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| Image by Renaud de Foville |
Music as a means of transcendence or as soul treatment is an ancient practise. Back in Ancient Greece, music was described by Damon (a music theorist from the 5th c. BC and teacher of Socrates) as a powerful art because it imitated the movements of the soul. The Pythagorean sect used music as a therapeutic tool that enabled them to enjoy peaceful nights with pleasant dreams. Music is an ancient art with many facets and with an indelible connection to what cannot be seen, but is felt intensely. It’s connection to the divine, being used as a bridge or vessel to communicate with the Creator and infinite rituals and chants all around the world make music as mysterious and precious as a true art form can be.
In the continent of Africa, music is multi-faceted and an indispensable companion to daily life. Slaves from sub-sahara arrived and brought to Tunisia, their own music that accompanied healing rituals. Stambeli as it’s called is music that induces trance by its intense rhythms and has the firm attempt to heal and ward away the evil eye. This kind of musical healing ritual has some similarities with the gwana ritual that can be found in Morocco.
As therapeutic as Stambeli, we can also find in Djerid, a community in South Tunisia that practices the banga ritual. Its chants, dances and the powerful element of transcendence was an inspiration for the musician François Cambuzat. Having worked with curious and intrepid sound explorers such as Lydia Lunch and involved in other projects such as Putan Club or Machine Rouge (with Denis Lavant), the musician inspired by the banga, filmed the rituals and landscapes and the result is the documentary Trans-aeolion transmission. Engaged by the community and its musical art form, the musician joined several other musicians, including local musicians and Ifriqiyya Électrique was created.
Ifriqiyya Électrique is a unique project that harmonizes the modern exploratory music with the traditional sounds of the banga ritual. Uniting synths, electronics, distortion and loudness, the band manages to convey an absolute sense of transcendence, and of music as a healing ritual. A ritual of possession and trance that harmonizes the animism and the Islamic worlds. Banga is devoted to the the rite of Sidi Marzouk practiced in the south of Tunisia by the black communities. The rite is considered to be adorcism, in which the person engaged in the ritual, intends to accommodate and welcome spirit entities and become possessed, unlike the exorcism, the experience in adorcism is considered to be positive and of a healing nature for the possessed.
Ifriqiyya Électrique released this year their second album, Laylet el Booree, following up their debut Rûwâhîne and continues to cross the bridge between technology and the traditional, creating and inducing trance in its listeners and reaffirming the healing and transcendental power of music that simply holds no barriers.
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| Image by Renaud de Foville |
- You have released your second album this year called Laylet el Booree. What new sonic elements did you want to explore in more depth with this new album?
- We were surprised by the “success” of the first album. The whole year before the recordings of Laylet el Booree we’ve been thinking, asking… then decide to have exactly the same strategy of Rûwâhîne: just doing what we wanted, what the original field-recordings were calling/asking for. Getting more extreme, in any ways, from metal to techno. Then adding a lot of composed rhythms, like Gianna playing in 7, me in 9, Simoh & Boualem in 4 then powerfully meeting all together every x bars. And of course, not caring at all about the taste of the formatted world-music network.
"A kind of new concept: traveling/composing/writing/
- In 2017, after the release of your debut album, you toured a lot and played in the stages of some famous festivals and here in Portugal you played in Milhões de Festa (Barcelos), Festival Med (Loulé) and FMM (Sines). How did the local Tunisian community dealt and still deals with Ifriqiyya Electrique’s popularity?
- We had to talk a lot about this all together. Explaining that money would have bring troubles (and did so). But the Banga, an ostracized community from the desert, in a country where people are quite racists (black people are often called “waseef”, dirty), were proud of this success: we were the only Tunisian band traveling regularly all over the world.
- Ifriqiyya Électrique is in some way the result of endless musical exploration of different cultures all around the world. Apart from the Banga ritual, with its chants and entrancing rhythms, what other sonic worlds did you find that most impressed and inspired you in your travels?
- Ifriqiyya Electrique is the second research of our Trans-Aeolian Transmission, a cell dedicated to the musics of elevation. A kind of new concept: traveling/composing/writing/filming somewhere else, as far as possible, where neither the music industry nor the artistic agencies will ever take any western musician, really gone-out in countries defined impossible to reach, considered much too dangerous - but especially of derisory earnings and thus unimportant interest (they say). Just approaching to be and to become what really the music is when it is not venal any more: a wind, a flutter, a little thing otherwise nothing, but an libertarian emotion.
The first realization of the Trans-Aeolian Transmission is called “Xinjiang, Taklamakan & Karakoram”, a research in the Xinjiang area with Uyghurs musicians (shamans, bards and Dolans), then reconstructed with computers and electrical instruments, going into a documentary/fiction/road-movie/concert on an edited film shot in the depths of the desert of Taklamakan, up in the mountains of Karakoram as well as in the deep-hearts of last cities of the Silk Route, an adventure/creation between Kashgar, Marqit, Larkam and on the Pakistani, Tajik and Kirghiz borders.
Lately we’ve been passing months (almost a year) in Dersim, a part of the Turkish Kurdistan, working/creating with the Alevis. We just finished the editing of this third movie/concert. Then in July we will be back to Tajikistan, exploring the falak in Pamir, the roof of the world.
This may sound opportunistic. But life is short: you should live your dreams as fast as you can. And I like to study, to learn. Especially the music that I don’t understand. I did start with punk, going to jazz, going to improvisation, going to modern classical, going to oriental, going to noise, going to flamenco, then techno, metal and so on….
"The social role that this music have, play for free to heal people. Highlighting the fact that the need to do some good to yourself is universal, and that music had always precisely that role. A deep social function, like pogo, techno, rock or tarantella, to forgot about the tedium vitae, to have a social space where you can loose your mind. This is absolutely universal. If done with honesty, and not just entertaining."
- The sonic dimension of this album is very intense and as in the previous record there is an avant-garde quality that is more prevalent in some of the songs, like Danee Danee, for instance. How do you feel avant-garde’s role in cinema and music in today’s world?
- I hate the word “avant-garde”: it’s definitively onanism for westerners. Better quoting Pier Paolo Pasolini: «The world rots in a well-being which is only egoism, stupidity, lack of education, gossip, moralism, constraint, conformity: to contribute in any way to this decay is maintaining the fascism.» (Vie Nuove n. 36, 6 september 1962), then Gian Maria Volontè: «Being an artist is a choice that is at first at an essential level: either one chooses to express the conservative structures of society and one is happy to be a robot between the Hands of Power, or we address our work to the progressive components of this society in an attempt to establish a revolutionary relationship between art and life.»
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| Image by Renaud de Foville |
- We can learn a lot from a culture through its music. What was the element in Banga, visual or auditive, that caused the first and strongest impression when you first saw/heard it?
- The social role that this music have, play for free to heal people. Highlighting the fact that the need to do some good to yourself is universal, and that music had always precisely that role. A deep social function, like pogo, techno, rock or tarantella, to forgot about the tedium vitae, to have a social space where you can loose your mind. This is absolutely universal. If done with honesty, and not just entertaining.
Sonically wise, Gianna & me felt immediately in love with the volume & the violence, the extreme way of living music of these Maghrebi communities (next to them people like Keiji Haino, Meshuggah, Swans or Caspar Brötzmann are just nuns with recorders). Intensive. No joke. No theatrical attitude.
- Ifriqiyya Électrique unites several musicians from very different musical backgrounds that managed to create this special kind of sound that fuses the modern with the traditional in a very unique way. How was the first time that you played together?
- The first rehearsals took place in Tozeur, in the desert, in the open courtyard of the ruined house we did rent for years. Our three heroes were covering our amps & p.a.: we were in the full-red, and neighbors were dancing on the roof. We were shocked. They were shocked. We all had the feeling that a whole world has been discovered.
Then the music went on. From almost a year, in Ifriqiyya Électrique the gnawa (Morocco) & Diwan (Algeria) came in. We all wanted to include the “cousins” of our electrified Stambeli (Tunisia). So arrived Simoh Bouchra and Boualem Fedel.
- During November you’ll be touring France and Belgium in more intimate kind of venues. Do you think that Ifriqiyya Électrique’s trance inducing music is better experienced in these type of venues and how do you feel the connection between the band and the audience when you play in them?
- Great question! On a huge stage, in a huge festival, it’s awesome how the audience is pushing us. It’s more like the annual gathering of the communities in the desert, sometimes up to 10.000 people. But in the clubs, we play on the floor, in & with the audience, separated each of us at the 4 corners of the room. People are in the middle, confused. An attempt of recreating a ritual situation where we can touch and push people. This is also what we have been doing for years with the Putan Club: killing the idea of star-system, getting down the altar. It’s much more risky. And much more human.
- Music can be a path to a higher state of conscience that for some people is a connection to the divine, being used in religious rituals all over the world. In Banga we can sense the harmony between the Arab and the African cultures in a world where people want to build even more walls and demonize certain cultures. Do you think art in the west has been taking a strong enough stance against those kind of politics?
- In the West, so called “art” is mainly merely business. And then the revolution must be global, from economics to arts, all over the planet. No, the entire world still did not took a strong stance against toxic politics.
- What other artistic side projects are Ifriqiyya Électrique’s members involved in that you wish to divulge?
We are coming from:
- PUTAN CLUB; The Putan Club is part of the soundtrack from "A Fábrica de Nada", a movie from Pedro Pinho, presented at "Quinzaine des Réalisateurs"/Director's Fortnight as part of the Cannes 2017 Film Festival, Fipresci prize.
- TRANS-AEOLIAN TRANSMISSION; Researches, then creations, faraway & elsewhere. Concerts & Road-Movies.
"Xinjiang, Taklamakan & Karakoram: Shamans & Dolans in the Uyghur County" (People's Republic of China); Research, Concert - Road-Movie around Uyghur Music.
Video extracts, “Alevilik Aşkına” (Kurdistan, Turkey), Research, footage, recordings & creation around Alevi music of Dersim, Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. A musical Road-Movie/Poetry/Concert.
- MACHINE ROUGE; (with Denis Lavant); Literature. Theater. Extra-Contemporary Poetry. Post-Industrial Music and Magnificent Savagery.
Text and interview: Cláudia Zafre
Band: Ifriqiyya Électrique (François R. Cambuzat)
Images: Renaud de Foville
Band: Ifriqiyya Électrique (François R. Cambuzat)
Images: Renaud de Foville