OK, this is one of the more obnoxious cassettes in my stash. You may love it, hate it, or both! Abdenbi (
Llah irhamuh) used to flee the room if this came on the tape player back in '92. Not only does it feature the sort of songs that the ladies sing when they get together and sit around drumming and hanging out (and talking crap about the men). But it replaces the cool stratified drumming of
Moroccan women's percussion ensembles with a drum machine. Doubly annoying!
Or doubly awesome! You get rocking, spirited, call-response singing, typical themes of unrequited love (track 2), exile (track 3), betrayal (track 6) and trance (track 7), a live
derbuka plus electro-drum fills, plenty of
zgharit-s (ululations), a guy who adds rhythmic vocal inserts here and there and sounds like a cow (track 6, 1:05), and the epic White Album intro to track 3 ("Airplane, bring me back to my homeland").
Totally saturated sound increases the annoyance/awesomeness factor. Enjoy and/or use it to empty the room of humans.
BTW1 - No idea if the woman pictured on the j-card is part of the ensemble. If I had to guess, I would say probably not.
BTW2 - The group's name
Bnate Errma (girls of the
rma) suggests some association with the fantastic rural (male) genre
'abidat errma, but I don't know enough about
'abidat errma to know if this group is pulling any special influence from that source.
Get it
here.
A lovely album from my fave singer of chanson moderne (or musiqa 'asriya). This genre represents the Moroccan version of 20th century Arab art song, based on the model of great Egyptial musical artists such as Umm Kulthum and Muhammad Abdel Wahab. Big orchestras, lush arrangements, large-scale song forms, thoughtful poetry.
