Maalem Mah - Guinia - Floating Points - James Holden - Marhaba - Eglo

Comes With 16 page A4 booklet.

In March 2014, James Holden and Floating Points were invited to the Fellah Hotel, nestled at the foot of the Atlas Mountains just outside Marrakech, to participate in a week-long residency collaborating with the legendary Maalem (Master) Mahmoud Guinia from Morocco's Gnawa musical tradition. The four tracks you see before you are the product of Holden and Floating Points' makeshift open-air recording sessions by the hotel pool with the Maalem Mahmoud Guinia and his band, featuring the Maalem on his three-stringed guembri instrument and lead vocals and accompanied by the trio of Guinia's brother-in-law and two sons who provide the vocal chorus response and complex krakeb and clapping percussive rhythm cycles that characterise the Gnawa tradition.

Presented as a documentary souvenir of that residency week and released in collaboration with Floating Points' Eglo label, an initial vinyl release via Eglo available at the upcoming Independent Label Market in London will juxtapose the two contrasting collaborative approaches of Holden and Floating Points on one double Aside 12". Border Community meanwhile will take care of the subsequent digital counterpart, including two bonus digital-only Holden and Guinea improvised live takes, available from all good music outlets from 20th April 2015 (along with any remaining Eglo vinyl stock).

Floating Points' 'Mimoun Marhaba' began life as a series of prepared Flo'Po loops which the Maalem was invited to jam over via an in-ear monitor, prompting the Guinea group's rendition of the 'Marhaba' ("Welcome") Gnawa theme. Mixed back home in Sam's London studio, the poolside singing, and clapping recordings were reintegrated with Sam's virtuosic keyboard performances and reassembled into one trippy, hypnotic, groovy whole - by far the most club-friendly cut here.

Holden's attempts to meld his music with the Gnawa sound meanwhile saw him quickly ditch his home-prepared efforts and swiftly repatch his modular synth to enable him to improvise alongside the Guinea contingent's traditional repertoire, with Sam standing in as recording engineer to capture the one-off collaborative performances in a series of live takes. Holden & Guinia's alternative take on the Gnawa standard 'Marhaba' was the very first sketch to emerge, featuring Holden's own attempt at emulating the distinctive Gnawa beat for the Guinia crew to play along with via a homemade drum machine patch on his modular synth.

Their second improvisational experiment - and perhaps the most successful of the three - 'Bania' is a magical coming together of two parallel musical evolutions, where Holden's soaring modular solo drifts in and out, over and under the vocal call-and response, plucked guembri and relentless krakeb rhythm of the Gnawa traditional. At one point, the metallic clatter of the krakebs naturally falls away to expose the deliciously nuanced in-the-moment interplay between Holden's undulating synth line and the Guinia-led anthemic vocal refrains, forming a breakdown which is pure trance in every sense of the word, though orchestrated entirely at the behest of the 63-year-old Maalem.

With the collective sense that in 'Bania' they had managed to nail down something rather special, the third and final Holden & Guinia experiment took place under much more relaxed circumstances. Thus a laidback delivery of 'Tora Tora Torko Lila' features the subtle yet shrill intervention of a Holden-tweaked modular synth following the decidedly Gnawa-tinged percussive input tapped out by Guinia's philosophy student son Hamza on the trigger pads of Holden's midi controller, in a thoroughly modern moment of cultural exchange.

The product of a single days outdoor recording session on a makeshift poolside setup, communicating entirely through a translator, their success in melding together these two disparate musical traditions in such a seamless fashion is surely a remarkable achievement. "It's because we're all playing together and are open to each other's ideas that it actually worked," Floating Points told Red Bull Music Academy's Kat Leinhart, who accompanied the producers throughout the course of their Moroccan trip (as documented in her illuminating article 'The Hal of Gnawa').

"Whether sonically it's like mixing lime and milk is a different matter, but the fact that we're happy to make music together is an edifying thing."

Discogs wanted collectors item.