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Maurice Louca – Elephantine (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 38:11 minutes | 764 MB | Genre: World
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Northern Spy Records
On Elephantine, his new Northern Spy/Sub Rosa album, Cairo-based Maurice Louca guides a 12-piece ensemble through a panoramic 38-minute odyssey, which he describes as his most ambitious project yet.
One of the most gifted, prolific and adventurous figures on Egypt’s thriving experimental arts scene, Louca has in recent years garnered a global reputation through two previous solo albums and an expanding, evolving lineup of genre-defying collaborations. The Wire called his 2014 sophomore solo effort, Salute the Parrot, “remarkable music—dense, driven and splashed with colour.” In 2017, the self-titled debut by Lekhfa, the trio of Louca and vocalists Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, was praised as an “edgy triumph” in The Guardian and picked by BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction as one of the very best 12 albums of 2017.
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Maurice Louca – Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 38:02 minutes | 756 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Northern Spy Records
Maurice Louca, one of the most gifted musicians and composers on Egypt’s thriving underground music scene, announces his new album Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour), to be released September 24, 2021 via Sub Rosa and Northern Spy.
The forthcoming full-length album draws voraciously on Arabic music, psychedelic folk, and free improv and the lead single “Bidayat (Holocene)” mesmerises with a feral groove centered around percussion, guitar and violin.
The title Saet el Hazz is a coded saying in Egypt to refer to a good time and usually implies a great deal of debauchery. “When you mention to someone that you’ve had a saet hazz, there are no questions asked. It is what it is.”
The initial spark for Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) was Louca’s desire to collaborate with “A” Trio, the Lebanese improvisational group featuring Mazen Kerbaj on prepared trumpet, Sharif Sehnaoui on prepared guitar, and Raed Yassin on prepared double bass. “When the three of them come together they create a sonic cosmos entirely their own. I started by composing music that I wanted to have exist within this sonic world— at times in harmony, or clashing with it, and all the emotional ranges in between.”
Just as “A” Trio served as the spark, a commission from Mophradat, an arts organization based out of Brussels, was the tinder. The commission was for a new composition to be performed using instruments that Louca would modify to play microtonally. This led him to Turkey and Indonesia. In Istanbul, he worked with a Lutheran to custom-make a guitar. In Surakarta, he ended up with an instrument maker tuning a Serang—referred to as the Indonesian xylophone, part of the family of Gamelan tuned percussion instruments.
These new modified instruments opened up the compositions to new tonal possibilities which drove Louca to expand his line up to include Khaled Yassine, a longtime collaborator and versatile percussionist and drummer, Christine Kazaryan, a dynamic harpist whom he met via Praed Orchestra, and Anthea Caddy, a cellist who came highly recommended from the Berlin free improv scene.
“There is something about linking luck to decadence that resonates with me, and even if I can’t fully articulate it in words, the drive behind the music of this album and how it came to be, and the energy between us at the studio rehearsing and recording it, was in a lot of ways for me a saet hazz.”
Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) is a long form composition of six movements, recorded over the course of a week in August 2019 at A/B studios in Brussels.
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Maurice Louca – Moonshine (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 36:38 minutes | 767 MB | Genre: Jazz, World Fusion, Psychedelic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Northern Spy Records
Maurice Louca’s Moonshine shines brightly with a live, raw, collective sound. The Elephantine band is incredible: Double drummers Tommaso Cappellato & Ozun Usta; Piero Bittolo Bon on alto, Daniel Gahrton on baritone and Isak Hedtjarn on clarinet; Rasmus Svale Kjaergard Lund on tuba; Rosa Brunell on bass; Els Vandeweyer on vibraphone; Louca on guitar/lap steel/synth. Abstract territories of freedom, always grounded, expansive, multiple, internally differentiated, and elephantine.
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