O Morto

One of many good reasons to keep a close ear on Discrepant and its Sucata Tapes sublabel, ‘Ifrits Habitent’ is proffered as a more free-flowing sibling to O Morto’s new studio album ‘Dans la Gorge d’un Monstre’, itself a follow-up to 2016’s ‘The Forest, The People and the Spirits’. Typically drawing on his background as a composer and sound artist for film, dance, performance and theatre, O Morto specifically applies his techniques to the riches of Moroccan music here in a heavily satisfying hour of impressionistically skewed and warped field recordings that nevertheless impart a strong feel for the sweltering sound fields of Moroccan streets and marketplaces. The results are acutely comparable to Metal Preyers’ similarly spirited incursions on Kampala, also taking the license of Muslimgauze’s sound-scaping, but with a humid sense of actually being there (as opposed to Manchester) that reflects the lingering psychedelic after effects of his time in Arabic North Africa.

With keen attention to the rhythmic psychedelia of Moroccan percussion traditions and polyphonic cacophony of its built-up areas, augmented by a spellbinding taste for curdled discord and bittersweet Non-Western synth tone, O Morto plunges us into his memory banks with a grippingly impressionistic sort of surreality. We are utterly intoxicated from the front by his dense thicket of horns and crowd holler in ‘Marrakesh Vertigo’, and it’s a rare pleasure to follow his logic across the 12 minutes of trampling, ritualise drums and chant in ‘Fais attention, pas de confiance’, thru wavey flutes that sound like a screwed grime riddim in ‘Ali Baba’, to Raï keyboard melodies of ‘Tefout Radio Loop’,  gonzoid Sublime Frequencies snapshots of drum batteries in ‘Festivities in Boumaine du Dadès’, and the eerie evocation of ‘Out of Nowhere Ferry Between Ceuta and Algeciras’ that leaves us with the oddest sensation of time travel.