Harvet Festival - Tekchbila Show

Harvest Festival Marrakech is honored to invite Tekchbila to Marrakech for a special Yennayer 2974 concert on the 20th January.

For this concert Tekchbila brings Ahwach group Bnat Louz into conversation with electronic musicians Raskas. They are also pleased to welcome Imane Benssouda and Yassine Watcha as an opening act.

Tekchbila as a project aims to preserve, archive and maintain the wide plurality of Amazigh music within our culture as well as exposing it to international audiences. It achieves this objective by recognising the exposure and contemporaneity of electronic music in conversation with traditional Amazigh musical heritage. It is both an archiving project and educational project.

This performance is centered around an Amazigh music style known as Ahwach, considered to be one of the most ancestral styles to be found in the region and constitutes the basis of many other modern and contemporary amazigh musical styles. The performance specifically centers Ahwach Asdaw n’Tifrkhine, a style that is very specific to the region of Tafraout which consists of an all-women choir whom sing collectively while hiding their faces with a long colored cloth, whilst an ensemble of men play percussive instruments to set the rhythm for singing and dancing.

Bnat Louz, a group of 10 women, are considered to be one of the first Ahwach bands that brought the traditional amazigh style of Ahwach to the professional scene, by creating an actual legal structure that strives to preserve it and transmit it to wider audiences, outside of the villages it came from. They have been active since the early 90s and have taken part in many local, national, regional and international festivals.

One of the two electronic musicians invited into this mix is Archidi, a Moroccan visual/sound manipulator. Archidi is a composer and member of the experimental industrial rock/electronic band/duo RASKAS. Starting out as a sound collage – noise maker, he quickly moved to the field of the experimental side of things, with music for theater, performances, contemporary dance and movies.

Tekchbila is a project initiated by L’AMME (Association Marocaine de Musique Electronique), an NGO that strives to preserve and promote the different strands of Amazigh music all while support the Moroccan electronic music scene.