Les Gens De Mogador
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Between sonic critique and meditative self-sabotage, Ab Uno’s drone-temporal drift is to be read as an anthropological study: looking for answers in the past we can find the future, returning to being a ‘plural one’ as the primal feeling of the cosmos indicates, opening a door to a deeper state of consciousness.
Born in Berlin in 2016, Eugenio Petrarca and Roberto Di Ciaccio’s project fuses experimental music made of drifting analogue oscillations to modular synthesiser resonances, with exotic field-recordings and organic visual progressions that build immersive minimalist atmospheres.
After the experience between Colombia, Sierra Nevada and Bali rendered tribal landscape field recordings (as in the previous La Linea
Negra on Rohs! /Lontano Series, Medewi for Musica Stampata and the self-produced Lost World), in Les Gens de Mogador, released in July 2022 by Dornwald Records, the journey continues to Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, continuing the path of a sound anthropology and enriched with visual materials in collaboration with Waxaw Ethno Roots collective that captured the album’s proto-documentary dimension.
Les Gens de Mogador marks a further evolution of Ab Uno: among the open-air markets amidst phoenix ceramics, the Jewish mellah quarter and the gnawa rituals in the story of sub-Saharan black slavery, the album is a physical reconstruction of ancient Essaouira, the result of two weeks in close contact with a land that tells of wind, blinding sun and ruins embedded in history.
Gestures of Mogador’s people from the past become an open-air sound stage, following the imperturbable movement of an ambient with exotic-primordial colours. From the hubbub of the downtown market to the echoes of a knife being sharpened to cut fish, amidst the colours of the souk stalls, sound becomes anthropology and investigation, in a continuous echo that deconstructs the entire post-human experience of the Medina.
The pirate origins of the region make the minimal spectrum of the composition even more in empathy with its legends: the esoteric aspect of primordiality moves on a journey between tradition and immanence, in a flow of 7 tracks that accompany to understand the ex-truth of the places described.
Thus there’s a lot of reality, amidst the full-bodied thrusts of modular synths citing a dense, dark sun and a night kissing the Atlantic ocean, but there is also the reflection of a land in constant search of its lost time, woven into pads of lysergic silence and awe of beauty.
