Author: Richie Troughton

The new all-encompassing history of the mighty drone – Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion by Harry Sword is published this week.

According to the publisher’s notes, Monolithic Undertow “alights a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers. It traces the line from ancient traditions to the modern underground, navigating archaeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub-bass, avant-garde, eccentricity, sound weaponry and fervent spiritualism”.

The book is available now from all good bookshops through White Rabbit Books.

A full chapter of the book is devoted to ecstatic music and Moroccan trance music features prominently, including extensive exploration into the impact of the Master Musicians of Joujouka.

Master Musicians of Joujouka manager Frank Rynne is interviewed in depth on his 25 years working with the group, their music, history and influence. “The music has an extraordinary effect,” he said. “They reach a point where you think “that is as far as they can go; they couldn’t possibly keep it at that pitch” but then the lead rhaita player goes up a little bit and the drone shifts up and the drummer gets up a level. And it goes on and on and on.”

Tracing a line through from the ancient origins of the Master Musicians’ Sufi trance music to the present day, Sword writes: “It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that the Joujouka sound began to permeate beyond the Rif mountains, bewitching the emergent Beat culture as a viscerally intense audio counterpoint to the surreal dreamscape of the Tangier Interzone. That it has since been disseminated globally through counterculture figures like Brian Jones and Ornette Coleman – both of whom recorded in Joujouka – makes perfect sense. After all, the best rock ‘n’ roll and free jazz are about abandon, liberation, the breaking of restrictions, an embrace of the animalistic.”

Sword goes on to explore how the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka played a part in influencing later experiments by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, in their writing and creating hallucinatory trance like states with the invention of stroboscopic light device the dreammachine – an effect similar to the impact of the music they heard in Morocco.

Monolithic Undertow is the first book by Cambridge-based writer Harry Sword, who is a regular contributor to The Quietus, Vice, Record Collector and The Guardian. It is the first book of its kind to focus solely on drone and also features writing on The Beatles, Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Ash Ra Tempel, Melvins and Sunn O))) among many more.

The minimalist music of composer Terry Riley, who the Master Musicians of Joujouka met on tour in Japan in 2017, is also discussed in detail.

Ahead of the book’s publication the album Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka was featured in an article by the author on starting points into a journey of drone music published in The Guardian.

Author Harry Sword invited readers to “turn on, tune in, drone out” in the article No drone unturned: tracing the sound that unites ancient and modern

Read an excerpt:

Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka

The Master Musicians of Joujouka, a group of Moroccan Sufi trance musicians from the foothills of the Rif mountains, make a joyous, hypnotic cacophony. Their sound dates back centuries, using techniques passed from father to son. Long associated with the beat poets, who gravitated to bohemian Tangier throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Master Musicians of Joujouka were introduced to writers Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin by Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamri, whose uncle was one of the bandleaders. Gysin, in particular, was captivated by the music, stating that it was the sound that he wanted to hear for the rest of his life. He later employed the Masters as house band in the 1001 Nights restaurant that he ran in Tangier with Hamri.

Hamri also introduced his friend, Rolling Stone Brian Jones, to the Masters. In 1968, Jones recorded this live album, capturing the sound of the annual Boujeloud festivities that celebrate the appearance in the 15th century of a Pan-like half-man, half-goat figure said to bestow fertility, a bountiful harvest and musical secrets. Each year a villager plays the Bou Jeloud: sewn into freshly slaughtered goat skins, he exhorts people to dance by whacking them with olive branches, while the music focuses on fever-pitch pipe drones, gruff call-and-response chants, ethereal flutes and frenetic handheld drums.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka strongly contest the notion that drone-based music is calming: theirs is an energetic, frenetic sound. Jones’s sensitive post-production dub effects (mainly echo and reverb) were subtle, but add to the head-twisting psychedelic density of the music.

Read the full article published in The Guardian here

Read more via White Rabbit Books here

Pre-order your copy here

More information about Monolithic Undertow: In Search Of Sonic Oblivion here

Watch this space for news on the upcoming release of Live In Paris album by the Master Musicians of Joujouka.

The album, recorded at Centre Pompidou in 2016, is set to be released as a double vinyl LP on Unlistenable Records in Spring 2021, with distribution via Kuroneko.

More information closer to the release date.

Jilala album originally released in 1966 to be reissued by Rogue Frequency Recordings.

Recordings of Moroccan Sufi trance musicians in Tangier by Brion Gysin are to be reissued in a limited pressing of 300 LP copies by Rogue Frequency Recordings.

The Jilala album will be released by Rogue Frequency Recordings in a limited edition of 300 LPs on 26^th February 2021.

Brion Gysin collaborated with Paul Bowles to record the Jilala Brotherhood in 1964 – with the tracks later released on an LP in 1966 on Trance Records – the imprint of Ira Cohen, who also contributed liner notes to the release.

Cohen wrote: “The Jilala is an order of dervish musicians known for their practice of trance dancing and spiritual healing. They are called upon to exorcise evil spirits and to purify the heart. The Jilala are particularly useful in curing cases of epilepsy and hysteria, controlling the spirits or demons in possession of the subject through their music and the ritualized gestures of the dance. But mainly the dances are dances of exaltation.”

According to Cohen’s notes Side 1 and the last track on Side 2 were recorded by Brion Gysin on a portable Martel. The other selections were recorded by Paul Bowles on the Uher.

Statement from Rogue Frequency Recordings ahead of the release:

Until Now, Jilala has been a much sought-after phantom in relation to their better-known musical and spiritual contemporaries, The Master Musicians of Jajouka / Jououka. Culled from three and a half hours of 1965 recordings by writers/artists/poets Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles, the first batch of Jilala recordings were released on a 1965 LP that was scarce even upon its initial release. The second batch of Recordings, which this LP has drawn from, came in the form of a CD by Baraka Foundation in 1998, which is also now long out of print.

The Jilala brotherhood – like the better known Jajouka / Joujouka culture – has pre-Islamic roots in Sufi mysticism that span across northern Africa from Morocco to India. Jilala shares the kinds of small, portable instruments historically favored by nomadic cultures. Even among more ardent afficionados of “world music” these recordings have seldom been heard.

In the original liner notes Ira Cohen provides a breakdown of the Jilala ensemble: “The instruments used are the shebaba, a long transversal cane flute, which leads the way; the bendir, a handheld drum resembling a tambourine without cymbals; and the karkabat which is a double castanet made of metal. On this record there are usually three flutes, six drums and one pair of castanets.” In conjunction with the qraqaba — an iron analog to the wooden castanets featured heavily in the Flamenco music of the Roma people that also flourished over the centuries mere miles to the north in southern Spain.

These bendir drums provide a range very similar to that covered in contemporary popular music by the bass drum, snare, and cymbals that make up standard drum kit. The Trance-inducing grooves were major influences on such bands as Led Zeppelin, Agitation Free, Can and the Rolling Stones. The collective rhythms are often reminiscent of early hip-hop.

 

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Brion Gysin listened to many forms of traditional music during his time Morocco, including the Master Musicians of Joujouka, of which he said: “I just want to hear that music for the rest of my life”.

While living in Tangier in the 1950s, Gysin opened the 1001 Nights restaurant in a wing of the Menebhi Palace in Tangier where a group of visiting Master Musicians of Joujouka played every night.

In 1968 he accompanied Brian Jones, lead guitarist and founding member of The Rolling Stones, to the village for recordings that resulted in the LP, Brian Jones Presents The Pipes Of Pan At Joujouka, released in 1971 on Rolling Stones Records. Gysin contributed liner notes to the LP.

Mohamed Targuisti was also involved in that visit and is credited with thanks on the original Jilala LP.

Ira Cohen continued his association with Moroccan Sufi trance when he participated with the Master Musicians of Joujouka at the Here To Go Show in 1992 – an exhibition celebrating the work of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin organised by Master Musicians of Joujouka manager Frank Rynne in Dublin – where he displayed his Mylar images and other work.