Music Reviews

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Artist: Azurazia
Title: Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara
Format: 2 x 12"
Label: Grautag (@)
Distributor: Staalplaat
Rated: *****
Coming from an interesting experiment by Grautag label manager Nicolas Moulin, a French artist and photographer, who actually lives in Berlin where he's trying to develop the idea of a "self-generating" label together with other artistic projects as well as overturn some conventional schemes of music production, Azurazia is a very interesting project, based on a sort of back-propagation process: "Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara" - the title supposedly has been inspired by Atlantropa, the idea of German architect Herman Sorgel, whom Nazis banned, about the building of a dam on Straits of Gibraltar in order to produce hydro-electric power from the different sea level of the Mediterranean sea and Atlantic Ocean to irrigate dry areas and avoid further desertification of many surrounding lands - should be the soundtrack for a movie, which has not been made yet, a curious way to break the usual progression based on the issue of a book, feeding the plot for a movie, followed by the issue of its OST. Each of four long track has been partitioned in various episodes, whose title recalls the typical partition of a play script or the paragraphs of a book, so that listeners' imagination could be driven in the funny process of self-building of a possible plot, whose setting should be the place where the involved sound artists, Vincent Epplay, Pharoah Chromium, and Arnaud Maguet, grabbed most of the samples and field recordings to feed their sound banks, Morocco. Even if music includes many hooks and references to Moroccan traditional music, ritual dances and field recordings, it's quite different from projects which enclosed those sonorities such as Raksha Mancham, Amira Saqati, Master Musicians of Joujouka or other artists of Barraka El Farnatshi's roster due to its cinematic structure and the continuous contamination of drones, ambient and electronic sounds, which act as an adhesive of different sonic sketches, which pass through listeners's mind in a riveting way, just like the scenes of the supposedly forthcoming movie.


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