Demi-Écrémé

Jack-of-all-trades Wael Jegham, aka Ghoula, returns with an engrossing electronica exploration of North African fables, languages and musical traditions. In this sophomore album, the title of which means ‘Semi-Skimmed’, the composer of film scores reveals his cinematographic eye as he weaves together vinyl samples from his personal collection of Maghrebian classics while panning across his beatmaking culture. So we enjoy his electronic distillation of the gimbri on ‘Drum & Gasba’; the Libyan zukra (bagpipe) that gives birth to ‘Zinek’, an improvisation on a love so intense that ‘it made him suffer’; his trance-like stambeli music conjuring spirits and Muslim saints; or the gasba (reed flute) from his native Tunisia.

At the same time, Ghoula addresses head-on the politically-charged challenges of colloquial languages in the Arab world, layering the music with expressions from a gamut of regions. By sampling, he says, ‘I can isolate a vocal from its initial background and teleport it towards a novel arrangement.’ The result is an album of fertile electronic soundscapes and light-filled songs with elegant polyglot sounds that suck the listener in. Filter out the soppy intro and outro, in which someone is learning basic Arabic… and we would have ourselves a five-star album.