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Imanaren

Written By Jace Clayton (DJ /Rupture)

"Ayyiss Bo Tdlal (The Jeweled Horse)" via Okayafrica

Imanaren is the Tamazight word for the three stars of Orion’s belt.
And there is something of summer nights in the songs the young
group has recorded: a softness, a buzzing, a yearning. The music is
extraordinary—various styles of Berber music from south Morocco
blended together in a distinctly contemporary way, with spacey banjo
lines and haunting group vocals. It's sung in Tashelhit, one of the
several major dialects of Tamazight and the group’s mother tongue.
The lyrics are timely – as bandleader and songwriter Hassan Wargui
says, “about love and revolution” - but the songs themselves have a
timeless quality. Non-Berbers will not listen to it, says Hassan,
because they don’t understand. Then, thinking about it, he laughs,
“But we all listen to music in English, and we don’t understand that
either!” (Listing his favorite groups, Hassan cites Moroccan musicians
from the tumultuous 1970s, then Shakira, Celine Dion, Eminem, and
Akon.) He’s quick to stress that this is not party music (like Oudaden).
He sees himself in the lineage of 70s and 80s Moroccan Berber
bands such as Archach and Izenzaren, who dared to use music as a
platform to speak to their contemporary reality.
Earlier this year, I spent 2 months in Morocco, working on an art-
research project called Beyond Digital. In April I found a special CD at a
hijab-and-music stand Casablanca’s medina. After hearing me ask for
several little-known Berber bands, the shopowner pulled out a D.I.Y. CD
that wasn’t on display. Imanaren. He played one track – reverb-hazed
banjo over a FruityLoops backbeat in 5. Incredible. This June we were
able to contact Imanaren’s bandleader, Hassan Wargui. Wargui is from
the Berber village of Issafn in south Morocco, but moved to Casablanca
for work. We clicked, and he ended up joining in the Beyond Digital
project. In September we returned to stage a free outdoor concert in
Tangiers with Hassan and my band Nettle.

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