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Get it between 2025-02-18 to 2025-02-25. Additional 3 business days for provincial shipping.
From the Label Under the direction of their Arabic-speaking Swiss leader and co-producer Patrick Jabbar El Shaheed, the seven members of AKJE recorded the initial sessions for SHABEESATION in 1991 and 1992 in Casablanca. A shabee (Morrocan dance-pop) band at its core, the group's Indian and Arab melodies and rhythms were embellished in the initial mixing process with "found sounds" recorded to DAT by Jabbar El Shaheed. These atmospheric snippets of life in Marrakech include the thud of a knife being slapped across the back of a neck (on "Dunya"), samples of Soussi Berber musicians (also on "Dunya"), and the blasts of a gunshot (on "Nbrik"). Throughout the album's nine tracks, electric guitars and synthesizers mix with traditional Moroccan instruments including the kmenja, a violin instrument played vertically, the guimbri, a West African bass-stringed instrument, and aouuda, a small wooden flute. The band's already complex sound was further transformed at Bill Laswell's Brooklyn studio in 1993. As co-producer, he invited Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets to lend his booming vocals to "Fin Roh," while Laswell himself picked up his fabled bass for several tracks. P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell and rest of the groove-heavy Greenpoint Posse round out the funk. The already hypnotic fusion of Moroccan dance-pop and modern sampling technology were taken to a higher plane under Laswell's direction, and the resulting trancelike melange is positively rapturous. Thanks to its modern, bi-continental production and ceaseless rhythms, SHABEESATION dives headfirst into the fraja -- wild group dancing that is inspired by religious fervor or sheer delight. During the group's recent sold-out tour of the UK, clubgoers responded with religous ardor to what may best be called "electro-trance-dance-techno-dub." "With this record and the live shows," explains Jabbar El Shaheed, "we want people to let themselves be free to forget everything in their lives and trance to the music."