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Lost tracks New Beats
The faint drone of a Yamaha Arranger Workstation is perhaps one of the most recognizable synth sounds. Something about the warmth of an ambient hum suspended in nostalgia. A universal piece of music heritage in how it was internalized by different scenes. For much of the Maghreb, this sound conjures the late 1980s' Raï renewal. The advent of new studio technology and distribution processes, which although had questionable effects on the livelihood of many emerging artists, also enabled a profound mutation of what “local” music entailed.
The nascent music scenes in Morocco and other neighboring hubs in the early 90s, emerged at the synthesis of tradition and new tools to produce music.
While the Raï renewal of artists like Nordine Staifi and Salah El Annabi inspired the timeless cool of a countercultural defiance, the work of groups like Ahlam, Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effect and Amïra Saqati, under the umbrella of Barraka El Farnatchi label, exudes a peculiar avant-garde ambition that although sounds fresh today, might have come off as a just off-center at the time of its release.
A uniquely liminal period where for the first time the traditional began blending into renewal, via modern techniques and unlikely influences, in a collage of FM synths, syncopated rhythms and heartfelt ballads; an incongruous effect of technical prowess bent to the sensitivities of a burgeoning Moroccan modernity. This mural of analog warmth and digital reworking made up the cultural backdrop of Moroccan’s entry into the 2000s.
A few decades later, the same sound gives off a completely different appeal; residue of a time of tape static, chromatic gradients and polyester tracksuits.
This ghastly effect is certainly not lost on the producers, DJs, rappers and overall musicians of the independent scene in Morocco and the Maghreb. As much as traditional Moroccan sounds are merged or sampled into the soundscape of contemporary artists, the revival of elements from 80s and 90s pop culture and music appropriates a completely different terroir. This duality of heritage, between the rustic appeal of traditional sounds and the last echoes of a generation that witnessed firsthand the transition into contemporary Morocco, has been fairly pronounced in the work and overall ethos of the underground scene, and its adjacent regional scenes.
From nods to Hasni and the late 90s’ ethos in the work of rappers like Issam, similar homegrown influence in Hamza Haris and Sami Grar, the Raï-naissance movement by regional artists like Sofiane Saidi; to record diggers like Retro Cassetta and Cheb Mimo, or the syncretic patchwork of artists like Acid Arab, Cheb Runner and Mameen 3. This influence also continues with the work of artists like Gaouta and Malca who consistently defy classifications of vintage or nostalgic, seeking not to transpose familiar motifs and forms into pastiche, rather a continued lineage, through rediscovery and recontextualization, conjuring these untapped, dormant possibilities.
In Morocco, this confluence became apparent with the early markings of the independent scene, and began to resolve possibly sometime around the early to mid 2010s.
The reissue of Fadoul’s only surviving record Zman Saib in 2015 by Habibi Funk, brought back an almost mythical relic with an ahead-of-its-time allure. A mesmerizing tour de force of frantic chants nearly crackling the microphone’s compression limits, pulsating riffs fit for a generational anthem, marked by tracks like Sid Redad and Mektoub Allah, which have since become classics, instantly recognizable in young art circles.
The story of this album’s discovery is already part of some underground canon; a haphazard stumble on a forgotten gem in some desolate record store in the streets of the old medina, further adding to the legend of Casa’s revivalism. The reissue tapped into an interesting cultural moment; unearthing the work of previous generations of Moroccan artists who weren’t well-defined (or labeled as Western) within the triangle of sometimes heavy-handed national and Arabian music, popular music and the more ethnographic traditional or folk music. The influx of mass-produced entertainment at the turn of the 1990s was the great equalizer.
Perhaps some level of rediscovery has always been central to the landscape where the Moroccan underground scene developed.
Retro Cassetta sorting his tapes
Even the ethos of major cities like Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakech is still somewhat attached to an analog heritage of bootleg cassettes and record stores in the medina garnering a cult status, and making them more vulnerable to certain kinds of revivalism.
This resurgence of some elements of late 80s cultural experience has certainly seen a lot of resonance within contemporary visual culture and curatorial projects, almost synonymous with a second type of authenticity, defining Morocco’s place within the aesthetic atlas. Piecing together a new narrative beyond nostalgic indulgence, it’s the reclamation of artifacts long overshadowed by mass entertainment and global trends.
From its onset, the underground scene was painted as the advent of an imported cultural mode, separate from the local canon. It was something for the youth, and product of the early 2000s music video channels like MCM and VIVA, the internet and the increasingly easy access to the seductive “western culture”. “The movement itself, beginning in the 1990s, was first inspired from idols” says Amine Hamma, co-author of Jil L’Klam, “not only the music, but the entire culture was dispatched”. This firewall has, for some time, shaped our very idea of the underground scene.
The scene itself was born out of the absence of any mainstream cultural industry. Treading on a media and telecommunications sector that had just become slightly liberalized, paralleling the advent of satellite TV, the internet, and imported goods. The influx of new technology implied new modes of cultural consumption, which contrasted the picturesque, often didactic productions favored by dominant media channels, carrying its own set of connotations. The scene began crossing this firewall, emulating a fragmented soundscape through new production processes, which inspired new concepts.
By now, references to the droning synths of late 80s Raï, or the early experimentations of regional artists with new styles are recurrent in the work of underground artists.
Far from being mere nods, they are statements. The shift from the standard social realist rap and early fusion and metal bands of the 2000s, to more experimental forms is underlined by drawing from more obscure and eclectic sources. For several acts within the scene, the aesthetic frontier lay behind the elusive parts of collective memory. Throughout the last decade, this process paralleled a revisiting of ethereal soundscape and gritty texture, fluorescent pastel color palettes in the global music and visual culture trends.
Nostalgic motifs, especially in music, had become a very recognizable phenomenon during the 2010s.
Yet, even before, Tricky’s Maxinquaye first established this aesthetic shift in a very explicit sound. The hypnagogic pop of Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, paralleling the British hauntology wave at the time, conjured something uncanny, out of the shady cloisters of internet forums, the anachronism of abandoned media. The growing popularity of micro-genres like synthwave and chillwave at the turn of the 2010s rippled over to film, creating a landscape teemed in the retro-kitsch of John Carpenter, gloss-coated DeLoreans and neon lights. The cultural lament decrying the loss of the ability to imagine the future, or what Bruce McCall describes as a “faux nostalgia for a future that never happened”.
A recurrent cultural fatigue that writers like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds draw on as a characteristic of a generalized contemporary culture. The inability to conceive of the future itself, novelty and unprecedented concepts becomes an exercise in nostalgia. Despite limitations of this analysis, what emerges is the realization of an end to temporality. Visual and music styles, and different motifs can be deterritorialized from the periods that spawned them, and be appropriated and reused in new contexts; more similar to an experience of pure material signifiers. Writing about the early 2000s British Electronica scene, Mark Fisher explains: “If electronic music was ‘futuristic’ it was in the same sense that fonts are ‘gothic’--the futuristic now connoted a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations”.
An interesting shift occurs here in the very conception of novelty; the frontier is no longer the discovery of new ideas yet to materialize, but the extension of those that were previously overlooked, now.
Likewise, there is more to the reintroduction of artifacts and previously forgotten works than the immediate documentation. The possibility for salvage, and detournement into more than archive. The focus is on objects, retaining some of their original associations, which are perhaps more poignant in the current context. Rediscovery is more akin to salvage: “while signs are interchangeable, objects have particular properties, textures and tendencies”, explains Mark Fisher in a 2010 article, “the art of salvage is about knowing which objects can be lashed together to form viable constructions”.
As such, digging becomes an active search for novelty – rediscovering the past to reimagine the future.
This shift also mirrors a rejection of the local / foreign binary inherent to the local scene, which many artists are now so eager to break. It further seeps into the realm of galleries and institutional efforts to lend some symbolic seal of approval to “youth” and “urban” arts. The visual culture is now certainly more receptive to the playful ruptures like the pop art effect of comic book style renderings of city streets, the sartorial fusion of oversized vintage football jerseys on bleached jeans, and the lofi sound of early digital recordings. A reinterpretation beyond clichés of zellige motifs on minimalist designs.
In doing so, the scene revives the work of perhaps the last of the truly avant-garde local artists, through the same processes of technological mediation that often accompany these mutations.
Underlying this recent revival is the retracing of a lost lineage, or intergenerational accumulation
paralleling how Motown and soul records were treated through early sampling and multitrack sequencing technology creating boom-bap hip hop, or reggae disjointed through mixing consoles, effect processors and tape machines, into Dub, or how the Chicago House scene reworked the death of disco, combining Italo disco, punk and industrial through drum machines and samplers.
If the independent scene’s motive were to move beyond past clichés, the rediscovery serves a different purpose. The novelty imperative that shaped mass cultural production throughout the latter of the 20th century, now stands at a massive graveyard of forgotten cultural forms and lost media. The new process of rediscovery is fleshing out all the forgotten possibilities that have so far been intangible. It recreates its own set of reference; a new sonic and aesthetic language.
The very soundscape of artists like Issam and Malca evokes the tension of a generation of artists estranged between two sensitivities.
Malca for Modzik Magazine
It reclaims the scene / artist’s place within this binary not as youth music inspired by “western culture”, but a continuation of the same lineage of local and regional pioneers, reconstructing and contributing to this canon. A seemingly unassuming process of unlikely associations, detournement and a novel treatment of familiar motifs.
Past any clichés of return to origin and combining the local with the modern, this choice breaks down this binary relation of global / local as a sort of hierarchy of coolness. The height of coolness is no longer drawn from the novelty of formulas or sounds emerging from some groundbreaking scene, rather from the complete opposite. Forgotten records by local and regional artists, motifs and experimentations that were previously relegated to a more lowbrow status.
Where cultural reclamation in music has long inspired academic norms of engaged art with aesthetic value, bombastic claims and a social message, this trend serves to establish the heritage of previous generations of local and regional independent artists, which had experienced a similar treatment, into an alternative musical lineage, defined by search for novelty, shifting the limitations of recognizable forms and medium.
BADR SELLAK