The sound of distant drums, encrypted and broadcast from the back streets of Marrakesh, across the sun kissed islands of the Mediterranean to the shores of a grateful European continent – ‘The Thousands Sunsets’ is the latest instalment from Abel Ray, online now. Capturing the spirit of diverse north African dance music, Abel Ray releases his debut EP on PRAH Recordings on June 25th.
Labyrinth EP is a work of entirely modern construction, and yet it owes its origins to the ages. Programmed and produced to carry emotional weight and melodic reward in a digital age, here are the threads of a culture lost and found; spiritual, material, imagined, remembered, and mythologized.
‘Last Exit To Transkei’ – the first single taken from the EP earlier this year – was premiered by Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC 6Music. It is available now on DSPs and YouTube.
“This EP came out of a book I read” explains Abel who was born in Casablanca and lives in Marrakesh, “the civilization of Amazigh culture, it was a maze, a maze of how people can be merged into each other and still keep the colors and sounds alive along thousands of years, an authenticity kept being modernized, and it will still be.”
This conception of a cultural maze, an expanding sphere of colors and sounds, picked up and put down, built and borrowed, timeless and modern is an abstract for Abel Ray’s four track Labyrinth EP.
At the height of their collective power the Amazigh civilization ranged across north Africa to southern Europe, it conquered and was humbled, it absorbed and it overcame, it has dissolved and yet it precipitates throughout our world. Today the Amazigh are over 50million people, large minority populations in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, across Africa and Europe, a culture at once ancient and contemporary.
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