Following the repatriation in 2010 of the Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection from Washington to Tangier, Gilles Aubry and Zouheir Atbane undertook collaborative research on the reception of these recordings in today’s Morocco. The film follows their residency in Tafraout, a village where Paul Bowles recorded an Ahwash music performance in 1959. In exchange with local musicians, the artists deliver an interpretation of the return of these music recordings to their original location, including the documentation of listening sessions, discussions, and music sessions. The work examines the micro-politics of invisibility: Paul Bowles as an ‘invisible spectator’; the veil as a strategy of resistance during the French occupation of Morocco; the Pythagorean curtain of French acousmatic music. World premiere at ESAV Marrakesh, as part of the exhibition Why ain't you rich if you're so smart, 2014.

Atlantic Ragagar is an experimental film on seaweed and pollution on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. With its clear water, the beach in Sidi Bouzid is known as a seaweed paradise. Further down the coast in Safi, marine biodiversity suffers from the pollution caused by phosphate plants and fish factories, with dramatic consequences for the population's health. The film is an attempt to ‘listen’ to pollution and its effects on coastal life, inviting the spectator into a process of ecological transformation. If pollution often remains hidden in the landscape, the effects of toxicity are rendered through the voice and bodily presence of performer Imane Zoubai. The film unfolds through her vocal interventions, first on the beach and later in the studio during improvised sessions. As she hums, sings, breathes, and silently interacts with algae, a new figure progressively emerges, “maouj”, an aquatic body open to transcorporeal and interspecies speculations. World premiere and special mention at Ji-Hlava International Documentary Film Festival (IDFF) 2022.

The video documents a baking session in 2019 with a group women who collect red seaweed for a living in Sidi Bouzid, Morocco. Baking sweets with agar powder becomes an opportunity for conversations on seaweed life, marine ecology, pollution, and human labour. World premiere at La Chambre de l'Art, Bruxelles, 2021, as part of the exhibition Atlantic Ragagar.

In this article, Nadine Schildhauer argues that the eclectic mix of genre found in deconstructed club music, with all its cultural references and signifiers, goes beyond deconstructivism and gravitates towards a postcolonial understanding of sound.

Can sound be perceived independently of its social dimension? Or is it always embedded in a discursive network? »Postcolonial Repercussions« explores these questions in form of a collective conversation. The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition. The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.

Andi Schoon widmet sich in diesem Beitrag der Frage nach dokumentarischer Authentizität: Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Paul Bowles (1910-1999) reiste, kurz nachdem Marokko 1956 unabhängig geworden war, monatelang durch das Land, um traditionelle Musikstile wie Ahwouach, Andaluz, Gnawa und Rwais zu dokumentieren. Der Beitrag beleuchtet das Zustandekommen dieser Aufnahmen.

Over the last twenty years, museums and galleries have slowly opened their hearts, doors, walls and websites to the reverberation of sound works, musical performances and immersive installations. Finding microphones, musical instruments, vinyl records, turntables, amplifiers, musical scores, mixers, cassettes, recorders, headphones, wires, speakers and voices is not the rare occurrence that it once used to be. Exhibition halls are no longer the quiet, austere, sanctified spaces for contemplation either; codes of conduct such as measured silence and regulated movement have in many ways loos- ened.

Can sound be perceived independently of its social dimension? Or is it always embedded in a discursive network? »Postcolonial Repercussions« explores these questions in form of a collective conversation. The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition. The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.

Agadir, 1960. A violent earthquake destroyed the whole town, except for a few buildings, including the Salam movie theatre. By a strange twist of fate, apparently the film shown that night was Godzilla, King of the Monsters, a famous figure of post-apocalyptic days. This coincidence guides Gilles Aubry, all ears to echoes of the past, as he leads an investigation and tries to spot distant or tenuous traces left by time. The film features rich material, where dinosaur tracks, newsreels, or even seismic surveys can resonate with poetic verses sung by Ali Faiq, or the movements of rwais dancers. Shot inside the cinema and in the surroundings of Agadir, the film is driven by an abstract soundtrack recorded on location. World premiere at Visions du Réel International Film Festival , Nyon, 2019. International premiere at FID Marseille 2019. Moroccan premiere at Arab Media Lab, Marrakesh, 2020.

In this article, Gilles Aubry examines the sonic dimension of the violent earthquake that destroyed the city of Agagdir in Morocco in 1960. He compares the modes of technocratic listening mobilized by the scientific experts in charge of the city's reconstruction with an oral account of the earthquake by local poet Ibn Ighil. He offers comments on sonic materiality and situated aurality, re-considering also the notion of "unsound" (Goodman 2012) from a local perspective.

In Sawt, Bodies, Species, Gilles Aubry offers an account on sound and listening in Morocco across a wide domain of activities, including musical and artistic expression, sound archives, urban planning, building techniques, seismology, healing practices, industrial extractivism, and ecology. Sawt in Arabic literally means sound and voice. Sound in Morocco thus intimately relates to the body; it never quite corresponds with its modern Western counterpart as a phenomenon separable from the other senses. Sonic pluralism recapitulates Aubry's attempts to think sound and aurality together with modernity and (de-)coloniality. The transformative power of sonic pluralism is expressed in people's acts of listen- ing and sounding, aimed at questioning and shifting social conventions. On the level of ecology, sonic pluralism reveals extra-human agencies that mediate between people and their environment. Drawing on critical Sound Studies, ethnographic research, and artistic practice, Aubry's dense descriptions are complemented by audiovisual essays created in collaboration with local musicians, artists, and scientists.

STONESOUND documents an experiment in stone sounding in Moulay Bouchta. Abdeljalil Saouli relates his relationship with stones, as part of a local history of co-evolution between humans and their environment. A rich soundscape emerges, somewhere between a lithophone instrument, a sound lab, and a living ecosystem carved by water erosion. The general notion of “sound” is re-examined through the notion of “stonesound”, pointing to a relational understanding of sound and listening. World premiere at Sakhra Encounters, a festival and exhibition in Moulay Bouchta, 2019. International premiere at Simon Fraser University as part of the Festival A Light Footprint in the Cosmos, 2022.

Can sound be perceived independently of its social dimension? Or is it always embedded in a discursive network? »Postcolonial Repercussions« explores these questions in form of a collective conversation. The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition. The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.

The piece results from collaboration between the artists Ramia Beladel and Gilles Aubry in Moulay Bouchta l’Khmar, a village in the northern part of Morocco. Informed by Beladel's long term research on popular Sufism, the piece documents events which took place in July 2017 during the annual celebration of the local saint Moulay Bouchta. One can hear songs, prayers, field recordings, and an excerpt of bokharia, a healing ritual based on the powerful sound of rifles. The piece also provides a stage for a performance by Beladel relying on introspection, trance and self-reconfiguration, breath by breath, balloon after balloon. World premiere at Sonohr Radio Festival, Bern, 2019. Moroccan premiere at Sakhra Encounters, a festival and exhibition in Moulay Bouchta, 2019.

How are the Fordist and post-Fordist worlds of work represented sonically in pieces of music, films and TV series? The charged relationship between work and leisure time is deeply interwoven into popular culture, not just high art and pop art. It offers surprisingly more substantial information than even its own authors would have suspected.