MUTANT visions
Guedra Guedra is Moroccan producer Abdellah M. Hassak, part of a new generation of North African creatives simultaneously plugged into the region’s ancient traditions and the latest developments in global electronic music.
Smugglers Way, an imprint of Domino, will release Guedra Guedra’s second album MUTANT on August 29. The album sees Abdellah blend analogue synths and drum machines with field recordings gathered while travelling across Morocco, Tanzania, Guinea and many other countries, exploring themes of identity, Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism and decolonisation.
Needless to say, we like the sound of all that, but what sealed the deal for us was not the theory but the booming bass and crisp, infectious beats of the practise. So we put a few questions to the man himself, just to get to know him better…
Hi thanks for your time…. First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having… Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?
Hello! Right now, I’m in Marrakech, where I live and work. It’s a city full of inspiration, a unique place where ancient heritage meets vibrant contemporary life. Today is a relatively calm day for me in the studio. I’m working on preparations for my summer tour and promoting my latest album MUTANT. It’s not easy, there’s a lot to manage, but I feel lucky to be surrounded by a great team that allows me to stay focused on the creative side and to share my music with the world.
I’m also putting the final touches on a few new tracks and getting ready for an upcoming performance. Later this evening, I’ll probably attend a local event to catch some Moroccan artists live, I like to stay connected to the scene and support what’s happening here.
Tell us a bit about your formative musical experiences… Early musical memories from siblings, parents, schoolmates… First instruments, embarrassing bands etc
I grew up in Casablanca, in a family where music was always part of daily life. At home, my parents played cassette tapes filled with Moroccan popular music, everything from chaâbi to classical Andalusian songs. Alongside that, I was exposed to raï, funk, reggae, and later on, hip-hop and rock, especially through my older brother who sadly passed away a few months ago, and also through friends I had during that period.
The streets of Casablanca were a constant source of sonic inspiration. They were alive with trance-based traditional music like Issawa, Jebala, Chaâbi, and Aita. This was the kind of music you’d hear during religious ceremonies, weddings, or simply from street musicians performing in the neighborhoods. These sounds left a deep impression on me because of their powerful repetition, collective rhythm, and the deep connection between music, ritual, and everyday life.
Very early on, I began playing drums and bass guitar in high school bands. We explored everything from metal and dub to reggae. It was loud, chaotic, and raw, but also incredibly liberating. It taught me a lot about rhythm, energy, and how to communicate through sound in a live setting. That time felt like a personal school of freedom. We weren’t following rules. We were just creating with passion and urgency.
Eventually, I got my first computer, and that marked a real turning point. I started exploring music production software and entered the world of electronic music. But it wasn’t easy. Back then, access to equipment was limited, and online resources were scarce, especially in Morocco. Despite these challenges, I began learning how to build entire compositions on my own. I layered sounds, shaped field recordings, and experimented with new sonic textures. It felt like discovering a new kind of nomadic practice, one that allowed me to travel through sound, culture, memory, and imagination from my small home studio.
For me, electronic music has become more than just a genre. It is a language. One that is both deeply personal and radically global. It helps me bridge ancestral memory with future possibilities.
And tell us about your journey into the music you make today – what were the important steps?
The real turning point in my musical journey happened when I joined an engineering school. Until then, I had been very active in playing live music with bands, mostly drums and bass guitar. But once I began my studies, I didn’t have the time or flexibility to keep up with regular rehearsals. That’s when I turned toward home production, which completely transformed my creative process.
I installed my first digital audio software and began experimenting with basic tools. I started working with dub, ambient textures, and experimental music. These genres opened up a world of freedom that was totally different from playing in a band. I realized that I could create full compositions on my own, layering rhythms, melodies, samples, and effects. It was like opening a door to another dimension. I could now blend all the influences I had gathered, traditional Moroccan and African music, street sounds, digital textures, into something completely new and personal.
That period laid the foundation for my artistic identity. I began to understand sound not only as entertainment, but as a space for storytelling, memory, and resistance. The more I explored field recordings, polyrhythms, and sound archives, the more I felt the need to approach music with a clear purpose.
Eventually, this led to the birth of the Guedra Guedra project. From the beginning, the idea was to create a sonic space where African rhythmic traditions could be re-centered, not as background flavor or decoration, but as the core structure of the music. I wanted to challenge the way electronic music often treats non-Western sounds, to reverse the gaze and give full agency to these rhythms, voices, and textures.
Since then, I’ve been developing my own path in electronic music and sound art. It’s been a long and evolving journey that has brought me to different countries and allowed me to share my work internationally, while staying deeply connected to my heritage. I also expanded my focus into field recording and sound archiving, exploring how sound can carry memory and reflect power structures.
My mission with Guedra Guedra became clear: to decolonize sound, to celebrate African complexity and futurism, and to use technology not to erase tradition, but to extend it. Every track I make is a kind of time-travel, a bridge between ancestral memory and future invention. It’s a way of honoring what came before, while imagining what comes next.
Give us a quick precis of what you’ve released to date for the uninitiated…
Before launching Guedra Guedra, I had already been active under different artistic identities. One of my earliest solo projects was Dubosmium, active between 2005 and 2009. It was a platform for exploring electronic dub and ambient experimentalism infused with Moroccan sonic elements. During that time, I released two albums: Horizontal Plane Polar Dub (2006) and Green Element (2008). These works were shaped by a DIY spirit and a strong connection to local soundscapes, blending digital dub techniques with samples coming from film and records and meditative atmospheres. That phase helped me develop an early vocabulary for working with low-end frequencies, delays, and sound system culture, while reflecting on North African identity through a deeply introspective and experimental lens.
In parallel, as Abdellah M. Hassak, I began working more in the realm of sound art, radiophonic creation, and field recording. I explored how sound functions as a medium for memory, territory, and resistance, particularly in the post-colonial context of North Africa. These works were less about rhythm and more about listening, about how sonic environments shape our experience of the world. This part of my practice deeply informed the conceptual dimension of what would later become Guedra Guedra.
The Guedra Guedra project began as a response to a personal and political need to re-center African rhythmic traditions within contemporary electronic music. My first release under this name was the EP ‘Son of Sun’, which explored African percussive roots through a vibrant and high-energy electronic approach. It was both a love letter to African rhythm and a statement about how these rhythms could speak a futuristic language without losing their essence.
That was followed by my debut full-length album, Vexillology. The title itself refers to the study of flags, symbols of identity, borders, and belonging. This record questioned how we navigate complex cultural legacies and national identities through rhythm, voice, and sonic fragmentation. It was an attempt to rethink borders not through politics but through polyrhythm, to make audible the contradictions and entanglements of post-colonial identities.
Most recently, I announced MUTANT, which is my most elaborate and immersive project to date. Built on years of field recording in Morocco, West Africa, and East Africa, it incorporates traditional chants, acoustic instruments, and ritual rhythms, which I rework using digital processes like glitch editing, granular synthesis, and deep bass design. MUTANT is both a club record and a sonic archive. It is rooted in the idea that sound is never static, that it transforms, mutates, and carries with it the traces of movement, struggle, and imagination. The record features tracks like Tribes with Flags, with a spoken word performance by filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri, reflecting on Pan-Africanism and memory.
Taken together, these projects trace a personal and artistic journey from introspective dub and sound documentary toward a sonic Afrofuturism that is bold, rhythmic, and radically rooted. Each release is a different layer of that trajectory, from Dubosmium’s ambient experiments to Guedra Guedra’s political dancefloor.
Tell about the name Guedra Guedra… What does it mean and how does it relate to you and your music? How did you come across electronic music first?
The word Guedra refers to both a traditional percussive instrument, a large earthenware jar, and a sacred Amazigh ritual dance practiced in the southern desert regions of Morocco. This dance, often led by women, involves rhythmic hand clapping, chanting, and a spiritual trance-like state. For me, the term Guedra symbolizes a deep and ancestral vibration, a powerful connection between rhythm, the body, memory, and collective trance.
By naming the project Guedra Guedra, I’m not just referring to the tradition itself, but doubling it, repeating the name as an echo or a loop. That repetition is symbolic of transformation. It’s my way of honoring the deep cultural roots while also signaling the sonic mutation I bring through electronic music. It’s a way of acknowledging that something ancient is being carried forward into new spaces, clubs, festivals, sound systems, radio waves, without losing its essence.
My introduction to electronic music didn’t come through formal training, but through experimentation. I’m a self-taught producer. I started by exploring dub and ambient music on early digital audio software. At the same time, I was collecting cassette tapes, vinyl records, and making field recordings of traditional Moroccan and African music. These two paths, digital experimentation and sonic archiving, eventually merged.
Electronic music offered me tools not just to compose, but to reinterpret, to remix memory, to build bridges between the ancestral and the futuristic. So Guedra Guedra is more than a name, it’s a method, a manifesto, and a sonic identity that reflects both where I come from and where I want to go.
Tell us about Morocco and the music scene there… Are there many other musicians operating in similar musical areas? Does the traditional music you grew up with also play a part in your sound?
The music scene in Morocco is incredibly vibrant and in constant evolution. The past few decades have seen waves of experimentation and reinvention, particularly when it comes to electronic music. While the popular image of Moroccan music often focuses on traditional forms like Gnawa, Aïta, or Andalusian classical music, there is also a deep and rich history of electronic innovation that goes back to the early 1980s.
This movement was significantly shaped by the pioneering label Barraka El Farnatshi, founded by Swiss producer Pat Jabbar. He collaborated with Moroccan musicians to form Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects (AKJE), blending dub, trance, house, and techno with Moroccan ceremonial and trance traditions. This hybrid sound, wild, raw, and deeply spiritual, pushed Moroccan music into new spaces of global recognition. Collaborations with international icons like Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell (from Funkadelic), and Umar Bin Hassan (The Last Poets) further amplified this wave of innovation. These weren’t just crossovers, they were radical reimaginings of what Moroccan music could be.
In the same era, projects like U-Cef and MoMo (Music of Moroccan Origin) brought the Moroccan underground into dialogue with drum’n’bass, breakbeat and dub, coining terms like Digital and Roots (DaR) to describe this new kind of electronic heritage. They were among the first to argue, through sound, that Moroccan music was not just something to preserve, it was something alive, mutable, and ready to mutate.
These historical moments are not just background for me, they’re part of my artistic lineage. I see my own work as a continuation of this spirit. When I launched Guedra Guedra, my aim wasn’t to “fuse” electronic music with Moroccan sounds for aesthetic effect. It was about decolonizing sound, creating music that resists global homogenization, that speaks from within African polyrhythms, and that imagines new sonic futures rooted in ancestral knowledge.
Today, the Moroccan scene continues to grow. We have festivals like MOGA and Oasis, which mix global headliners with local talent. Spaces like Kabana in Marrakech, where I curate musical programming, serve as laboratories for sonic experimentation. Many younger producers are now turning to traditional rhythms like Houara, Ahwach, Issawa, and Gnawa as raw material for their productions, not out of nostalgia, but to push those forms forward with synths, drum machines, and DAWs.
This is exactly what excites me: Morocco is not a scene of imitation, it’s a scene of translation, of friction, of creative tension. There are many artists operating in similar territories, like Cheb Runner, Retro Cassetta, Daox, Driss Bennis, Polyswitch, Saib, and others a lot and a lot, each with a different take on what it means to be electronic and Moroccan today.
Traditional music plays a central role in my sound, not as ornamentation, but as a foundation. I work with field recordings, archival samples, and acoustic instruments from different parts of the African continent. These elements aren’t used to illustrate identity, they are the structure of my music. They’re the voice of memory, of community, of spirit.
To me, Moroccan electronic music is not a trend. It’s a cultural movement. It’s what happens when the desert meets the dancefloor, when heritage collides with technology, when rhythm becomes a method of resistance. And we’re just getting started.
Tell us about your specific music making environment… Does it have an effect on the music you make?
I compose from my studio in Marrakech, which is more than just a workspace, it’s a living organism that reflects my creative identity. The environment is hybrid, combining digital tools like synths, samplers, and production software with traditional instruments, cassette tapes, vinyl records, and field recordings I’ve collected over the years. I also include everyday sound objects, things as simple as kitchen tools or pieces of metal, because I see sound everywhere, not just in instruments.
Marrakech itself has a huge impact on how I create. The city is intense, full of contrasts. There’s sacred energy in the call to prayer, raw rhythm in the markets, and spontaneous harmony in the street vendors’ voices. My studio is open to those energies. I often keep the windows open while working, letting the outside world bleed into my sessions. The textures of the city, the voices, the birds, the traffic, become layers of the music I make.
But I also need moments of detachment, so I often leave the city for artist residencies or field trips, especially in rural or desert regions. That’s where I reconnect with nature, silence, and ancestral vibrations. These travels are essential to my process, because they allow me to gather new material and return with a fresh perspective. Many of my tracks start from these collected sounds, a chant recorded during a festival, the wind hitting a rock, the pulse of a traditional ceremony, and evolve into full compositions.
So yes, the space I create in, and the places I pass through, absolutely shape my sound. My studio is a kind of crossroads where the old meets the new, the local meets the global, and where memory, imagination, and experimentation coexist.
You’ve used field recordings from Morocco, Tanzania, Guinea and more on your new album MUTANT, gathered on your travels – what specific flavours and traditions are special to certain countries?
Every country I’ve encountered has left a unique sonic imprint that became part of the MUTANT universe. As an African artist based in Africa, it’s often easier for me to travel across the continent and connect with artists on a deep cultural and creative level. But more importantly, what’s truly powerful is the sense of solidarity and artistic kinship I’ve built over time. There’s a growing network of African artists who share common values, and that has been essential in helping me collect, understand, and reimagine these diverse sound materials.
In Morocco, my home, I’ve spent years recording and exploring traditional sounds like Ahwach collective dances from the High Atlas, Gnawa spiritual music rooted in sub-Saharan heritage, and Houara rhythms from the south, each carrying its own social function, trance structure, and deep ancestral resonance. These traditions have shaped my rhythmic understanding from the beginning.
In Guinea, I was deeply moved by the djembé culture of the Malinke people. The drum is not just a musical instrument there, it’s a language, a call to community. The intensity and unity of rhythm in Guinea is unlike anything else. It taught me a lot about how collective energy can be structured and transformed.
In Tanzania, what inspired me most were the vocal polyphonies, the interplay of human voices in harmony and rhythm, often performed without any instruments. Daily life there is filled with sounds that seem musical: the cadence of speech, the beat of tools, the rhythm of labour. I also recorded environmental sounds, markets, footsteps, distant conversations, which I later processed and layered into new textures.
What’s magical is that not all these recordings came from physical travel. Thanks to this strong pan-African network I mentioned earlier, I was able to collaborate remotely with artists and recordists across the continent. Even if I couldn’t physically visit a country, people would send me sound material, field recordings, oral traditions, vinyl samples, because we shared the same vision. This wasn’t just about collecting sounds; it was about building trust, exchanging knowledge, and co-constructing a shared archive.
This collaboration at a distance gave me access not only to new sonic material but also to new ways of listening. It allowed me to reflect on how rhythms from different African countries can speak to one another. The process brought me to a deeper understanding of how cultural memory is transmitted through sound, and how diverse local traditions can resonate and interact within a shared musical space.
In MUTANT, all of these fragments, Ahwach chants, Tanzanian voices, West African percussion, are transformed. They don’t appear as raw samples but are stretched, glitched, pitched, and woven into new patterns. My machines become tools for re-imagining memory, not just reproducing it. This is how MUTANT became a speculative sonic map of Africa, based not on borders, but on vibrations, resonances, and cultural dialogues.
What’s next for you in the short/medium/long term? What are you hearing that’s inspiring you? Any more live/DJ/release action we should know about?
In the short term, I’m focusing on a series of concerts and DJ sets to present MUTANT across Europe and beyond. These live performances are not just shows, they’re moments of transmission, where I can see how people physically and emotionally respond to the music. I’m also developing hybrid formats that blend live electronics, sound installations, and visual art. I want to create immersive environments where sound becomes architecture, movement, and memory.
At the same time, I’m carefully observing how audiences interact with the MUTANT album. Their reactions help me understand where the next artistic direction might be. I’m not someone who plans everything years in advance. I’m deeply rooted in the present moment, and I let each experience feed the next phase. In that sense, my next project is born out of the dialogue I have with the world, with the places I go, and with the people I meet.
In the medium term, I’m continuing my sonic research, especially around African archives, traditional instruments, and new forms of rhythm. I’m also working on expanding my field recording archive by collaborating with artists and researchers across the continent. Sometimes, I can’t travel physically, but I work closely with a network of like-minded people who share sounds, stories, and local knowledge. This remote collaboration has become a form of sonic solidarity.
Long term, I hope to keep evolving this project not only musically but also politically and culturally, building bridges between regions, reactivating forgotten memories, and imagining future possibilities for African sound. My next releases may explore new sonic territories, but they will always be grounded in this desire to amplify the vibrations of the continent through contemporary tools.
Pre-order Mutant on vinyl here
Pre-order Mutant on CD here
