The Glitterbeat label, based in Hamburg, have been fattening my record collection for years now with their mission to find “contemporary music from all corners of the world” and “embrace both evolving global textures and localised traditions and roots.” I have spent many happy hours listening to YĪN YĪN, Gaye Su Akyol, TRUPA TRUPA, Bixiga 70, and Altin Gün and they have been releasing Aziza Brahim’s albums since 2014’s Soutak. Now they bring us her fifth album ‘Mawja’ (which means ‘wave’ in Hassaniya Arabic).
The album is a mixture of the upbeat with the melancholy, influenced as it is by the plight of the displaced Sahrawi people as well as Brahim’s Grandmother who was an important poet in the Sahrawi culture and sadly died in 2021. She suffered a personal anxiety crisis, Western Sahara’s return to war with Morocco, and a global pandemic, all of which contributed to the four-year gap between Mawja and 2019’s Sahara. But music, as ever, can take the threads of melancholy and spin them into something more uplifting. The lament of the guitar and restless bass combined with the bounce of the percussion are the perfect backdrop for Aziza Brahim’s exceptional voice.
Brahim says: “Music lets you enrich your original sounds with others you learn. Mawja reflects everything that involves me (the Iberian Peninsula). There’s the tambourine, square tambourine, the almirez (pestle and mortar) that you hear in folk music everywhere on the peninsula. But I mixed with other African percussion instruments, and even ones from other continents. There’s a fusion in the root of each song.”
It’s not surprising that the musicians on this album have all worked with Brahim for years as the vocals and instrumentation mesh together seamlessly, particularly in evidence on the track ‘Haiyu ya zuwar’ where the singing has the same acrobatic dexterity as Guillem Aguilar’s guitar.
The vocal inflections that Brahim can utilise when singing are a huge part of the personality of her voice as it dances as effortlessly like the percussion rippling underneath it. Whether you understand the language or not you can still appreciate the yearning, power, and sorrow that is conveyed here from the softest expressions on tracks like ‘Thajliba’ and ‘Duaa’ to the desert-blues grit of ‘Metal, madera’.
It’s heart-breaking when you know that the music has its roots in tragedy and conflict, but when it is expressed this poignantly you hope that Aziza Brahim, and anyone who has gone similar experiences, can draw strength from it.
Aziza Brahim socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X (Twitter)
Glitterbeat Records socials: Website | Facebook | Instagram | X (Twitter) | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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