2 out of 5

Label: Un Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: ?

A mixtape which bandcamp has tagged as raï, a genre with which I am absolutely not familiar but “sounds” recognizable (at a surface level), and, for those in the same boat as me, can be read about at, say, wikipedia. Described as Algerian folk music, the tracks Byblos has brought together here are certainly somewhat archival, using artists / tunes stretching across the 70s and 80s, which isn’t forever ago by any means, but let’s assume that maybe some of this stuff is gathered from cassettes or singles you’d have to hunt to find – or at least I’m making that assumption based on quality of the recordings, which forms part of my negative judgement here: while exposure to raï tracks is a good education to my raised-on-US-MTV ears, and maybe if these are truly rare or hard to find quality recordings of, and even if maybe the distortion is a put-on for atmosphere… the fuzzy, faded nature of a lot of these tracks makes it hard to really dig in. Totally matter of opinion, ’cause I could see it casting a spell on a different listener, but it made me tune out a bit. And, again wholly operating on assumptions, if these are naturally poor quality, I feel you can hear Byblos’ efforts to present them as clearly as possible, forefronting their beats for the sake of the mix – that is, trying to tap into the inherent danceableness, so the fuzzyness is less distracting. Nonetheless, it’s a knock.

The other knock, and my main one: the mixing, sorry, just isn’t that great. The sides of the tape end abruptly, beats aren’t matched, and some tunes are just lazily faded out and in when there’s not a better option. It just feels fairly amateurish, including a looong blend on Side A where Byblos lets one track play in the background for an extended period, as though unable to get the beats to sync. It’s weird. The looping – presuming these are looped – is also a bit too extensive. The music itself can be quite impressive, with great vocal performances and fun disco-ish beats that are elevated by some pretty dense instrumentation, but most songs, particularly on the A-side, get that impression out of the way after a single chorus and verse and then go through the same again, and again, pardoning that maybe I’m not catching nuances in the language, but it mostly seemed like singles phrases or chanting, hence my belief it’s looped.

…Which makes the other knock apparent: that the A-side’s tunes, up through (I think – many apologies if I’m misidentifying) a key-based instrumental from Dziri, are very similarly structured. The vocals hit some unique trills but are fairly similarly toned, and the same goes for the backing beats / instruments. The introduction of some female vocals on (again, I believe) Aâlach T’aâdini help to break this up.

The B-side fares better in this sense, perhaps swinging a bit more modern, and possibly tainting my opinion by having some singing in English. But I think moreso it’s that the music is more varied, adding some swagger to the beats and going more clearly electronic.

All the same, I didn’t feel like I was discovering artists so much as a style of music, and the presentation did not feel like the most flattering way to do even that. I’d guess those more inclined to appreciate raï, or perhaps familiar with the artists – very possibly these tracks are, indeed, known quantities in the scene – will logically be more favorable here, but even given that, the jittery nature of the mix still feels like it would limit the appeal.