AMMAR 808

As titles go, Global Control/Invisible Invasion is a fair summation of how the world is under the baton of COVID-19, that microscopic slayer conducting our mutual fates to economic oblivion, if nothing else. This tiny little viral Kali embodies our deepest horrors and fears, but for Belgian-Tunisian musician and producer AMMAR 808, aka Sofyann Ben Youssef, the true invisible invasion goes way beyond the microscopic or the viral.

“The first place that gets invaded is the mind,” he says, bunkered down in his home studio in Brussels. “Religions, the systems in which we live, all these things, the mind gives them the consent to be. Power is about consent. We say, ‘these guys are powerful,’ and then they are. It’s just very hard to see because it happens on so many levels. The choice of what you eat, what you drive, what you wear… it’s so hard to see that you’re in a hierarchy that’s telling you what to do. All these systems are systems of domination that makes it very difficult for us to see clearly.”

Concepts of freedom and free will have preoccupied AMMAR 808 (his name taken from the 1980s Roland TR-808 drum machine) since the Arab Spring in 2011. “What happened in Tunisia in 2011 triggered all sorts of reflections in me as a musician and a producer,” he says. “Essential things like freedom. Freedom happens, but what is the value of freedom if you do not have the power of influence on your destiny? Maybe it is not freedom that we want. Maybe it is actually the power of influence. On my own life. And that brings you to free will. Free will by itself is not enough.”

However, it was free will that helped him to conjure the pan-North African soundscape of his acclaimed Maghreb United album (a Top of the World in #139), combining Tunisian Targ song, Moroccan Gnawa, and Algerian rai and embedding them within the sound universe of the 808, the drum behind some of the biggest global hits of the 1980s. As such, the Roland itself can be heard as a spearhead of an ‘invisible invasion’ of traditional forms by digital electronics.

For his second album as AMMAR 808, Ben Youssef took himself and his drum machine off to India, and the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, home to seven million or so souls, and the home, too, of Karnatic music, the southern Indian classical music tradition, with its focus on voice and mora rhythms, its music steeped in Hindu gods and mythologies. “The Hindu mythologies gave me a playground to test and feel and to witness ideas that are so old,” he says, “about freedom, free will and influence.”

The Mahabharata, and its Marvel-like universe of stories of flying machines, otherworldly beings and mass destruction at the hands of ancient tech, is a key pillar in AMMAR 808’s Invisible Invasion mythos. “I’d ask people in Chennai about the mythologies, whether they thought these stories were about people from another planet, and they’d say, yes, we know in the scriptures that Shiva came from a different world, and I was like, OK, so a relationship with otherworldly concepts is already embedded there.”

Ben Youssef’s passage to India was no stab in the dark, but a return trip, having first visited and studied in North India almost 20 years before, completing a dissertation on musicology in Hindustani music and the transmission of musical knowledge within a gharana, or school. “I also had access to Karnatic music but it took me a few years to dive into it, and when I did it was obvious that I had to do something with it.”

After the success of Maghreb United, the time was right for a Karnatic immersion. “So I prepared and went there, and had a lot of luck meeting the right people at the right time, as if this was meant to be.” He laughs, and adds: “When I walk the streets of India, there is a weird feeling of familiarity, like I am supposed to be there.”

Travelling with his portable recording studio, Ben Youssef connected with producer Paul Jacob, who has been part of the city’s indie music scene since the 90s, and runs a well-established studio there – it was he who recorded Thanjai Nayandi Melam, the quartet of players that feature on the album. “I know this was a person I could communicate very deeply with,” says Ben Youssef of Jacob. “We talked a lot about music and exchanged a lot of experiences. Because when it comes to Chennai’s music scene, there’s a lot of local production, a lot of live music everywhere. Local artists tour all the time, from one temple to another, and at private events. The notion of a venue isn’t like the set-ups we have here.”

One of the vocal mainstays of the album is Susha (pictured below), whose voice can be heard on the arresting opening track, ‘Marivere Gati’, an ode of devotion to the goddess Meenakshi, an avatar of the goddess of fertility, love and devotion. “It’s about accepting your divine mother, because who else on this Earth will protect us?” says Ben Youssef. “It’s asking for her protection and letting go of your ego. That is one of the main ideas in Hinduism. To surrender to the gods, and to play by the rules of the law of karma. You put free will against Hinduism, and you get that.”

As a producer with a drum machine attached, it’s no surprise Ben Youssef’s main focus throughout the album is on rhythms – from the minimal techno of ‘Pahi Jagajjanani’, an ardent hymn to the mother of the universe and ‘root of all desires,’ again voiced by Susha, to the softer contours of ‘Geeta Duniki’, a song Susha herself brought to the sessions, her gorgeous voice interwoven with guitar, woozy synths and a thick bass drum beat that’s a mirror to the beating of the human heart.

“It’s such a nice playground when it comes to rhythms in Karnatic music,” says Ben Youssef. “I didn’t want to simplify them – I wanted it to be exactly as it should be as it is played classically.” This he does by distributing them out among the layers of electronics, rather than purely acoustically, via traditional means.

For instance, the fast-paced synth rhythms and distorted voices of ‘Ey Paavi’ are drawn from Chennai’s street theatre traditions, to which Ben Youssef adds his own percussive patterns. “It’s from the Mahabharata, and when I first heard it, I thought, fuck, it has a hip-hop feel, there’s a flow to it. And I put on some beats and rhythms from the Malayalam tradition, which is music from the temples.” Reduced to their essences, they fire the track with the propulsive energy to lift-off towards the song’s frenetic culmination.

Intense Malayalam rhythms also infuses ‘Mahaganapatim’, its inspiration drawn from a classic performance by the Bombay Sisters, and recast as a deep groove with stomach-rumbling bass carrying it aloft, along with a compelling vocal from Chennai legend K L Sreeram – a mainstay of Indian film scores, and a master player of the mridangam and flute. ‘Duryodhana’, meanwhile, features the Thanjai Nayandi Melam quartet, on percussion and the marvellously air-splitting double-reed nadaswaram, which proudly stands as one of the world’s very loudest acoustic instruments. “Here I did something inspired by Gnawa music,” says Ben Youssef. “Originally the track was the same tempo from beginning to end, but with computers you can change the tempo and that’s what I did, accelerating to the end in a crazy rhythm, with a drop and an acceleration that would never happen in South Indian music.”

Vocoders do not have much of a place in the Karnatic tradition either, but there it is all over ‘Arisothari Yen Devi’, a minimalist, atmospheric swirl of a song about the goddess Kali to which Ben Youssef adds rai flavours, his digital beats and bass nailing down a stripped-back, hypnotically repetitive soundscape upon which this most dangerous and captivating of goddesses casts her spell.

“Humankind has to create representations of its own worst nightmares to communicate with one’s own fear and make peace with it,” says Ben Youssef of the mythology and iconography of Kali, the destroyer of worlds. “All these things we have no control over. All your bad shit. It represents the way we try to deal with who we are. And then it becomes a very powerful system of domination. And that’s another layer to the concept of the album – why these gods exist and why we give them consent to be in a higher position.”

How the gods treat AMMAR 808 in the months to come – he was due to embark on a big visual residency in India to accompany the projected live shows before COVID-19 hit – is as yet unclear. He plans solo shows, heavily electronic, with lights and visuals that are a long way from the Karnatic sources he plumbed in Chennai. But that is his raison d’être – the transmogrifying of tradition into an urgent, edgy present tense. For the moment, the present remains on hold for performers like AMMAR 808 back in Belgium and Susha in Chennai, their future in the hands of Kali. What worlds will she destroy, and what new ones will she create? And what rhythms will we be moving to when she does?

This article originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!