North African Tapes Roundup (Music Blogs is Dead - The Blogs Abides!)

It's 2026 and the heyday of the music blog recedes into the rearview mirror of our music consumption patterns along with the era of the cassette tape itself. However, there's still plenty of North African musical goodness being shared online via the form of the anachronistic blog and its various successors. 

Here's some recent shares that might pique your interest:

GET THESE BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR - THE BIG 4 MOROCCAN TRANCE TRADITIONS AT HIVE MIND

Marc at Hive Mind has been sharing some great cassette audio at "Name Your Own Price" on his Bandcamp page. These generally disappear after 1 month, but he's currently made all four them available again for a limited time. So get over there and pick up some choice Hamadcha, Gnawa, Jilala, and Aissaoua sounds. (And chip in a few dirhams for the good causes he supports if you're able to do so.) 

(And most of Marc's shares are still available at his old Snap, Crackle & Pop blog.)

SWEET ANADALUSIAN SOUNDS FROM CONSTANTINE AT MUSIC REPUBLIC 

MusicRepublic - World Traditional Music from LPs and Cassettes continues to share rare and high quality audio from world of vinyl. He recently shared a lovely album from the Algerian artist Mohamed Tahar Fergani. 

RAI VARIETIES AT K7MATIK 

Reda at K7MATIC continues to share loads of Algerian cassette audio, primarily but not exclusively rai music, this unusual cassette caught my ear recently - stripped down rai from singer Cheikha Houaria, but replacing the typical gasba flute accompaniment with a ghaita oboe provided by an Aissawa ensemble.

KHADIJA ATLAS ANTHOLOGY AT ARAB TUNES

Lazyproduction continues to compile anthologies and mixtapes from across the Arab (and Amazigh) music world at the Arab Tunes blog. A recent highlight is a compilation of the Zayane singer Khadija Atlas, featuring recordings under her name as well as her appearances on recordings of other artists such as Rouicha, Abdelaziz Ahouzar, and Mustapha Oumguil.

KHADIJA EL BIDAWIYA AT WALLAHI LE ZEIN!

A welcome recent development is Matthew's return to posting at Wallahi Le Zein! He recently reupped a compilation of the late âita marsaouia singer Khadija el Bidaouia, and the post includes excerpts from a 2011 interview he did with her. 

NORTH AFRICAN VINYL PROGRAMS AT BODEGA POP

No, not the old Bodega Pop blog, but the Bodega Pop radio program at WFMU's Give The Drummer Radio stream every Wednesday from 7-10 PM Eastern Time. Gary continues to confound expectations with his broad knowledge and musical omnivorosity for 3 hours every week. These programs live forever on the WFMU website, so you can enjoy them anytime you like. Many of his 2026 shows are devoted to vinyl from specific countries. In the North African vein, you can listen to entire programs devoted to music on vinyl from Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, and most recently Tunisia. 

And you should definitely check out the fab compilation he put together for Sublime Frequencies that came out last year, Born in the City of Tanta - Lower Egyptian Urban Folklore and Bedouin Shaabi from Libya's Bourini Records 1968-75. 

THEMATIC MIXES AT RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Lastly, there are some great North African mixes among the many streamable mixes at Radio Is A Foreign Country. Most recent North African offering was a great audio montage of recordings from Radio Mauritanie put together by Matthew Lavoie of Wallahi Le Zein! Keep an eye on Radio Is A Foreign Country for a Moroccan mix by yours truly, dropping very soon! 😉

Jamal Eddine Said Elhouate

Here's a tape by a young Jamal Eddine Said Elhouate, known commonly these days as Said Ould El Houate. The singer and viola player was born in 1968 in Casablanca. His real name is Jamal Eddine Said, and he was nicknamed ould el houate (son of the fishmonger) because his father worked at the port [1]. He rose to fame in the 2000s and 2010s with a chaabi style rooted in aita.

This album dates from the mid 1990s, and it benefits from the simple production values of the time. This is the simple and satisfying combination of a scratchy viola, a couple of tightly strung bendirs, Said's lead vocal, and some shikhate singing response vocals. Most recordings you find of Said Ould El Houate date from the 2000s and later, when it becomes hard to find chaabi recordings without a keyboard bass. This older style is refreshing, sort of in the vein of Abdelaziz Stati. Like Stati, Said appears to be an aficionado of aita. He has spent time in Safi learning and reviving old songs from the Abda variety of aita [1].

I was surprised to see the song title "Koubaily Baba" on this cassette. The name is reminiscent of Gnawa songs "Koubaily Bala" and "Koubaily Mama". Said's song does not sound like either of those songs, but the lyrics explicitly reference possession, Gnawa and Baba Mimoun. The music evokes Jilala trance music, with the bendirs playing a very syncopated pattern where drum strokes rarely coincide with the beat. So this track is a chaâbi evocation of a Jilala approach to Gnawa spirits.

Said Ould El Houate remains active and popular today. You can stream many of his albums at Ournia and a few on Spotify. And you can find lots of content on his Youtube channel.

Jamal Eddine Said Elhouate جمال الدين سعيد الحوات   
Sawt Ennachat cassette صوط النشاط   
mid 1990s

1) Essamra Qilini - السمرة قيليني
2) Mal Ezzine Tghayer - مال الزين اتغير
3) Ma Bin Lila ou Nhar Lhubb Tghayer - ما بين ليلة و  نهار الحب اتغير
4) Daq Alhal - داق الحال
     Koubaili Baba - كبيلي بابا
5) Moulay Abdellah Ben Lhoucine - مولاي عبد الله بن لحسين

320 | FLAC

[1] Interview with Said Ould El Houate at Doukali Bouhali blog.

Samaoui and Soussiya - Simulacra and Standards for Weddings, Parties, Anything

Here's a sampler from the label Sawt Bab Mansour out of Meknes. 4 long tracks each by a different artist. This was released in the sunny spring of 2001 when Orchestre Hamri scored a smash hit with "Samaoui". The song remains popular today. On revisiting the tape, I recognized another song, "Soussia", that is something of a standard at Moroccan parties (at least at the ones I attend in the San Francisco Bay Area). The two songs are quite different, but they share something in common - they both exist within the realm of Moroccan chaabi music, but refer (sometimes with lyrics, sometimes with musical tropes, and sometimes with both) to musical traditions and bodily experiences not native to the chaabi dance floor.

SAMAOUI

In spring 2001, this song was everywhere in Morocco, coming out of every tape deck, played at every wedding. I even heard Hassan Dariouki's aita haouzia group sing it at a soiree for a bunch of ethnomusicologists in Tangier!

In the early days of Moroccan Tape Stash, I wrote about the early 2000s wave of chaâbi hits that made reference to trance or trance brotherhoods:

"I don't mean pop versions of Gnawa or Jilala songs. Rather, I mean NEW songs with lyrics referring to the spirits or to the experience of trance. What struck me as odd was that most of these songs made no musical reference to trance music of the Gnawa, Jilala or other groups. Rather, they fit the basic mold of chaâbi songs, ready to slip into the repertoire of a wedding band with a viola player and a nicely dressed lead singer"

In retrospect, Al Hamri's "Samaoui / Ha Huma Jaw", while featuring smooth smooth vocals and moderne orchestral string glissandos, does actually make some musical references to the trance traditions. The bendir frame drum is being played in the loopy, topsy-turvy, syncopated way that Jilala musicians play it. The solo viola (as opposed to the orchestral strings) has the unusual processed, throbbing sound featured in Said Senhaji's hit "Aicha al Mejdouba" which, as I noted previously, resembles the throb of the Jilala gasba flute. And the cymbals of the tar tambourine are being played in a way that resembles the qarqaba metal clackers used by Jilala and Gnawa musicians. It's still to my ear a strange juxtaposition:



And yet... the song is undeniably catchy! Our local Moroccan DJ played it at the most recent party I attended, and the crowd ate it up! On the dance floor, everyone sang along "Wa Samaoui / Allah idawi / Aw s7ab el 7aaaaaaal". Samaoui is one of the entities invoked during Gnawa ceremonies. "Oh Samaoui / God heals / Oh friends of the traaaaaance / Bring the incense / bring the charcoal burner / I want to trance". Of course, none of us did trance - there was no incense, no ritual specialist, no guinbri, so it was probably for the best. And yet there we were, miming some of the gestures of trance, mouthing signifiers of trance, to a simulacrum of some of the sounds of trance music. And we enjoyed it, like we did 19 summers ago!

SOUSSIA

Another staple of our local Moroccan parties is the second song on this tape, here called "Soussia". The term soussia is a noun/adjective that refers to something or someone (female) from the Moroccan Souss region. I don't know whether there is an "original" version of this song, but if there is, I'm guessing this is not it. I've never known a proper title for the song - I just think of it as "A Mwi Lalla", or "that Berber-sounding song that gets sung at non-Berber parties".

In this version, sung by Mustapha Baidou, a metal percussion instrument sounds like a naqqus, drums sound like those used in ahwach performances, melody is based in the Soussi pentatonic scales. Yet the lead singer has that smooth delivery of a wedding band singer, and we again hear orchestral string phrases. And at the end of the track, the music shifts into typical chaabi taârida riffing, dropping the pentatonic mode and the naqqus sound.



A quick Google search for chaabi songs called "Soussia" revealed not the same song, but different songs that featured similarly Soussi-styled melodies (pentatonic) and musical tropes (drum timbres, naqqus-sounding percussion, sometimes a synth banjo), typically with lyrics in darija (Moroccan Arabic). An example:



As "Samaoui" invites dancers to simulate the hair-flipping, head-bopping of Jilala or Gnawa trance on a chaabi dance floor, when "Soussia" songs get played, dancers' movements immediately shift from the hips to the shoulders, simulating the style of an ahwach dance.

WEDDINGS, PARTIES, ANYTHING

Trance- and Soussi-styled songs make sense in the repertoire of a well-rounded Moroccan urban Arabophone wedding/party band. When you're playing at a party that goes on for hours, you want to be able to vary things up and pace the event. Wedding parties usually start off with slow and stately music to welcome and ease people into the event. So a wedding band should know at least one or two songs from the Andalusi and/or melhun repertoire to provide this function, as well as some long-form chanson moderne classics from the likes of Abdelwahab Doukkali or Abdelhadi Belkhayat. Wedding musicians don't need to be experts in those repertoires - just need to do a passable job on a couple of songs. They will probably throw in some well-known Middle Eastern hits from Egypt or Lebanon early on, to mix up the groove and allow dancers to mix up their moves. But eventually the floor succumbs to the inexorable pull toward the infectious chaabi beat.

Chaabi (literally, "popular"), is a wide field, that ranges from urbane Andalusi melodies to country aita-based melodies and regional varieties, from simmering slow jams to raucous, explosive bangers, from Houcine Slaoui classics from the 1940s to Hamid Zahir hits from the 1960s to Najat Aatabou hits from the 1980s to Daoudi hits from the 2000s to the latest offerings on YouTube. The viola and the darbuka reign supreme. Ouds may or may not appear. (Of course a keyboard can give you that plucked-string sound, and double as a qanun zither, a banjo, or a horn section too.) Chords were once provided by electric guitars, but those have given way to keyboards as well. But whatever the origins or musical textures of songs may be, chaabi performers slot them into musical suites that inevitably end up with the climactic, raucous, joyful 6/8 groove.

Musics come in and out of the urban wedding band repertoire as the years roll on. When rai music was popular in the 1990s, you sometimes heard a few rai songs at weddings. I'm told that in the 1980s, wedding bands would sometimes have some Bollywood tunes ready (or perhaps some faux-Bollywood-styled chaabi tunes?) in case the bride's array of costumes included an Indian-styled outfit. In my day, said array typically included a Berber-styled outfit, so some Berber-styled songs come in very handy in the repertoire for the moment the bride switches to that outfit.

So "Soussi" songs serve a function within a wedding band repertoire, accompanying a particular moment in the itinerary of the bride's clothing trajectory. On another level, they release the dance floor, temporarily, to a different way of celebrating, a different way for the body to let loose and move. This is also the case with chaabi pop-trance songs like "Samaoui" - the dance floor is given over, momentarily, to trance movements and lyrics, letting people groove and move in a different way. But the chaabi imperative eventually brings the floor back from these excursions. Both "Samaoui" and "Soussia" on this tape finish up with an exit from Soussi- and trance-styled lyrics and sounds, bringing it all back home chaabi-style.

Weddings, parties, anything - and trance and Soussi jams a speciality...

Sawt Bab Mansour presents صوت باب منصور يقدم
Samaoui السماوي
Sawt Bab Mansour cassette, 2001

Al Hamri الحمري
    1) Samaoui السماوي
    2) Ha Huma Jaw هاهما جاو
    3) Shera3 oul Qanun الشراع و القانون

Mustapha Baidou مصطفى بايدو
    1) Soussia السوسية

Âbd al Hamid عبد الحميد
    1) Almajdoubiate المجدوبيات
    2) Sidi ouel Qalb M3akoum سيدي والقلب معاكم
    3) Galuli Ghir Ensah كلولي غير انساه

Al Berbouchi البربوشي
    1) 3lach A Lalla علاش الالة
    2) Ouahia Almra Ouahia واهيا المراة واهيا

Get it all HERE.

PS - I patched a couple of short dropouts in the Al Hamri and Al Berbouchi tracks with versions found on YouTube.

Jilala by Request, plus Recent Interweb Goodness

By request, here are two albums of Jilala music that were previously offered at the now defunct WwW.ZizMp3.CoM. These are very nice recordings of a group from Fes. There's more Jilala music in the stash if you like this intense stuff.

S'hab el Hal - Variétés Jilalia (Mounawaates Jilalia)
Volume 1 - get it here.
Volume 2 - get it here.

Meanwhile, kind souls across the interwebs continue to share Moroccan goodies. Here are a few recent gems:

Lokman_ud launches his new blog أرشيف لقمان with a FANTASTIC cassette of Mahmoud Guinia. My copy of this went missing years ago, so it's wonderful to hear it again. The percussion is, for the most part, not metal qarqabas, but something lighter, and Mahmoud's guinbri playing here is more laid back than usual, though the riffing is just as righteous. Overall, it's got a warmer sound than your typical Gnawa music cassette. It's a delight, and you should visit this page and download it right away!

Meanwhile Tawfiq at the venerable blog Oriental Traditional Music from LPs & Cassettes dropped a lovely album of Qur'an recitation by Abderrahim Abdelmoumen, a Moroccan reciter who is also versed in Moroccan Andalusian Sufi singing. It's rare to hear Moroccan melodies and vocal stylings in Qur'an recitation, so this is a real treat. You can find it here.






Phocéephone recently shared a nice 1960's chaâbi 45 from Felix el Maghrebi. There's some info on Felix from Chris of Jewish Maghrib Jukebox here and here.

Chris recently shared a rare 78RPM recording of the Jewish liturgical chant "Adon Olam", recorded in the 1950s by Moroccan singer Judah Sebag.

And finally, Gary of Bodega Pop has been hosting a fantastic weekly radio program on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio online, called Bodega Pop Live. A few months back, he devoted an entire 3-hour program to Moroccan music, covering a LOT of styles and time periods. The program is still archived online, and you can listen here.

Hamadsha Information and Jilala Tunes

The most popular post on this blog to date is my post from February 2012 about the Hamadsha and Lalla Aisha, featuring the music of Abderrahim Amrani. I was delighted to receive this message last week from Chris Witulski, an ethnomusicologist currently doing research in Fez. Mr. Amrani saw my blog post and wanted to share some information about Lalla Aisha for the followers of this blog! Many thanks to Chris and to Si Abderrahim for their interest and generosity!

---

Tim,

I am a researcher working with the Gnawa, Hamadsha, and Aissawa here in Fez. Amrani has been a good friend of mine for a few years from now, and he just sent me a link to this page with a request. First, I appreciate the recording. Even he has trouble finding some of these older tapes of himself now. He did not realize that you posted a link to his own opinions about Aisha, but he asked that I translate a part of a recent conversation between us regarding who Aisha is into English for your page. He cites four Aishas, three of whom were different living figures that should not be compounded or confused. This, of course, runs counter to many contemporary opinions about the mysterious Aisha that is so present in Moroccan life.

So please pardon the long comment that is to follow. Hopefully you or your readers find it to be an interesting perspective. We were speaking of Sidi Dghughi's trip to see Sultan Bil-Khir at the request of Sidi Ali Bin Hamdush, during which the king gave Dghughi Aisha as a gift for Sidi Ali. According to Amrani, we do not know if his intention was that Aisha be Sidi Ali's wife or servant.

"For six months, Sidi Ahmed traveled to return to Sidi Ali with Ayisha. When he arrived to the place where Sidi Ali had been sitting, he found his master dead under the tree. Sidi Ahmed began to strike his head. In the poem "Al-Warshan" (the carrier pigeon) we hear the story. Then this Aisha, now without Sidi Ali there to marry or serve, began to do miracles of healing. She healed those who would come from afar: the desert, Algeria, Tunisia, and other cities across Morocco. (In Tunisia, there is still an active hamadsha zawiya that celebrates the hamadsha mussem in the city of Um Al-'Arais with Moroccan clothing. She saw many people before suddenly disappearing. No one knew what happened to her or where she was. Her cave, however, remained and became a pilgrimage site just downhill from the zawiya of Sidi Ali Bin Hamdush. Despite the fact that she was no longer there, her cavern became a place where one could bring a sacrifice, light candles, and be healed. This practice entered the tradition, as people would continue to visit and live within the proximity of her past and continuing miracles. This is Aisha Sudaniyya. She was the one who came from the Sudan, from King Bil-Khir, to Sidi Ali Bin Hamdush.

There is a second Aisha: Aisha Bahariyya (of the ocean). She came to Azemmour from Baghdad. Now people go to Azemmour (near El-Jadida) to see her and visit her qubba. Mulay Bu Sha'i al Rddad is the wali of Azemmour, just as we have Moulay Idriss here in Fez. He studied in Baghdad, where she saw him, fell in love, and followed him here (to Morocco). But he was like Sidi Ali, tsawwuf. She came to the edge of the ocean and slept there. The women from here came to know her after hearing her story, that she followed him here out of love. [He did not bring her. She came on her own.] She asked about him when she arrived to learn that he had given up women, cigarettes, alcohol, etc (لقاتو زهد). She had no house, no friends or family. All the woman knew of the story of her love for him. The waves took her [she was sleeping on the beach] and killed her. They buried her body near the coast and now people in love [especially women] visit her marabout in order to write their names and those of their beloved on the walls of the building in henna. She blesses them with requited love. There is a well nearby with very cold water. She is not a jinn, but was a woman.

The third Aisha was Aisha Qadissa from Portugal (not Qandisha, a mispronunciation of her Portugese name). She was a beautiful woman. The Portuguese colonizers killed her husband. She would make herself available to any man who wanted her [Portuguese soldiers], and over the course of an evening, she would kill him, avenging her husband's death. She killed 500 soldiers. ("She was like Zorro.") She was not a jinn.

But those here, the Gnawa, Jbaliyya... shame on them [hashuma alihum]. They create the atmosphere that she is a jinn. Aisha was one of Mohammed's women, how could there be a jinn with the same name? The first two of these examples were holy [ربنية, Sudaniyya and Bahriyya] and the third is powerful [قوية, Qadissa].

There is a fourth Aisha. That's the life that we live, you and me and everyone."

Thank you for reading, and allowing him to speak to his music a bit more directly (albeit translated).

 Christopher Witulski

-----

Unfortunately I have no more Hamadsha tapes in my stash (that I can share, at least...). I was going to share an Aissawa tape that has some Gnawa songs on it (to further exemplify the borrowing and sharing of songs between the Moroccan trance music repertoires. But then when googling around to find more information about the performer, Al-Hajj Said Al-Guissi I found that the tape has been issued on CD and is available on iTunes as "L'Art Aïssawa, Vol. 2". (Though the cassette j-card pictured here is much more glorious!)

So instead, here's a vintage Jilala cassette on Tichkaphone. I'm pretty sure I bought this one sealed, but the lyrics (what I can make out of them) don't seem to have any relationship to the song titles on the j-card. Unusual that one of the vocalists is female!

Track 2 (of 4)

Get it all here.

Chaâbi viola as Jilala flute - Saïd Senhaji

About 10-12 years ago, there seemed to be an explosion of pop hits in Morocco making reference to trance of one flavor or another. I don't mean pop versions of Gnawa or Jilala songs. Rather, I mean NEW songs with lyrics referring to the spirits or to the experience of trance. What struck me as odd was that most of these songs made no musical reference to trance music of the Gnawa, Jilala or other groups. Rather, they fit the basic mold of chaâbi songs, ready to slip into the repertoire of a wedding band with a viola player and a nicely dressed lead singer. You don't typically want to hire a trance music group for a wedding but, as Deborah Kapchan has noted, the aesthetics of nashat (lively, energetic, loose party feeling) often come close to those of jadba (possession trance), and sometimes bump up against each other (1).

I tend to like my trance uncut, so these songs never did much for me. Some of the tunes were pretty catchy and popular, though. You can hear a few of these on a great early-2000s chaâbi compilation Maroc by Night (tracks 6, 17 and 19). Hamri's "Samaoui" in particular was massive in the spring-summer of 2001.

One track that I do rather like is "Aicha el Mejdouba" by Orchestre Senhaji. What got under my skin was the weird sound processing on the violin. The first time I heard this, I had no idea what instrument was playing. To my ears now, the strange throb seems to hearken to the unique timbre of the gasba flutes in Jilala trance music. The lyrics of the song also refer to the Jilala. Here's a lip-sync/playback clip of Saïd Senhaji performing this tune:

 
"Aicha el Mejdouba", track 5 on today's offering, is the only tune on the album to feature the tweaked viola sound. The rest of the album is some darn fine straight-up Casablanca chaâbi music, vintage Y2K, served up by the singer Saïd Senhaji and his orchestre. Heavy on the rhythm (drum kit in effect), swell riffin' on the viola, catchy call-response vocals. The electric guitar comping doesn't always work for me, but I've heard waaaaaaay worse.

Check yala.fm for Senhaji's bio and more tunes. Amazon has LOTS of Sehaji mp3s (though, oddly, not the album I've got here.) And for those of you here on the West Coast of the USA, Saïd Senhaji will perform in Anaheim on Saturday May 19!

Discographic note: the j-card reads
 سهرة حية مع الجمهور, i.e., "live concert with audience", but that does not appear to be the case - this sounds like a studio recording.

Get it here.

---

(1) Deborah Kapchan. "Nashat: The Gender of Musical Celebration in Morocco." Pp. 251-65 in Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

---

UPDATE 2012-04-21, 11:30PM - I think the link was incorrect earlier. It should be fine now.

Jilala & 'Aita Down at Bir Jdid - Mohammed L3aouina

Here's one of my fave cassettes - a particularly fierce Jilala tape for ya. Picked this up in the mid-'90s, I think in Marrakech or thereabouts. The tape is from Bir Jdid (which I had to look up on Google) - it's between Casablanca and El Jadida.

The tape doesn't say "Jilala" anywhere on it, but the tunes have that same throb and rasp that identify the Jilala groove. In addition to the gasba flutes and bendir frame drums, you'll hear some qarqaba metal clappers on the tunes labeled "Buwwab". These songs invoke some of the spirits associated with the Gnawa, who are the main users of the qarqaba.

In addition to the trance material (Sidi Slimane, Sidi Chamharouch, Buwwab), the tape also contains "Al-3aloua", a piece usually associated with aita / shikhat. The recording of this song (as well as track 6, another song that seems to be non-Jilala) features only a single gasba, rather than 2. The use of 2 gasba-s adds a loopy dimension to the sound and seems appropriate to the trance material. Whatever the aesthetics of trance textures vs. non-trance textures may be, it is certainly true that most musicians working with trance repertoires also perform other non-trance genres, and that seems to be the case with this ensemble.

Enjoy!

1) Intro
2) Chamharouche (? i guess. I can't hear the name in the lyrics, but it is written on the j-card, but then again, the tracks are all out of order too...
3) Sidi Slimane

4) Al Buwwab 1 (edited together from end of side 1 and beginning of side 2)
5) Al Buwwab 2
6) Track 6
7) Al 3aloua

Get it here.

Jilala - Throb and Rasp

Finishing up my recent set of trance brotherhood music tapes. There are 4 well-known trance-music "brotherhoods" in Morocco - Gnawa, Aissawa, Hamadsha, and Jilala. I'm not sure exactly how widespread the Jilala are. I know they are found in the north, are quite popular around Casablanca, and can be found at least as far south as Marrakesh.

Jilala music is all about throb and rasp. Throb - the acceleration and decceleration within a song, the breathy organic timbre of the gasba flutes, the in-and-out-of-phase frequencies of the paired flutes. Rasp - flutes, voices, bendirs, all buzzy. This is music with a VIBE. The bendir patterns inhabit the 2/4 and 6/8 universes common across Morocco, but I find the drum stroke patterns particularly loopy and provocative.

I don't know where this group hails from. The j-card reads Al-farqa al-jilaliya, al-juz ath-thalith (The Jilaliya Group, vol. 3). I believe I got the tape in Casablanca around '01, but the tape company is based in Fez. Song titles are best guesses. Enjoy.

01) Moulay Amer - Moulay Idriss
02) Sidi Allal

03) Track 3
04) Lalla Malika
05) Moulay Abdelkader

Get it here.

BTW - don't confuse traditional Jilala music with the folk revival group Jil Jilala (whose name translates as Jilala Generation). Like Nass el Ghiwane (aka "New Dervish"), Jil Jilala chose their group name with a conscious reference to Moroccan trance traditions.