(Stroom)
Vocalist Basma and group Temir Alcy offer a dark and disorienting listen that contemplates loss and new beginnings, stoking a captivating sense of tension
The new album from French-Moroccan vocalist Basma and Paris-based group Temir Alcy comes just in time for the changing of the clocks. It’s a dark and disorientating listen, exploring themes of loss and new beginnings over swampy, downtempo rhythms. The 11 tracks here linger somewhere between folk, shoegaze and ambient, with skulking percussion, droning passages and plucked strings soaked in reverb. Opening track Belati sets the tone with its spacious, shapeshifting composition, where ghostly drones and Basma’s layered calls give way to a sluggish beat. Most of the tracks follow a similar non-structure: amorphous but with an intermittent, sultry groove, like the winding bass on Khti Sarah, or the slow, swinging rhythm on Aji M3aya.
Basma’s performance is always captivating. Singing in a mixture of Darija (vernacular Arabic) and French, she delivers poetic snapshots in sensory terms that chime with the shifting seasons: “shy light”, blowing wind and bonfires. On Rised, breathy fragments are looped and reversed into a dreamy haze, while her lilting chants on La Tourne have a hypnotic effect. On standout Al Atlal, which lumbers along like a haunted lullaby, she drifts between soft wails and stoic spoken word.