Revolt Against Reason

There's a general rule when evaluating the Moroccan pop recordings handled by the Barraka El Farnatshi Productions/Barbarity axis in Switzerland: The further back in time you go, the better the music is. This was, after Aisha Kandisha's landmark El Buya release, the first recording to be distributed through that organization. There's more Western consciousness in the electronic dance rhythms especially, but there's still a lot of resonant verve to the string instruments, some wonderfully emotional singing, and a bit of an anything-goes attitude to the insertion of samples and electronic effects. One gets the feeling that the group is still trying to wrestle, both physically and conceptually, with modern equipment and dubbing/editing techniques. In cultural collisions such as these, that's a good thing, not a bad one, lending the whole project a degree of frontier-stretching spontaneity.