The Gnawa Berber

After dedicating his debut solo album, the bustling but tightly wound Gnawa London, to his adopted home city, Simo Lagnawi focuses his second recording on his Berber roots and heritage. As before, his Gnawa music feels timeless in its ecstatic, trance-like flow but also contains musical or thematic threads from further afield. On this album, those threads are folk songs from across the Sahara and West Africa, all of which offer fuel for Lagnawi's bluesy gimbri (long-necked lute) playing, which grooves profoundly under his fingers. He again sings and plays the other core parts – high chant-like vocals and percussion (including, of course, the Moroccan castanets known as qaraqab) but there is also a slight widening of instrumentation. Producer and collaborator Griselda Sanderson contributes a riveting, gritty fiddle solo on ‘Dounia’, while Freya Rae's flute settles (a little less well) into ‘Sma’.

The music itself remains the same at its core: texturally waxing and waning with different ensemble combinations, and always with a sense of inner pulse and energy. There are some fine tunes, such as ‘Sandika’, which juxtaposes a juddering gimbri riff with echoing call-and-response vocals. But The Gnawa Berber feels more sprawling and less tightly focused than its predecessor.