Words by Justin Turford
This excellent new compilation on the Swiss label Bongo Joe contains quite a story. A tale of a transplanted community from North Africa, a rare courage to be both musically progressive whilst championing their own ancient traditions in a new country, and of a sonic journey that only Les Abranis could have taken.
Paris has long been the chosen destination for foreign émigrés who have run from repression, and the Abranis tale follows that timeworn method. It’s the mid Sixties, and two young Algerians - Shamy El Baz and Karim Abdenour - find each other in Paris. They were Kabyle, the Berber people from Algeria’s northern regions, and they were running from the newly independent but conservatively repressive Algeria.
"They were considered a threat for the newly created nation-state, since they belonged to another nation, much older than the Algerian state and even the Muslim / Arab presence in North Africa" explains musical anthropologist Simon Debarbieux, who wrote the liner notes for the compilation.
Despite the fact that there was a significant Kabyle community in France since the early 20th Century, our heroes were cut from a different cloth, and of course, the times they were-a-changing. Harbouring a love for western rock music, they teamed up with bass player Madi Mehdi and drummer Samir Chabane, instantly setting their stall out with a curious hybrid of garage and psyche-rock with traditional melodies and rhythms unheard of in the rock world at this point. Compilation opener ‘Athedjaladde’ embodies this spirit with screechy organs, raw garage rhythm guitars and a swinging drum groove behind the yearning vocals. Not a million miles away from belters like Moroccan band Fadoul’s 1970 record ‘Sid Redad’, the North African influence on the western sounds of the day still have an indefinable hot magic about them.
The band had an immediate effect, good and bad. The psychedelic swirl of ‘Avetheri A L’Afjare’ nearly got the band kicked off Algerian national television during the 1973 Festival of Modern Algerian Song but this was just the beginning of their journey; if the traditionalists were perturbed by Les Abranis’ experiments in pan-continental synthesis and their odd hippie magnetism, the younger audiences embraced them as their own.
Following a few more years of tours, releases and membership changes, the band began to explore new musical avenues. Embedded into the worldly communities of Paris exposed them to art and cultural shifts that in turn, inspired the band’s experiments into new forms as the 80s approached. The driving twang and melancholic synth disco-country of 1980’s ‘Therrza Rathwemza’ saw them moving into new and peculiar spaces. Revolutionary music for a people in a permanent state of struggle. The drum machine fuelled funk of ‘Thilelli’ from the same album is a wild workout with wah wah guitars and droning organs; this wasn’t ‘pop’ music, this was the underground voice of the global Berber (Amazigh) community in exile.
The rest of the compilation is a cratedigger’s dream; not many outfits travel from garage rock to disco to reggae and manage to still sound like themselves. Les Abranis had significant success in Algeria and Europe up to the 90s but what makes this collection stand out is how it really captures the open minds and hearts of Shamy and Karim as they grew as musicians and people; their characters permeate the music. Beautifully curated and packaged, Bongo Joe have done them proud. 9/10
Released on 4 April 2023 on Bongo Joe Records.
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