We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira

by Mahmoud Ghania & Abdellah

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD  or more

     

1.
Chelha 03:26
2.
Dahven 06:18
3.
Mogador 08:06
4.
Mektoub 07:01
5.
6.
7.
Fraja 02:48

about

Eat the Dream: Gnawa Music from Essaouira
SF071

Recorded and compiled by Tucker Martine in 1994, the bulk of this album features the magnificent results of a chance meeting between Martine and the late, great master of Gnawa music, Maâllem Boubker Ghania (1927–2000), who kindly offered to organize a several-day informal recording session in his home. Martine began rolling tape as musicians came and went throughout the sessions. These spectacular recordings from Essaouira Morocco are interwoven here with other encounters including a wedding procession in the streets of Marrakech, snake charmers of the Jemma El Fna with their rhaitas, calls to prayer with children playing while James Brown echoed off of the labyrinthian walls, Moroccan radio dial surfing and more.

The Gnawa are a mystical brotherhood whose ancestors migrated from West Africa to North Africa approximately 500 years ago. After integrating into the local Berber and Arabic societies, a unique cultural blend resulted which is reflected in their music. Their complex liturgy borrows both from the traditions of mystical Islam and African Shamanism. The Gnawa's trance-inducing music accompanies rituals such as the healing of psychic disorders and scorpion stings, Ramadan celebrations and animal sacrifice. Participants in these all night rituals are invited into an ecstatic state. The primary instruments of this tradition are the krakebs (a pair of metal clappers) and the guimbri (or sintir), a three stringed lute with a camel skin covering and a body carved from a log. The one short string and two long strings are made of goat gut.

credits

released July 7, 2012

Recorded By, Producer, Liner Notes – Tucker Martine

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Sublime Frequencies Seattle, Washington

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, other forms of human and natural natural expression not documented sufficiently enough by various communication channels. ... more

contact / help

Contact Sublime Frequencies

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira, you may also like: