Abdelli: an open mind across musical frontiers

Compact choice: Among Brothers, Abdelli
Real World

There are four albums hiding inside Among Brothers. The Algerian singer and his producer Thierry Van Roy recorded it four times over, taking Abdelli’s vocals and a basic percussion track to Cape Verde, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso and finally the castle of Voorde in Belgium. The result was four sets of musicians, each responding to the skeletons of the songs on offer without hearing what anyone else had done.

“Individual musicians each kept to their own style without seeking to fuse it with that of other cultures,” says Van Roy. “The end result consists of a controlled fusion, or even a complete absence of fusion.”

In the studio, the producers’ subtle knife cuts between the four universes and an Azeri flute finds itself in unwitting duet with an African percussion section.

Abdelli has always been open to external influences. His debut, 1995’s New Moon (Real World), combined the traditional North African darbukas and bendirs with Chilean cajones, tormentos and charangos, and a Ukrainian bandura, a gigantic zither. National myth has it that the Berbers discovered the Americas centuries before Columbus, hence the South American connection. Among Brothers, similarly, skirts the musical borderlands of the old Berber empire, which ran from Egypt to the Canary Islands. The South Americans are back too.

The album was recorded largely on location, rather than in studios, and there is a crunchy, organic quality to the instrumentation, as a battery of wooden and metal things are struck and plucked. Van Roy’s occasional exhalation of synthesiser is suitably discreet. The sound world bears witness to the differing acoustics of the volcanic valleys of Cape Verde, the site of ancient stone carvings in the desert of Qobustan, an echoing cultural centre in Baku, the courtyard house of Mani Sanou in the Bolomakote in Burkina Faso. On “Svar”, as Abdelli sings about the need for patience in a song that plays like one long introduction, a stray goat can be heard bleating on a neighbouring hillside.

Given the way the album was recorded, perhaps the greatest surprise is how few surprises there are. The instruments dovetail beautifully, the Cape Verdean diatonic accordion at the start of “Itij” (The Sun) gliding up and down the scales as Abdelli hymns Slimane Azem, one of the pioneers of Berber song.

In spite of its title, the world the album paints is dark. “Instead of uniting/We betray each other,” sings Abdelli on “Kif-Kif”. “It is the traitors who are applauded/And the good ones who are despised,” warns “Asiram” (Hope), over a jaunty melody. “Adhou” (Wind) has a plea: “When our brother shines/Let us no longer be jealous of him.”

On “Ayen” (Why) he bemoans the fate of the exile: “I am drowning/It is the ocean of darkness/All those who were dear to me/I can only meet in my dreams/Today I am slowly dying/Life has lost its taste.” But the liveliness and glee of the musical collaboration undermine this bleakness. If Abdelli is really drowning, he is going down fighting.

David Honigmann
Financial Times, 19 April 2003