posts on the norient space by Gilles Aubry

An extended conversation with the Moroccan composer about performance in electroacoustic music, cultural roots and identity, the importance of music, the voice and the body, nature and ecology, and many more topics.

In this introduction to his book «Sawt, Bodies, Species», Gilles Aubry situates his research project on the sonic dimensions of our environment, tracing alternate genealogies of sound, listening, and technology in North Africa.

With a short history of sound technology and music industry in Morocco since the early 20th century, the chapter proposes a close listening to early Moroccan rwais music recordings with the singer Ali Faiq.

In 1959, the American writer Paul Bowles recorded an ahwash music performance in the Moroccan Berber town Tafraout in 1959. In 2013, Gilles Aubry initiated a research on the reception of these recordings in today’s Morocco during listening sessions with local musicians.

The scientific research on seaweed of the biologist Younes Boundir provides an entry point into industrial extractivism and ecological justice in Morocco.

A series of joint experiments in stone sounding with the Moroccan artist Abdeljalil Saouli leads to a decolonial dialogue on sonic materialism and posthumanism.

Moroccan visual artist Ramia Beladel’s performative art practice on popular Sufism provides a starting point for considering sonic experience from the perspective of gender and embodiment.

An experimental film on seaweed and industrial extractivism on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, inviting the spectator into a process of ecological transformation.

As part of the research project on sound, ecology, and seaweed production, this video documents a collective baking session with a group of women who collect seaweed for a living in Sidi Bouzid on the Moroccan Atlantic Coast.

A violent earthquake destroyed the city of Agadir, Morocco, in 1960. Shot inside the Salam movie theater and its surroundings, the video essay is a tentative reconstitution of the earthquake as a sonic moment.

A film without images documenting the authors’ research in Tafraout, Morocco, a village where Paul Bowles recorded an ahwash music performance in 1959. In exchange with local musicians, the two artists engage in listening sessions and sonic experiments.

This video is a documentation of a joint experiment in stone sounding in Moulay Bouchta, Morocco, featuring statements by the Moroccan artist Abdeljalil Saouli on the nature of stone and of sound itself.

Informed by Ramia Beladel’s research on Sufi healing, this sound piece relies on trance and self-reconfiguration. The soundtrack includes sounds recorded during an annual celebration of the local saint in Moulay Bouchta, Morocco.

The 1960 earthquake in the Moroccan city of Agadir and its aftermaths reveal a heterogenous «unsound» field, between state-supported technocratic listening and Indigenous sonic virtuality.