NEW ALBUMS
HOUEIDA HEDFI
A flowing pan-Arabic voyage.
By John Lewis
DISCOVERED Searching out the best albums new to Uncut
Fleuves De l’Âme
PHANTASY
8/10
THE debut album by the Tunisian musician Houeida Hedfi has been more than 10 years in the making. In 2011 she played percussion on a compilation album of female musicians from Tunisia, many of them linked to the Arab Spring protests of 2010 and 2011. Hedfi’s contribution was mixed by the Swedish producer Olof Dreijer – one half of the electronic duo The Knife – and the two developed a rapport.
Dreijer played flute in Hedfi’s band Hiya Wal Âalam, who toured America in 2015, and offered to produce her work.
Hedfi, however, didn’t release anything until she had completely refined her sound. She had started out as a percussionist in a band called Chabbouba, who specialised in stambeli, a form of percussive trance music associated with Tunisia’s black sub-Saharan minority.
“I loved it,” says Hedfi, “but the music was primarily rhythmic.
I needed melody.” Over the course of several years, Hedfi and Dreijer started to explore a kind of pan-Arabic chamber music that was primarily melodic, eventually settling on a core group – Palestinian bouzouki player Jalal Nader, Tunisian violinist Radhi Chaouali, Swedish cellist Agnes Magnusson and Parisian bassist Ragheb Ouerghi – along with a host of guest musicians.
The resulting album – Fleuves De l’Âme – creates a different kind of trance music, one where the meditative mood is created tonally rather than rhythmically. Hedfi still plays a variety of percussion instruments, but the rhythms tend to be muted; sometimes she plays tuned percussion like glockenspiels; more often she is playing soft chords on the piano.
The album is refracted through the lens of club culture – not only is it produced by Dreijer but it is being released on the record label owned by Erol Alkan (the London remixer and producer behind the likes of Duran Duran, The Killers and Ride and the DJ responsible for the iconic Trash club nights).
Yet this is not one of those clubby worldbeat albums that plasters breakbeats and electronic bleeps over traditional music. Instead the electronics are more subtly embedded in the music from the start. For instance, on “Namami Gange” (Obedience to the Ganges), a processed and sampled voice has been cleverly woven into a tapestry completed by Radhi Chaouali’s violins, Jalal Nader’s bouzouki and Saloua Ben Salah’s guitar. Dreijer plays woodwind instruments through effect units, other times he expertly recreates Arabic wind instruments on synthesisers. On