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It may not seem cutting edge these days to fuse global musical styles with western pop. But one band from Germany has been doing it for nearly thirty years. DISSIDENTEN from Berlin.
Music critics have described Dissidenten as the Godfathers of World Beat. And the trio cuts no corners to get its sound. They produced their 1984 standout album "Sahara Elektrik" in Morocco with the assistance of writer Paul Bowles.
Dissidenten tracks like this remix of their classic number "Telephone Arab" inspired hoards of real North Africans to do with their own rai music what these three Germans were doing with it.
The iconoclastic band even became real dissidents of the recording industry when they broke away from Warner Brothers, their record label in the early nineties. Dissidenten co-founder and bassist Uve Mullrich says the label had not been amused by their artistic ideas.
“We were supposed to do two albums. One we did, and the other one we insisted it's called "Real American Music." It involved native Indian musicians and they didn't really go for it. (laughs)”
Now Dissidenten is back with its first studio album since 1996. Mullrich himself has resided in Tangier, Morocco for many years. So it made sense for the band to move stylistically back to the part of the world that fascinated them in the first place in 1982.
They've also returned to rock and roll territory, the starting point for their musical forays into other parts of the world. But what really motivated this new album TANGER SESSIONS was an event that inspired a lot of artists.
“After 9-11 since I still live in Tangier, we felt the friction, and we thought 'well let's do another project there,' in a sort of humanistic sense, but we thought what a 22 year old young American guy in front of a supermarket somewhere in the Midwest, and a couple of months later he finds himself in Iraq and doesn't know what's happening. So we were using these musical archetypes of the 70s, Led Zeppelin, or whatever. But the singing is in Arabic to demonstrate the culture shock this guy must be feeling. And when you have titles like "It's the world stupid, it's not your country," it's obvious what we're aiming at...”
Suffice it say that Dissidenten are peaceful internationalists. "This is the world, not your country" is actually the subtitle of one of the songs on Tanger Sessions.
Dissidenten recorded the CD with a new group of collaborators, the Casablanca ensemble Jil Jilala.
But old Dissidenten fans will be pleased to know that the band revives their big international hit from twenty years ago "Fata Morgana."
On the Tanger Sessions, it's subtitled "the Eagle sits in the cage while the chickens are watching TV."
- PRI's The World |
