Indie Electronic from Abel Ray

Born in Casablanca, living in Marrakesh. Abel Ray’s journey through electronic music began at an early age. Having started making music at 14, he’s now a producer, DJ, sound designer and label boss, forming half the team of Aberton Records, with Italian producer Nicolo Berton in 2014, and Medina Records with his friend Ibrahim Ettalabi in 2018.

The Moroccan artist has spread his sound across the globe via releases on records labels based all over the world such as Cr2 Records (UK), Radiant (ZRH), Nightcolours (UK), PRAH Recordings (UK), Moshi Moshi Music (UK), Aberton Records (IT), House Tribe Records (LA), Voyeur Music (FR), Medina Records (RAK).

This time round he brings us the new track “Last Exit To Transkei” channelling the antecedents of contemporary North African culture with his eclectic electronica.

The new release has already caught the attention of tastemakers such as Lauren Laverne and Mary-Anne Hobbs at BBC 6Music, and is the first track from Abel’s Labyrinth EP set for release this spring on PRAH Recordings.

The EP is a work of entirely modern construction, and yet it owes its origins to the ages. Programmed and produced to carry emotional weight and melodic reward in a digital age, here are the threads of a culture lost and found; spiritual, material, imagined, remembered, and mythologized.

Commenting on the track, Abel offers, “This EP came out of a book I read. The civilisation of Amazigh culture, it was a maze, a maze of how people can be merged into each other and still keep the colours and sounds alive along thousands of years, an authenticity kept being modernised, and it will still be.”

This conception of a cultural maze, an expanding sphere of colours and sounds, picked up and put down, built and borrowed, timeless and modern is an abstract for Abel Ray’s four track Labyrinth EP.

At the height of their collective power the Amazigh civilisation ranged across north Africa to southern Europe, it conquered and was humbled, it absorbed and it overcame, it has dissolved and yet it precipitates throughout our world. Today the Amazigh are over 50million people, large minority populations in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, across Africa and Europe, a culture at once ancient and contemporary.

Hi latest track delivers his hypnotic take on this cultural history. Tribal rhythms shuffle throughout as traditional instrumentation arrangements including a flute collide with modern sonic aesthetics.

Listen to Last Exit To Transkei below

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