscape ahead... go ahead and jump aboard. Recorded on location in Dakhla, West Sahara in 2010 by Hisham Mayet.

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

GROUP DOUEH: ZAYNA JUMMA Limited Edition LP out soon

Group Doeuh – Zayna Jumma
May 24th, 2011
Sublime Frequencies
Score: 8.2

Planting yourself before a mirror and peering into it is child’s play. Most days, we might merely process the reflection of a muddled silhouette and go about our thankless business should no patent mars or juts rear their wretched heads into our line of sight. We aren’t moving forward — only sideways into a sea of perpetual thrall. Seeing rather than just looking, however, can set us free and consequently cries out for a much sturdier backbone. We’re forced to confront our frailties and vices and fundamental natures, and the snag of how we’ll reconcile them with our ambitions. Indelible daubs crawl out from under our skin, and we stand unable, nay unwilling, to gloss over them any longer.

This is an about-face until we’re blue in it.

Few contemporary African acts have presented as diverse a discography as Group Doueh has thus far, and even fewer have performed their songs with the verve these Saharans have conjured on their three previous full-lengths (here’s a rare occasion where I’m counting a compilation — 2007′s Guitar Music From the Western Sahara— as a studio debut). That being said, a multiplicity of identities has emerged through the band’s rough-hewn bluster and solemn elementalism. These records have been solid on their own, but if push comes to shove, we couldn’t offer an accurate read on who Group Doueh truly is.

The catalog kicked off in endearingly clatter-laced, guitar-driven iridescence, then moved onto more brooding, impassioned pastures, and finally came its quietest, most traditional affair to date with last year’s Beatte Harab.

On their latest, Doueh and company erect one singular voice by pulling from their past lives and treating each angle with a deft balance — tracing a fair middle ground while skirting the mundane grip of settlement. Zayna Jumma comprising GD’s third full-length in three years, one could have expected them to tire from their prolificacy but the very opposite scenario unfolds. After a spell of stone-faced serenity, the formidable troupe has returned in fine form, evidenced first and foremost by Doueh’s enchanting electric guitar. It’s BACK in a big way. ‘Ishhadlak Ya Khey’ and ‘Zaya Koum’ present a brief albeit fulgurous suite as sleazy, distorted guitar pairs with communal chants to weave psychedelic oases in the arid desert air. The tunes are groovy as can be, like an interstellar garage funk band jamming with the entirety of its astral might…in the Sahara.

A wondrous upshot of the pure leader’s revival is the galvanizing tints it shines on his troupe. Where the previous two LPs appeared so concerned with portraying a mood that the charming esprit de corps deeply embedded in Guitar Music somewhat dissipated, here, every call is met with an answer, every component holds its ground. Opener and title track ‘Zayna Jumma’ captures this cooperative elan straight out of the gate, affirming that the playfulness of old is indeed back for seconds — a spirited, layered rock ‘n’ roll gallop accented by piercing vocals shooting up through the sand in a hair-raising heartbeat and retracting just as quickly.

Elsewhere, ‘Met-Ha’ and ‘Aziza’ provide dulcet respites from the storm. Slower, earthier entries, the two are rooted in old-school fare; hymn-like vocals, handclaps, and gentle folk arrangements acting as a spiritual intermission of sorts. A prayer for good fortune.

In the end, though, the crux of this journey is that mammoth of a guitar and its finest showcase is ‘Jaguar Doueh’. The instruments cascade and trip over themselves from the outset, leaving the treated guitar to fend for itself. Gathering the requisite fortitude to carry on, the axe is brandished skyward to stare down an inconceivably clear firmament and the scorching, oppressive orb at its core. Doueh absorbs its all-powerful glow, if only for 4 minutes, and just barely manages to harness it, like he’s swept back to adolescence with the world dangling at his fingertips. It’s awkward, it’s cumbersome, it’s fascinating. Gleams pour out now and again, on irregular cycle, and these slapdash pocks come to represent our oneness strewn across once uniform plains to reinforce its sanctity.

Decades in the works, Group Doueh’s sundry slants have conflated into one distinct trajectory. Despite the guitar rightfully at the helm, the vocalists, the percussionist, they all carry the mail at various junctures of Zayna Jumma. There’s no restraint on hand, no hesitance chiming in.

Closer ‘Wazan Doueh’ perfectly bottles the act’s newfound equilibrium, Touareg-style hollers yielding to a jarring start/stop countenance courtesy of guitar and drums. Through poise or panache, the track brushes off its mazy coils and comes to document GD’s continual shake-ups: raw and welcoming, melodic and tempestuous, fun-loving and contemplative. It all convenes under one banner, effortlessly, as though the strokes weren’t always meant to be shortened. They aren’t at all.

Self-discovery is often draining, daunting to even consider — let alone commence. It’s spun out, ghosts of our past and glimmers of our future halting any headway to an unctuous grind.

Group Doueh, for its part, dives right in without a second’s apprehension. It never pauses, never protracts. It flows to the hilt with small-town coarseness and candor and chirpy excitement over the yellow-brick road at its feet as well as the dusty, long overdue promised land that awaits just around the bend.

Vinh Cao

A limited Edition LP version of Group Doeuh's Zayna Jumma 

will be available on the Sublime Frequencies web site soon...

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

GROUP DOUEH TOUR DATES 6/29 - 7/5 2011

GROUP DOUEH

Tour 2011

06-29 Seattle, WA - Nectar Lounge

06-30 Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios

07-01 San Francisco, CA - Rickshaw Stop

07-02 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda’s

07-03 New York, NY - SummerStage Central Park

Tuesday, July 05 at 8:30PM

at OBERON

2 Arrow Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

GROUP DOUEH

and Khaira Arby and her Band

with special guests The Debo Horns

Presented by Bowery Boston and End of an Empire in association

with Feeding Tube Records, Weirdo Records and Uhuru Afrika.

For tickets click here

The now legendary Group Doueh have been playing in and around their native homeland for over 27 years, the band morphing between acoustic and electric modes with members of their family and friends joining the band as the mood requires. The enigmatic guitar hero Bamaar Salmou, who is known simply as 'Doueh' (pronounced: 'Doo-way') and his wife, the incredible vocalist Halima, bring their son on keyboards as well as three female backing vocalists/percussionists. The group's ancient/modern sound is rooted in the traditional foundations of Sahrawi/Hassania music, but takes it in a direction that is also entirely its own. It shares its roots with the neighbouring styles of Mauritanian music - yet Group Doueh have managed to transcend the limitations of that music with a fiery, independent, and individualistic approach that incorporates a distinctly rock element anomalous in the region. This is a sound that can only come from the land that inspired it: the Sahara desert.

The discovery of the group by Sublime Frequencies, via a song snatched from a AM radio broadcast in Morocco in 2005 (as well as an exploratory mission in 2006 that landed Hisham Mayet in the group’s compound after chasing an overland trail all the way to the Mauritanian border) sealed the band’s relationship with the label. A successful European tour with labelmate Omar Souleyman in 2009 ensued and western audiences were finally able to witness the power of the group’s mighty live shows. In 2010 Doueh hosted Tony Allen in his home town and joined in on some of his dates in Europe. SF have released three albums by the band in recent years, and a set featuring the band at their most upfront and catchy should be released in time for this soon to be epic tour.

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

Just Added! GROUP DOUEH in Cambridge, MA July 5th

GROUP DOUEH

and Khaira Arby and her Band

with special guests The Debo Horns

Presented by Bowery Boston and End of an Empire in association

with Feeding Tube Records, Weirdo Records and Uhuru Afrika.

Tuesday, July 05 at 8:30PM

at OBERON

2 Arrow Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

For tickets click here

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/