Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Moonlight Benjamin | Bab L' Bluz

Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Global Echoes of Gnawa
Moonlight Benjamin | Bab L' Bluz
Concerts, DJ set

Moonlight Benjamin

The singer Moonlight Benjamin combines vodou, rock and punk like no other. Her voice is dark, somewhat rough and demanding. Her songs are fast, rhythmic and rebellious, her attitude stern and powerful. She provides excellent evidence of the relationship between Gnawa and Vodou, rhythmically and spiritually. Moonlight Benjamin digs for the roots of rock and finds them in the blues and in West Africa. Clearly influenced by the great Oumou Sangaré and the driving guitars of 1970s rock, she makes demands for freedom and respect with her shamanic stage presence. Her career began in 2018 with the exciting debut album Siltane, which immediately made people sit up and take notice, followed in 2020 by the equally explosive Simido. She describesher new album Wayobas a "cry of pain"; it is still about Haiti, her troubled homeland, but from there also about the world and philosophical questions. Born into a Vodou-practicing family in Port au Prince, she spent her childhood in a Catholic orphanage after her mother died in childbirth. It was there that she learned to appreciate gospel singing, and it was only as a teenager that she returned to her roots before moving from Haiti to France in 2002. While her debut album was still dominated by traditional drums and vocals, the instrumentation became rockier from album to album, but she still sings in Haitian Creole, energetic and demanding.

Bab L' Bluz

If Asmaa Hamzaoui brought the guembri back to its ritual place the previous evening, Yousra Mansour connects it to the amplifier this evening and sends it into the psychedelic rock of the 21st century. Bab L' Bluz - "The Gate of the Blues" - is the Moroccan-French band that no one who wants to hear what's happening musically in Morocco can ignore. Formed in Marrakech in 2018 from the meeting of charismatic singer Yousra Mansour from El Jadida and guitarist and producer Brice Bottin, the quartet with flute and drums has created a sound that could not have been created anywhere else but on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Mansour plays an electric awisha, the younger sister of the guembri, while Bottin plays the electrified guembri itself - and what emerges cannot be pigeonholed: Gnawa trance, Hassani songs from the south, Amazigh rhythms and reggada, Chaâbi, sub-Saharan tracks, plus funk, Afrobeat and a rich, hypnotic rock in the spirit of the late sixties and seventies. Mansour, who grew up in El Jadida with the voice of Fairouz, the Gnawa sounds from nearby Essaouira and the voices of Janis Joplin, Oumou Sangaré and Erykah Badu, sings exclusively in Darija, Moroccan Arabic - lyrics about freedom, against corruption, for the possibility of a different life. Her acclaimed debut album Nayda! (2020), named after the Moroccan youth culture movement that advocates the creative reappropriation of local heritage, was released on Peter Gabriel's Real World Records; in 2021, the band received the Songlines Music Award in the fusion category, followed in 2024 by the second album Swaken as "ancient-to-future music". As part of the two festival days dedicated to women in Gnawa culture, Bab L' Bluz is the high-frequency counterpart to the concentrated ritual of the previous evening: there the Maâlma on the Guembri between Casablanca and Lila, here a Doukkalia with electric Awisha between El Jadida and Real World - two answers to the same question of what it means to be a female voice in a tradition that for so long only wanted to allow male voices.

19:00-20:15 Moonlight Benjamin
20:45-22:00 Bab L' Bluz
22:00-00:00 DJ set (Magnus Hirschfeld Bar)

Venue:
Paulette Nardal Terrace
Magnus Hirschfeld Bar