M'berra

In 2018 the Italian producer Khalab – aka Raffaele Costantino – released the wildly acclaimed Black Noise 2084, an album whose tribal grooves, housey beats and swirling synths were given organic clout by the likes of drummer Moses Boyd and saxophonists Shabaka Hutchings and Tamar Osborn, making Khalab that year's DJ du jour. The year previously, however, and unknown to most, Khalab had been garnering inspiration and gathering ideas as a sort of foreign-artist-in-residence at the M'berra Refugee Camp in south-east Mauritania. Working alongside a collective of Malian musicians, some Arab, some Touareg – including Amano Agg Issa and Mohamed Issa Ag Oumar, erstwhile members of the internationally regarded Tartit – he crafted a work that combines vocals, live instrumentation, electronic sounds and samples to compelling effect.

M'berra won't please the purists. But Khalab is no cut-and-paste cowboy; his deft arrangements and otherworldly effects complement live instrumentation including the single¬string amzad (spine-tingling on ‘Docu-Fiction’) and the lute-like tehardent (lending pathos to ‘The Griot Speaks’). Alongside rolling blues guitars and gritty sung and spoken-word vocals (notable on ‘We are M’berra), Khalab's psychedelic synth-wizardry borrows from Afro-futurism, the genre at the intersection of African diasporic culture and technology, to lend agency to the players and a real sense of liberation and possibility to the work.