Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Mehdi Nassouli | Gnawa Diffusion

Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa
Mehdi Nassouli | Gnawa Diffusion
Concerts, DJ set

Mehdi Nassouli

L'enfant terrible of the Gnawa. Mehdi Nassouli, born in 1985 in Taroudant - the city in the southern Moroccan Souss where Amazigh culture, Malhoun, Gnawa and the local Deqqa Roudania coexist in a single sound fabric - is today the guembri player of a generation that is making something new out of this diversity itself. Having grown up in a family steeped in Gnawa traditions, he then spent a decade crossing his own country to study the specific schools of the great maalems of each region - an itinerant education in which the musical cultures of Morocco never appeared to him as borders, but as interlocking languages. This gave rise to the flexibility that predestines him today for the most diverse encounters: with the itinerant musician Titi Robin, on whose albums Les Rives (2012) and Taziri (2015) he plays a formative role; with Hindi Zahra, Fatoumata Diawara, Alpha Blondy, Nneka, Hamed Sultan, Justin Adams, Karim Ziad; in the trans-Mediterranean tribute project Bob Maghreb, in the electronic universe of Sofyann Ben Youssef's Ammar 808, in the pan-African collective Jokko. And yet, wherever he performs, he is one thing above all: a guembri player of extraordinary presence, who turns his instrument not only into rhythm but also into song - with his own bright, agile voice, which is able to wander between Tagnaouite litanies and Malhoun poetry without a break. The fact that his concert opens this evening's program is the right order: before the tight, ritual circle of Lila closes later that night at SAVVY, Nassouli once again opens up the full breadth of what Gnawa can be today - a living, permeable, wandering heritage.

Gnawa Diffusion

Biting, danceable, unforgiving. Gnawa Diffusion, founded in 1992 in Grenoble around the charismatic singer and guembri player Amazigh Kateb, prepared the ground for an entire generation on which Bab L' Bluz, Mehdi Nassouli and so many others stand today. It was the first band to consistently combine Gnawa with reggae, dub, rock, chaâbi and hip-hop to create a single, powerful sound without lulling it into a folkloristic lull or losing it in arbitrariness. And Gnawa Diffusion were the first to combine this with a political acuity that is still unparalleled today: lyrics in Algerian Arabic, Tamazight, French and English, sarcastic, biting, often dangerously topical - about poverty in Algeria, the corruption of the powerful, the hypocrisy of religions, the wars of empires - and yet danceable, anthemic, community-building to the bone marrow. Amazigh Kateb, born in Algiers in 1972, is the son of Kateb Yacine, the father of modern Algerian literature; his first name, "Amazigh", means "free man" in Tamazight - a program that the band literally carries before them. Having grown up in his father's theater and emigrated to France in 1988, he founded Gnawa Diffusion in the banlieues of Grenoble in the spirit of that post-colonial experience in which voices from the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the whole of Africa came together - a sound that does not explain the history of the diaspora, but translates it into music. Albums such as Algeria (1997), Bab el Oued - Kingston (1999), Souk System (2003) and Fucking Cowboys (2006) are classics today, but the band made their greatest impact at the height and end of the Algerian civil war, when their songs became the anthems of an entire youth. Their performance in Berlin closes a circle that the festival has drawn over four weekends: here is the band that has long since demonstrated what it is all about - that Gnawa is not a museum legacy, but a living, polyphonic, politically alert and danceable sound of the world.

19:00-20:00 Mehdi Nassouli
20:30-22:00 Gnawa Diffusion
22:00-00:00 DJ set (Magnus Hirschfeld Bar)

Venue:

Paulette Nardal Terrace
Magnus Hirschfeld Bar