Mahavélouz

La Réunion’s maloya music has provided fertile ground for electronic producers looking to inject the genre’s trancelike rhythms onto sub-heavy dancefloors both on the island and beyond. One pioneer is Jako Maron, whose 2018 The Electro Maloya Experiments of Jako Maron brought the music into a new world of bleeps and blips via an array of synthesizers. Sparser, though no less innovative, Mahavélouz focuses on the bobre, the single-stringed bow with a calabash resonator, the only melodic instrument in a traditional maloya set-up, and here the only acoustic instrument to accompany the drum machines. The twanging bobre lines on tracks such as ‘Paré Po Saviré’ and ‘Mdé Prototrash’ provide a hypnotic if heavily distorted hook on the traditional rhythms, coloured with a wash of electronic shimmers, whines and echoes. The resulting soundscape is heavy and industrial, distorting the links from the tropical island where the sounds originated.