“Charaa,” the long centerpiece of this intercontinental mash-up, spins unsteadily on waltz-time rhythm, a snare picking out the two upbeats, a woozy chorus of “la la las” pitching and weaving, a feverish treble of non-Western guitar skittering over the surface, scrambling frantically for a foothold. As it goes on, the steadiness of ¾ time disintegrates as a member of Group Doueh, the guitar masters from the very Western edge of Morocco, begins singing in a warbling, note-shifting, free-flow of luxuriant note-age that twines and curls and doubles back like some type of growing tendril caught on time-lapse camera. The music ebbs and flows, with French punks of Cheveu positing forthright, straight-ahead beats and the Africans of Group Doueh responding with…
…tangled, untethered complexity. There is a long, flute-driven coda that seems wholly African and almost like another song altogether. The track, and with it this remarkable record has, almost, a battle of the bands feel, as one party faces off and the other responds and if the two meet, it’s because they jostle in the middle, not because they’ve melted into any sort of whole.
Dakhla: Sahara Session was recorded in nine days, in a crowded space a stone-throw from the Atlantic Ocean, by two bands that barely knew each other and had, by all reports, a rough time breaking the ice. Cheveu, let’s call them punk because what else are we going to do, are resolute experimenters. Reviewing their 2011 album, 1000, Doug Mosurock noted that one of the best things about the record was the string trio arrangements. He wrote, “Very few of Cheveu’s records sound alike from each other, the band always having adopted a new style to push against our notions of who they are at any given time, but reliant on their own personalities and charisma as a signature.”
Group Doueh, likewise, shifts its sound from album to album, though perhaps less drastically, since its material is founded in deep tradition. Bill Meyer, reviewing Beatte Harab in 2010, got the band’s sound down pretty well when he wrote, “The music still consists of trilling string bursts and stabbing, impassioned vocals that lunge at you from the cover of loping, unevenly accented beats.”
So what happens when two such headstrong experimenters sit in a hot room with amps and instruments for nine days? A sort of rough magic. ““Moto Deux Places” begins in a clicking, clopping rhythm, soon picked up by by tight circling keyboard riffs, an irregular guitar, a heady spin of a song that whirls very fast while remaining exactly where it is. David Lemoine of Cheveu is singing at first, punk style in a block-rhythmed spoke-song chant, then Group Doueh’s members come in with a freer, more luxuriant call and response, the rhythms of speech enjambed into one another in complex curlicues. “Bord de Mer” suggests disco for a nanosecond, its opening riff recalling the BeeGees “Stayin’ Alive” stripped down to basics: throb and grind and thwack. Then it, too, veers off into dizzy complexity, the vocals slippery with extra notes and bends, shape-shifting as you listen.
This is not the kind of collaboration where you have to untangle who does what. The focus shifts from one band to another within the space of the song, and each comes out of the fray more or less as he or she went in. Cheveu’s members make no attempt to bend to the West African aesthetic, and Group Doueh plays from their rep book right over whatever punk mayhem Cheveu has put on offer. There’s a great deal of tension in these tunes, as two very different sets of musicians block out space for themselves. And yet, it’s a wonderful thing, feistier and more belligerent than most cross-cultural meetings. “Tout Droit,” the CD’s most exhilarating cut, sets up a rousing, shout-chanted Cheveu chorus, punctuated by grunts and “huhs,” then cuts it to ribbons with ravaging flourishes of guitar, ebullient forays of singing. The two bands are doing entirely different things, at the same exact time, and it works like a motherfucker.
You might be tempted to compare Dakhla: Sahara Session with The Ex’s work with Getatchew Mekuria (and other Ethiopians), because, you know, Euro-punk band + African traditional musicians = x. But this is a red herring. The Ex spent decades understanding the Ethiopians, playing with them, touring with them, recording them. Cheveu holed up for a little more than an uncomfortable week with Group Doueh and came out bloody. If you want to hear the struggle of trying to communicate on the fly across every kind of cultural barrier, of fighting out your differences, of battling to a noisy, life-affirming draw, Sahara Session is your jam. — dusted
320 kbps | 102 MB | 
320 kbps | 173 MB | 
