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4.0 out of 5 stars
Amazigh-Berber Beats Up From Algeria's Underground, December 7, 2000
This review is from: Umalu (Audio CD)
This is a very important musical statement for the Anglo world. The Amazigh-Berber recording artists who've left Algeria to record and publish in their own native language of Tamazight (the Arabization Laws made this illegal for many years after the Arab-Amazigh alliance helped expel the French colonial power from Algeria in 1962) usually do so in France, with no English translations provided in the CD booklets. Umalu (which means one from the north in the Tamazight language) is living in exile in southern California, and all the song lyrics here are provided with English translations, including a post-modern version of Djamel Allam's haunting song from traditional Amazigh-Berber roots, "Mara Dyoughal/If He Comes."
Umalu has brought his Atlas Mountains heritage with him into California studios. Indeed it would appear that even remote Amazigh-Berber villages are linked via oral tradition and secret written works, if not fiber optics, to the cyberage. Umalu has not gone overboard on technology though, and what makes the music on this CD so compelling is the way it achieves its Space Age Berber Music sound with instruments as organic as a reedy saxophone, and a sea-ray skin frame drum modified in the Amazigh-Berber style particular to the Kabylia Mediterranean coastal range of Algeria. This frame drum, known as a bendir, has a sound that has been described as that of a blown speaker! But it is a gentle rasping sound sliding off the beats, and not a discordant or unpleasantly dissonant tone that sweeps Umalu's music-of-many-changes along.
What will take some adjusting to is the passionate and totally uninhibited singing of Umalu, especially on the ritualistic sounding "Aggur/New Moon." No one will mistake this North African recording for Arabic music, as so often happens due to the masking of the Amazigh-Berber majority population and fertile culture by ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) WORLD, the primary disseminator of English language media on a region the Arabs called El Maghreb/The West, following their invasion and conquest of the Amazigh-Berbers, but that the native Amazigh-Berbers and Tuarig tribes of supra-Saharan Africa to this day call Tamazgha/Land of the Amazigh, or, Land of the Free People.
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