01. Mashee Kooka (2:33)
02. He Eh Lalla (3:36)
03. Beesmeellah Beedeet (4:52)
04. Moola Nefta (5:50)
05. Habeebee Hooa Jooani (4:46)
06. Nafta Naghara (5:07)
07. Danee Danee (3:38)
08. Wa Salaat Alih Hannabee Mohammad (1:37)
09. Mabbrooka (5:11)

Fusing the rhythms and invocations of the ancient Saharan Banga ritual with an electrical storm of contemporary sonics, Ifriqiyya Electrique’s second album both grips and awakens.

In Tunisian, Banga means “huge volume” and one cannot think of a more apt description of Laylet el Booree than that.

Maximalist & relentless. Blood, sweat & trance.

In the West, music performances and audiences are widely cut from the same cloth. There is a secure dividing line between the stage and the hall, the audience and the performer. But profoundly different experiences can be found on the southern side of the Mediterranean Sea, deep in the Tunisian desert, where the group Ifriqiyya Electrique was born and has performed the most. Several years ago, two of the musicians who make up the five-piece Ifriqiyya Electrique – Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat – ventured to the Djerid desert of Tunisia to investigate and confront the religious ritual of the Banga, a ritual of legendary intensity indigenous to the region. The musical duo’s background is in the underground post-punk scene of continental Europe, as members of Putan Club and as collaborators with the venerable Lydia Lunch. But they are also voracious travellers and seekers of global sonics that are at least partially hidden from the western gaze. Previous trips to the Uyghur region of China and the Kurdish regions of Turkey had in part prepared them for the musical immersion they would undertake in Djerid. Their original intention was not to join in the ritual but rather to research how this unique ceremony delivered “pure elevation” to its participants. This state of elevation or trance, is something that they had experienced in their own music, and they were searching for instructive parallels and new perspectives.

But after living in, and travelling throughout the Djerid for years, things began to morph. The beginnings of a group began to take form. There was a shift towards direct engagement. Their first “appearance” ended up being in Nefta, in the city of Sidi Marzug. It was terrifying: after all the months of studying, filming, recording and bonding, could Ifriqiyya Electrique actually participate in the Banga ritual? The first ten minutes were in fact distressing, the Banga adepts from the town initially shocked. But eventually the locals recognized a shared music of the spirit and everything rocked together: people sang, danced, went into trances, were healed and the entity that became to be known as Ifriqiyya Electrique passed an unwritten test of inclusion. Remember: Ifriqiyya’s music was never composed for a Western audience in the first place. It was brought to life in real time, on the same streets in which the Banga has been practiced uninterrupted for centuries. Within the ritual there is no leader nor primadonna. It is a collective improvisation. Sufism. A ritualized, social bond where no one stands above anyone else.

In the oases of Southern Tunisia, those frequented by the caravan traders of past centuries, black slaves worked in houses and in the fields, where they planted crops and dug irrigation channels. A native of Sub-Saharan Africa, purchased in Timbuktu by the Beni Ali family, Sidi Marzug (the black saint) was a slave whose first owner was Sidi Bou Ali (the white saint), a celebrated Sufi mystic who had made his home in Nefta during the 13th century. The popular image of Sidi Marzug is that of a powerful saint who had at his disposal a diwan (assembly) of rûwâhînes (spirits), who were his servants and allies. The black communities of Tozeur, Nefta and Metlaoui commemorate him with a ritual called the Banga, which is less of an exorcism than an “adorcism”: intended to placate and calm the spirit who possesses – and who will always possess – the initiate who participates in the Banga. The modern day sanctuary (zawya) which holds the body (thabût) of the black saint is in the suburbs of the city of Nefta, to the far west of the Djerid oasis. In the Djerid desert region, the ritual of the Banga of Sidi Marzuq is an extremely popular ceremony, which takes place both in the marabout (holy tomb), but more commonly in private houses and in the city streets. The songs and dances are passed down in this way to the younger generations, and the songs are still sung in ajami, the original language of the Hausa who were forcibly brought to the area as slaves.

In 2017, Ifriqiyya Electrique released their debut album Rûwâhîne, an album which deftly brought together the hypnotic chants and metallic hand percussion of traditional Banga music with brutalist electronics and sheer rock volume. Three members of the Banga community – Tarek Sultan, Yahia Chouchen and Youssef Ghazala – joined forces with Gianna and Francois not only on this acclaimed album, but also onstage throughout the eighteen months of European touring that followed the record’s release (tour stops included: Womad, Womex, Sziget, Vieilles Charrues & FMM Sines). It quickly became clear that the Banga had not been pointlessly retooled for western consumption, but rather through the deep commitment of the five Ifriqiyya Electrique musicians – it had been transformed into something contemporary and unexpected. Ifriqiyya Electrique cryptically call this transformation a “post-industrial ritual” and the actual experience of hearing this music certainly echoes this moniker. The band create a fertile space where ecstatic electronics and rock levitation intersect with timeless ceremony and community.

The title of the second album Laylet el Booree translates as the “Night of the Madness.” It refers to the last part of the annual gathering of the adorcist ritual from the Banga of Tozeur – it is the night when the spirits actually take possession of the bodies. Like the ritual itself, the album is wild, frantic, and never caresses the listener’s expectations. But its purpose is also to heal; with sweat, spirituality, electricity and trance being central to the almost overwhelming sensory experience. With the band now joined by new member Fatma Chebbi (on vocals and tchektchekas hand percussion) one senses that the musical and cultural conversation is even deeper this time around. In fact, it doesn’t feel like a speculative conversation at all, but rather something fully formed and undeniable. An emergent ritual in itself.

01. Laa la illa Allah 02:50
02. Qaadrii – Salaam Alaik – Massarh 07:33
03. Mawwel 01:10
04. Zuru el Haadi – El Maduulaa – Maaluuma 06:34
05. Stombali – Baba ‘Alaia 03:39
06. Annabi Mohammad – Laa la illa Allah – Deg el bendir 09:15
07. Lavo – Baba Marzug – Sidi Saad – Allah 04:47
08. Arrah arrah abbaina – Bahari – Tenouiba 05:43
09. Sidriiya 02:06

 

Sufi trance musicians and rituals – from the depths of the Tunisian desert – in conversation with post-industrial sonics.

‘No theatre or stage or audience. The rûwâhîne have possessed and contorted the bodies of the Banga. Teenagers leap to the floor, their legs arched and tense, glaring transfixed [while] girls dance wildly, … accelerating the rhythm of the hand percussion’

The film opens on a cloud-pressed, bleached-out desert highway and an ominous electronic pulse, a devil of a wind, that you don’t want to shake off. Where are you? The truck in front carries human freight, half-glimpsed, anxious and thoughtful.

You’re soon joined by the kind of dark lunar soundscapes familiar from Can, by polyrhythms at once deft and relentless, and then, as the truck reaches the outskirts of the town, by chants that seem to issue from the empty streets themselves. Ifriqiyah was the medieval entity that contained present-day Tunisia, as well as parts of Algeria and Libya: the boundaries, more or less, of the Roman province of Africa. Is this where you are?

To get your bearings, you might first have to dive into a basement club somewhere in Southern Europe: Barcelona, perhaps, or Taranto or Palermo. For Ifriqiyya Electrique’s François Cambuzat – a guitarist and field recordist (Turkey, China, Central Asia) – is a veteran of the Mediterranean punk and avant-rock scene, which has always been more politically charged than its counterparts to the north and (far) west. With bassist Gianna Greco, he is one half of Putan Club – or one third when these two fierce and uncompromising players are joined by legend of the NY underground, Lydia Lunch.

These are not spaces of comfort but of challenge and confrontation.

But let us pull focus again – and this is crucial, bass and guitar and electronics notwithstanding. Ifriqiyya Electrique was formed in the Djerid Desert in southern Tunisia, home to the Banga ritual of Sidi Marzûq. The Banga is a key annual event in the lives of the black communities of the oasis towns of southern Tunisia, descendants of the Hausa slaves transported from sub-Saharan Africa. It is a ritual of adorcism not of exorcism: of accommodating the possessing spirit rather than expelling it. The invitation has been issued by the rûwâhîne themselves, the spirits from whom the record borrows its title, and is taken up primarily in the streets and in private houses.

The Banga is a musical tradition for sure, with stark, metallic, cavernous percussion and voices of cool urgency, but should not be felt as such, for it is most defiantly a ritual and remains so on this record. Cambuzat and Greco are joined in live performance by the voices, krakebs and Tunisian tablas of three members of the Banga community, Tarek Sultan, Yahia Chouchen and Youssef Ghazala, with a fourth, Ali Chouchen, providing vocals and nagharat on the record itself. The voices and rhythms are unaltered, of course. What is new here is the conversation the group initiates between guitar, bass and electronics and the rhythms and chants of the Banga – what Cambuzat refers to a post-industrial ceremony. It won’t be an easy listen for purists and propagandists; but if post-industrial ceremony doesn’t describe a large portion of the most challenging music of the last 40 years, what does?

In short, the music can only be fully understood in the context of the events that gave rise to it. Happily, Ifriqiyya Electrique is a film and documentary project as much as a band. The footage is astonishing: of wild, ecstatic gatherings that seem, to us, the un-initiates, by turns other-worldly and utterly familiar. It is familiar because we all recognise the need for “new ways of forgetting”, in Cambuzat’s words. But we surely need to remember too. For here is another deep tradition, another precarious music, on the brink: a vital part of a Sufi culture being pressed on all sides by the forces of reaction. Ifriqiyya Electrique will not be lamenting its passing – because they will refuse to let it pass.

‘This is, then, most certainly not a “world music” project (still less an ethnomusicological one), but a wild process of improvisation and re-composition that brings traditional instruments face to face with computers and electric guitars… [My work] is driven towards elevation, sweat, blood, poetry and tears – not to some pretty colour postcard’ — François R. Cambuzat / Ifriqiyya Electrique

 

IFRIQIYYA ELECTRIQUE:

Tarek Sultan: vox, tabla, tchektchekas
Yahia Chouchen: vox, tabla, tchektchekas
Youssef Ghazala: vox, tchektchekas
Gianna Greco: bass, voice, computer
François R. Cambuzat: guitars, voice, computer
Guest: Ali Chouchen, tangura & vox