The Brooklyn Rail

Babel Music XP is the reincarnated Babel Med (2005–17), a global-folkloric festival that’s open to the public, but also acts as a music biz showcase and conference. Following a post-lockdown slumber (Babel Music born in 2023) its problems aren’t over yet, as its core venue, the Docks Des Suds, closed at the end of March and is now under threat of demolition. As the name suggests, we’re located near the Marseille port, but since your scribe’s first visit in 2017, the surrounding buildings are now mostly towering, glassy, and newly built. Gentrification is gonna get us, wherever we lie. Dock Des Suds is (was) an ideal space for Babel, this former spice warehouse having large and medium stage-spaces, so the acts can alternate, making for a constant flow of performance.

In the daytimes, the conference events took place at the Friche la Belle de Mai, this venue being an old tobacco factory, converted into a warren of culture spaces, including at least two venues. One of the best sets happened at the Grand Plateau, with a collaboration between Lebanese percussionist Wassim Halal and Gamelan Puspawarna (all living in France), this blending becoming Polyphème. The darbuka nestles well with the ringing metallophones and deep-quivering gongs, this set-up boasting a pair of large resonators to the rear. Halal also adds electronic embellishments, but these are well-behaved rather than disruptive. The original pieces sound like traditional Indonesian constructions, but gently subverted into rule-bending entities: faster, harder, nay, veritably galloping. Audience gasping was inevitable.

The gamelan array is pushed toward a zone not often heard, although there’s a long history of similar skewings, not least those made by the composer Lou Harrison. Halal drives his fellow players toward the speeds sometimes preferred in Bali rather than Java. Sheer pleasure was derived from the shimmering interlocks of players on the left and right sides of the stage, with dampened small-hammer strikes lending a sharp percussive edge, rippling lighter hits moving tightly-locked by the diligent performers. Complicated resolutions arrived, prompting meaningfully isolated head-bangs from the audience, as the emphases landed softly.

Two of Babel’s dominant musical themes, whether sculpted or accidental, involved folk that spoke the region’s Occitan tongue, and also artists from North Africa, principally Morocco. There were comparisons to be made between Polyphème and the combinations explored by Bnat Louz and Raskas, who gave a central performance of new work AZMZ on the Friday night. Bnat Louz is a traditional ensemble from Tafraoute in Morocco, fronted by a pair of intense bendir [frame drum] percussionists. Behind them sways a line of female singers, united by a long transparent drape of material, so that their heads are covered together. Surrounding the traditional Amazigh (Berber) dance, the Casablancan duo Raskas rucked up the sonics with extreme strafe-guitar and sub-gut laptoppery. Once again, intensity was the result, this time operating at a higher volume-pitch, as the voices grew in ritual abandonment, and the Casablancan dudes trimmed with visceral pulses or eruptions. The combination was ecstatic, for both performers and audience, all the hall’s seats removed to facilitate a sluggish, hypnotic swaying. Accepting that this team-up may well be influenced by the groups assembled by the French-Italian duo Putan Club, and their similarly rupturing metal and electronic interventions (Ifriqiyya Électrique, Ndox Electrique), this doesn’t prevent the listener from thrilling to the resulting sonics. It’s almost certain that Putan arrived at this incendiary state first, though.

Remaining in Morocco on Babel’s final night, the rockin’ Marrakech trio Bab L’Bluz magnetize a dancing crowd, but in a far more conventional manner, as their near-psychedelic invocations of traditional Gnaoua styles unite deeply internal pulses with showy, almost T. Rex-ian glam postures. Yousra Mansour is showing off a brand new electric axe, with its Jimmy Page-ed double necks combining the freeform, fretless sintir/gimbri (plus smaller string-sister awisha) and the conventional rock guitar, although it’s the former that she’s devoting most time to, rising to a series of extended freakouts before ramming back into a song’s running rhythmic verse structure. Brice Bottin plays a traditional gimbri, although with a toughening contact microphone. There’s also liberal amounts of wooden flute soloing, but in a visceral breath-blast rather than gentle hippy mode. A sheer celebratory blanket ripples over the today’s-problems-jettisoning audience. Bab L’Bluz still sound rooted in a hardcore Berber sound, but they are equally conversant with hedonistic rock and roll climaxing and wild extroverted shape-throwing.

Before the afternoon Polyphème set, a quieter, more intimate experience beckoned with the Boucs! trio (from Port-de-Bouc), singing in Occitan. This was another (secreted) highlight of the weekend. The set held a powerful authority, a contained potency, springing from a casual campfire-gathered closeness. There are shared vocals, along with a spread of bouzouki, acoustic bass guitar, and a volume-leashed electric that retains an exciting tension even while at quietened volume. The central singer is Sam Karpienia, who is apparently pretty well-known throughout France, with his raspy vocal style bringing Tom Waits to mind. The Occitan root appears to involve elements of flamenco, and being an outsider to the local scene, your scribe has trouble nailing down the exact sonic makeup of these compelling songs. They sound like combinations, perhaps even to the local Marseille ears.

As a testament to the great Babel variety there were also winning sets by the Iranian all-acoustic Rokh Quartet, the atmospheric South Korean duo Dal:Um, the new junkyard instrument builders in town Kin’Gongolo Kiniata (from Kinshasa), and the quirkily individualist veteran South African rapper Yugen Blakrok (who has unusual body language moves to accompany her nonconformist rhymes).