Still hard to believe that Mustapha Baqbou is gone. The great guinbri player from Marrakech passed away in September, as we commemorated in a previous post. I checked the stash to see if I any additional recordings of his that I could share. I found a copy of a cassette of his that has appeared online before: many years ago at the defunct Murky Recesses blog, and recently in a YouTube complete album upload:
The album is very good and well recorded, but there is a lot of tape hiss on the recording, especially on side B (at least this edition of it - my copy is the same edition as the embedded YouTube video above). I was able to roll back a fair amount of the hiss using Audacity. My audio software (Logic) recently rolled out a new stem splitter feature that can identify voices and some instruments in a recording and separate them into tracks. So I thought I'd try my hand at a remix - eq'ed the vocal and the guinbri, added a tiny bit more stereo separation between them and a little reverb (between the noise reduction and the stem separation, the sound had become very dry). Finally, I used the mastering tool to algorithmically improve the overall sound, and I'm pretty happy with the results! Hope you enjoy it too!
Mustapha Baqbou مصطفى باقبو
EH1271 (2025 Moroccan Tape Stash Remix)
A1 Baniya - Sidi Hammou
A2 Chalaba Titara - Mimouna
B1 Berrma Nana Soutanbi - Aicha Lagnawiya
B2 Hamdouchia
B3 Jilali Boualam (fadeout)
