Shikh Hassan El Dariouki - Aita Haouzia From The Turn Of The Century

Here's a cassette of Aita Haouzia from the year 2000. The performers are the group Ouled el Haouz featuring Shikh Hassan Dariouki (here misspelled as Darouki, elsewhere spelled Driouki or Daryouki). During my fieldwork time in Morocco, they were ubiquitious - I saw them perform on the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech, at an Aita festival in Safi, and at a gathering of ethnomusicologists in Tangier. 

We've featured some fine Aita Haouzia recordings before in the stash here and here, but it's been a hot minute since we did so. Frankly I'd forgotten I had this tape. I think I never shared it because I thought it wasn't as good as the other two, but upon listening again, and aided by the magic of a little EQ and compression, it sounds pretty good to me today. 

Aita Haouzia is such a great sound - scratchy fiddle and screechy vocals staying within the range of a minor third for the entire song, accompanied by explosive beats on the little tarija clay goblet drums (how do those little drums make such startling big noises?). The Dariouki group seemed to be the primary exponent of Aita Haouzia back around the turn of the century, or at least the most famous. Here's a video clip of them in action around this time - I believe this comes from a 2004 VCD:

One thing I love about this group is the old thin guy with glasses who doesn't sing but just dances and wanders around the stage, sometimes getting up on the qaada to stamp out a beat with his feet. Hassan El Dariouki has passed away, but according to this article, the dancer, Mohamed Zaitra, was still alive and stepping in beat as recently as 2024. May God give him, and all of us, health, joy, and transcendent grooves.

Cheikh Hassan El Darouki شيخ حسن الدروكي
M3a Farqat Oulad Al Haouz مع فرقة ولاد الحوز
[with Ensemble Oulad al Haouz]
Safi Disque cassette 15/2000 صافي ديسك 

FLAC | 320

Rouicha - Aouraamache Aouri Ta3fat

Another Rouicha banger for your digital cassette rack. I obtained this tape recently. One of my favorite Rouicha tapes is TCK819 (now reupped in FLAC!), so I wondered whether TCK820, whose j-card features the same photo and yellow color scheme, might come from the same session and might be as jamming or be in a similar vein.

I've been trying to get my mind around the Rouicha discography for a while. He has released so many recordings over the years, the largest chunk being the cassettes on Tichkaphone. Between Discogs, various other online sources, and what I have on hand, I've identified almost 80 individual cassettes released on Tichkaphone, dating I would guess from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s. Like most Moroccan tapes, none of them list a release date or copyright date. One can assume that the catalog number listed on the cassette j-card indicates the sequence in which they were released. That may be so, but it's not clear whether the music contained on those cassettes was newly recorded at the time of release or had been sitting in the can for some time. As I related in my first Rouicha post in 2011, I visited the Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques in Casablanca, which also served at that time as the headquarters of Tichkaphone. This would have been in around 2001. I was told that they had around 30 albums worth of Rouicha recordings that had not yet been released. It would sure be nice to know when the various songs and albums were recorded and released.

One think I noticed while compiling my list of Tichkaphone cassettes is that they appear to be released in groups of 2, sometimes 4 consecutive catalog numbers. In most of these cases, one release would feature songs in the Tamazight language while its companion release would be in Moroccan Arabic darija. Doubling up the production one each release would seem to maximize the appeal to the different linguistic audiences. 

Back to the tape at at hand - it is the Tamazight companion to the Arabic release TCK819. It is excellent, but it does not feel or sound like the same session, despite the consecutive catalog numbers. Where TCK819 has a warm, dynamic sound, this one is thin, sounding almost like an AM radio broadcast compared to an FM broadcast. With the miracle of modern music apps, I was able to warm up and fill out the sound to give the lotar more of the round, low-end sound we know and love, and to give the bendir more of that good boom and buzz. I think it turned out alright and I don't think these songs are online anywhere else. Enjoy!

Rouicha رويشة
Tichkaphone cassette TCK 820 تشكفون

A1 Aouraamache Aouri Ta3fat ْأورَامَشْ أوُري تَعْفَات
A2 Awerd Agankh ْأورْدَاڭَّنْخ
B1 Magharghat Taddout ْمَاغَرْغَاتْ تَدُّوت
B2 Maayatousaawat ْمَايَتْوَصّات

FLAC | 320

Mâalem Mohamed Daoui - Gnawa Variétés From Meknes - Track 2 Destroyed Me

 

Here's a nice old-school Gnawa cassette from Mâalem Mohamed Daoui. During my research days (late 1990s - early 2000s), Daoui was the most well known Gnawa mâalem from Meknes. I believe he was the primary interlocutor for the German researcher Frank Welte, whose Der Gnawa-Kult: Trancespiele, Geisterbeschwörung und Besessenheit in Marokko (1990) was one of the first books on Gnawa ritual and repertoire. 

The cassette contains 3 tracks - the first is a 25-minute non-stop suite of songs from various sections of the Gnawa lila ceremony (black, blue, and red songs). This track crosses sides 1 and 2 of the cassette, but I was able to edit them together relatively seamlessly. 

The track that destroyed me was the second track. I made the mistake of transferring this tape when I was trying to do work for my day job. "Moulay Abdellah Ben Lhoucine" came out of the speakers and within about a minute my hair was down and I was stamping the floor with my bare feet and banging my hands on my desk/workstation. (Good thing I am working remotely these days...) The singing unfolds at its own pace, going on as long as it needs to, to give a listener (trancer) the lines of text that invoke the ambience of wali (saint), while the guinbri marks time, provocatively, underneath, and the choral responders keep the energy high and provacative. On the ritual floor, singing would continue until the mâalem judges that trancers are competently riding the groove and are ready to interact directly with the guinbi. His manipulation of riffs responds to (or provokes) the movements of whatever trancing body is directly in front of him, moving in dialogue or in concert with his guinbri. In this state of heightened musical awareness, trancers are keenly aware of the slightest variations of phrase, accent, and volume level. The job of the mâalem is to give the trancer the musical support to express in movement whatever needs to expressed. This track, better than most Gnawa tracks you will hear, gives a sense of how that conversation unfolds - though of course you are only hearing one side of it.

Daoui الضاوي
Variétés Marocaines Gnaoui منوعات ڭناوية
Sawt Isamailia cassette 015 صوت الإسماعلية

A1-B1 Berkilia - Fofo Denba - Lgnaoui Baba Mimoun - Samaoui - Marhaba Sidi Komwi
B2 Moulay Abdellah Ben Lhoucine - Moulay Brahim
B3 Mekkaoui Habib Allah - Âmmar Douwaya Abdellah

FLAC | 320