Animator Sabine Saba sets textural graphics with the excessive metres of ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’, a emphasize from Ibtihalat, the launching album from artist, designer and scientist Mhamad Safa.
On Ibtihalat, Safa checksout the percussive musical customs from throughout north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, fumbling with geopolitical intricacy and musical migrations while at the verysame time gesturing towards possible future versions of these sounds. From North Africa, Safa raises aspects from gnawa, West African, Islamic music with routine significance that spread throughout the breadth of the continent bymeansof artists forces to relocate to the Moroccan coast, amazigh, polyrhythmic music native to the Berbers of north Africa, and raï, Algerian folk music noteworthy for its anti-colonial lyrical material and it’s adjustment by females singers and entertainers (cheikas) as emblematic of sexual freedom and hedonism. From the Arabian Peninsula, Safa recommendations Sea Music, more typically understood as Music of the Pearl Divers, work tunes created by the ship contractors, seafarer and pearl scubadivers of the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, laywa, ritualistic music from Bahrain, UAE, Oman and Basra, Iraq brought over throughout servant trades from Kenya, South Somalia and Tanzania, and samiri, music associated to Zar routines of exorcism and spirit expulsion. Drawing from a stretching, yet inherently connected, patchwork of cultural exchange and musical custom, Safa threads highly textured percussive structures, headfuck assemblages of noise style, micro-sampling, algorithmic noise innovation, psychoacoustics, field recordings, and their graphic analyses. “The album crafts a multi-patterned sonorous speculation, reflective of percussive musical customs whose histories and provides shapeshifted with spatial and logistical yet celestial imaginaries,” he discusses.
For the excessive visual accompaniment to the evocatively entitled ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd,’ which plays on the complex metres of gnawa, animator Sabine Saba layers visual texture, controling images of rock developments, classical architecture and bisected fiber optic cabletelevisions. “This workout unsettles the proposal-driven usage of computersystem graphics by takingalookat existing georealities atfirst modeled into being,” discusses Saba. “It glimpses through their shifts and rifts to appearance for possible future encounters inbetween people and land.” Like Safa’s production, Saba unpicks historic types in order to hypothesize on future potentialities, blurring and mixing ecological and technological development over quickly broadening and contracting timelines in the fast advancement of his animations. As ‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’ pinballs inbetween low-slung lollop and high stress spring, drilling guttural singing chops into many-metred percussion, robotic arms and valuable metals are folded into an jittering landscape of ancient caves and turning coliseums, shining chrome and sand-coloured stone.
‘Ouda And The Strikers At Najd’ is taken from Ibtihalat, which getshere on A