Our feeble summer passes on and an equally bony autumn stumbles into view. Work takes its grip (in spite of all intentions to the contrary) and here we are again. The needy little faces of the PP regulars, already on subsistence measures, gaze ruefully up at me from their empty bowls. It’s been a scarcely believable six weeks, I think.
Posts that begin with an apology are boring but…, well, I can only apologise.
You may have noticed over the years that, musically speaking, I like to travel a bit, I get bored easily and am always trawling through record shops, music books and websites for things that are new (and when I say “new”, I usually mean “old”, you understand). I gleefully shovel down a daily diet of all sorts of sticky treats from around the world – some smoky Ethiopiques morsel; a helping of garish Zamrock, a spot of delicately complex Afrobeat; some gooey Chicha or Cumbia for pudding; a glass of something Cambodian perhaps to wash it all down. In my headphones, I fancy myself a bit of an epicurean sightseer.
I’ve always struggled, however, with music from the Islamic or generally Arabic-speaking world. It’s all so densely different and hard to penetrate. I’ve never really managed to find a way in.
I think I have found an “in”, this time, though…
Algerian Proto-Rai
According to the fine folk at Sublime Frequencies, “proto-rai” is really a thing, and even if I wasn’t suckered in by the canny use of “proto”, who would I be to disagree with people that know stuff? After all, Link Wray was Proto; Hasil Adkins was Proto; the Sonics, Los Saicos, the Monks and the whole garage punk scene were Proto, the Cramps built a career on being Proto. Of course, there’s such a thing as Proto-Rai!
I picked up this banging Sublime Frequencies compilation during our peregrinations in London this summer, and I’m really only discovering it now. It’s a fantastic clutch of rough, gritty pleasures.
When I say “banging”, I’m not trying to sound like a radio DJ or a daytime TV chef, it really is a very noisy bunch of songs. And the percussion on all of the tracks is jarring and brittle – in some of them, the drummer (or one of them) sounds like he is using a metal oil can to build his foundation. It’s Proto Percussion.
1970s Algerian Proto Rai Underground is quite a concise little compilation of stark, noisy Arabic-ness – reedy accordions take the melody; what sound like tablas flutter around indistinctly in the middle ground; ululating vocalists prance around, insistently, singing about women, money problems or owning a car (something of an obsession, as far as I can gather). It’s a harsh but steamy brew.
On top of everything, the following appears in the liner notes:
“Around the late 1970’s, Cheb Zergui brought a newer ingredient [to Rai]: an electric guitar with a wah wah pedal.”
Oh my Lord.
Suddenly it’s all starting to take shape. The gruff sounds of Arabic and the complex movements of unknown instruments gain a little garish colour – it’s a flashing purplish light in a strange new (old) world.
Predictably, there’s little footage (well,… pretty much none to be fair) of what was certainly an underground (and apparently disapproved of) scene in Algeria at the time. But there are a few interesting clips to be found:
Here’s “the godfather of modern Rai”, trumpeter Messaoud Bellemou, in a later, gentler TV spot from the 90s, supporting the still-guttural sounds of Belkacem Bouteldja, both of whom are captured in their wilder days on the collection:
In all other senses of the phrase, I’m utterly in the dark though. I know very little about Rai music (you can Google it as well as me), I know almost nothing about Ahmed “Cheb” Zergui, other than that his band, Les Freres Zergui, contained no brothers and that the epithet “Cheb” – he is regarded as the first to take it – means “young”, in that he was new and different to the existing Rai singers of the seventies. The only other fact the Wikipedia gives me is that he died forty years ago in a car crash, while this young feller was mostly buying Joy Division and Cure records and only just trying a door marked “Proto”…
(I should mention that there’s quite a bewildering treasure store of Rai and Algerian clips on the YouTube channel “Old Rai – Le Rai d’Antan” which is well worth a visit. Chocful of reedy pleasures, you could easily lose a Sunday morning there…)
And here’s one final clip which absolutely captures my sense of musical blindman’s buff here in the strange world of Rai. It’s a clip from some sort of open air show… somewhere… by someone… recorded… at some point in 2018. Arabic speakers will be able to read the comments and I’d be more than grateful if they could tell me what people are saying about it. But in the meantime, I remain happily blindfolded, pushed from one sniggering party goer to the next, unable to distinguish anything but the sounds of a wah wah pedal in a strange rich world.
To be fair, I’m more than happy in the dark…
Partly Porpoise 