Traditional music is the foundation of Guedra Guedra’s electronic sound.
Body percussion, Amazigh and Maasai vocals, polyrhythmic soundscapes that merge analog drum machines with African instruments and Sufi chants — these are just a few of the sonic elements that make up MUTANT, Guedra Guedra’s second album.
For this project, the DJ and producer — born Abdellah M. Hassak — spent recent years collecting sounds and inspiration from across the continent, traveling to Tanzania, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal, Egypt, and Tunisia for field recordings that he incorporates into his electronic music.
“My creative process always starts with listening,” Hassak tells OkayAfrica in a call from his home in Marrakech. “We didn't have access to this material before, but now I can discover archives from different places.”
His artistic namesake, Guedra, is a traditional percussive instrument, a large earthenware jar, as well as a sacred Amazigh ritual dance practiced in the southern desert regions of Morocco, typically led by women.
Hassak chooses to live in Marrakech because it is a multicultural melting pot and has Morocco’s best travel access.
Photo by Joanna Bellon
Guedra Guedra is more than an artist name — it’s a socio-political concept and project through which Hassak archives and re-centers African rhythmic traditions to decolonize sound and “celebrate African complexity and futurism.” He doubles his name as a way of extending the roots he honors in his music, to step onto a dance floor that makes space for imagination from a place of deeply knowing tradition.
Blending the organic with the electronic, MUTANT is a vibrant and intentional journey across the continent. It’s danceable, sure, but beneath its energetic surface, it’s a class in African instrumentation, rhythmic and spiritual tradition, and music history.
“African percussion is more than just music; it represents the heartbeat of life, from breathing and walking to the changing seasons and the pulse of the earth,” Guedra says about “Drift of Drummer,” the album’s opening track which references Djémbe rhythms and vocals from Guinea as well as the Ndokpa, a traditional xylophone of the Banda people in Central Africa.
While each song carries sounds of different places, polyrhythms, which make use of two or more different rhythms simultaneously, constitute the project’s throughline. “I never used to think of polyrhythms, I just composed,” says Hassak. “But when people listened to my music, they’d talk about them. So I tried to learn more about polyrhythms from other African countries and adapt them into the technological equipment that we have today.”
“It’s like a conversation where everyone finds their place in a group. They play their own rhythm, but it can meet in a place where the others are playing,” he continues. “This is what all African polyrhythms have in common.”
That is not to say that all these rhythms are the same. Each region has its own concepts and percussion. On MUTANT, they converge in a Pan-African exploration of what it means to be able to access all these different musical corners of the continent through modern technology.
“Machines were not created for music from SWANA, Africa, or South America, but it’s a new creative challenge to use this software and develop our music,” he says. “I believe that electronic music has the power to deconstruct technologies and machines, to integrate our social practice of making music.”
“For me, decolonizing is about reclaiming the right to define my narrative, aesthetic, and future. In sounds, that means challenging Western dominance in music, but also not rejecting the technology of today,” says Hassak.
Photo by Joanna Bellon
When Hassak cannot travel, because intra-African travel is expensive and often badly connected, he asks friends to send him field recordings or looks for random, spontaneous recordings on YouTube.
He then improvises in his studio, playing around with sound until he starts sculpting the layers and strings that will eventually tie a poem or a chant to a drum and a synth.
How do people feel about the way he reinvents their folk music, adding synths and bass to often spiritual traditions? “They are really open to reimagining traditional music,” he says. “In Morocco, we have lots of collaborations between people playing jazz or reggae or rock and gnawa. And some places in Africa, like Ethiopia or Morocco, have traditional music that is completely electronic.
It is this emphasis on collaboration that makes MUTANT so interesting. On “The Arc of Three Colors” and “Tamayyurt,” Amazigh singer Foulane Bouhssine lends his voice to preserving the tradition of Ahwach, a cultural practice of community expression through dance, song, and poetry that is deeply rooted in Amazigh villages of the High and Anti-Atlas Mountains.
“The idea is to recreate new music coming from this collective choreography and the Amazigh spirit,” says Hassak.
On “Tribes with Flags,” one of Hassak’s favorite tracks on the album, award-winning director, producer, and visual artist Jihan El-Tahri invites listeners to imagine themselves as future African archeologists reflecting on the decay of Pan-Africanism. Sifting through remnant memories of the period of independence, she wonders if it has died or can still be revived.
El-Tahri’s words, “Was it Lumumba, Nkrumah, Nasser and Cabral who were misguided or did we just go astray? [...] When did humanity lose its compass?” are followed by a crackling silence in which Hassak hopes that listeners will take a moment to think about the questions raised.
