Guedra Guedra

Guedra Guedra is the DJ and producer alias of hybrid sound artist Abdellah M. Hassak. He has been navigating universes of electronic and bass music through an introspective and retrospective lens. He is anchoring his creations in an imagined space-time between his explorations of ancestral music and rhythms and his design of new sounds and beats; an approach that he anchors within afrofuturism.

Abdellah can count on his long and solid experience as a Dj, under various alias, and above all as a sound explorer, throughout several projects involving field recording, residences, sound mapping among other techniques and channels that approach the World through its soundscapes.
When he started the Guedra Guedra project, Abdellah had a quite clear and sharp conceptual orientation and mission: de/re-constructing rhythms, decolonizing dancefloors, re-centering African tribal sound schemes.

The links with the African continent appear indeed as strong and under multiple forms through the Guedra Guedra project. The chosen name itself is a celebration of African identity as it means both a dance of nomadic women of the desert, but also a pot used both in the kitchen and as a percussion.
Exploring polyrhythms and tribal sounds and beats find their roots in Abdellah's journey before he became a Dj and producer: he has always been curious about his sonic surroundings and passionate about sound and music archives.

It drove him towards the worlds of field-recording starting in his city, Casablanca, and extending his horizons first in Morocco then further in West Africa and beyond. He is also a vinyl collector, especially focussing in creative traces of artists from the MENA region and the African continent. These explorations translate now in a solid catalog of samples that enrich his productions.

His two first opuses, an EP and an LP, are diverse in their propositions and vibes but both use patchwork techniques to build layers of past and future sounds, fusing contemporary dancefloor bass and drums - like UK funky, hardcore, Kuduro, juke etc - with instrumental and vocal sounds meticulously extracted from his wide collections.

While Son of Sun, his first EP, was an introduction to this patchworked universe, Vexillology, an LP in thirteen tracks, was even bolder, inviting us to confront our senses to afrofuturistic calls, centering mystic spiritualities and journeys through space-time.

Abdellah is now seeking new orientations through which he will pursue his explorations of polyrhythms and global African sounds, diving deeper into interpretations of afrofuturism where the machine/artificial intelligence is given more space, more autonomy to play a role in extending the existence and traces of ancestral rhythms and sounds. This use of softwares, tools and machines translates Guedra Guedra's approach and contribution to decolonize technology.

His new project is clearly an afrofuturistic call and bold proposition. Thus, the notions and experiences of place and space are central in Guedra Guedra's on-going creation, in its artistic, intellectual and political dimensions: giving space to traditionally marginalized voices and cultures in order to re-imagine the contemporary African music scene as more inclusive and representative.