Group Doueh

Established in Dakhla, a village in the Western Sahara in southern Morocco, Group Doueh was born in the early 2000s, bringing together Sahraoui and Hassanian musical expressions as well as the hits of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Open to improvisation and experimentation with new musical structures, the group performs at weddings and invites audiences to a collective trance. Doueh's sound, built around electric guitar, tinidit (Mauritanian guitar), tbal (tambourine), synthesizers and vocals, was a real hit, and the group went on to record their first album, Guitar Music from the Western Sahara, released in 2007 on Sublime Frequencies. The line-up based around Bashiri Touballi, Halima Jakani, Jamal Baamar and Salmou Baamar (Doueh) expanded to include Salmou and Halima's two sons, El Waar and Hamdan Bamaar. With Treeg Salaam (2009) and Beatte Harab (2010), the band gained international recognition and received rave reviews from specialist media. With their fourth album, Zayna Jumma (2011), Group Doueh achieved significant productivity and asserted their electric style, which is both close to traditional cultures and receptive to a wide audience. A few years later, the arrival of French punk/garage band Cheveu in Dakhla for a ten-day residency gave Group Doueh a new face. Together, the two groups attempt to reconcile their different approaches to music, resulting in ten recordings that make up Dakhla Sahara session (2017), under the Born Bad Records label. The album gives Group Doueh the opportunity to expand its French-speaking audience and perform internationally, at the Fête de l'Humanité 2016 as well as in Rabbat, Morocco, while becoming a standard-bearer for the mixing of cultures.

Please enable Javascript to view this page competely.