Souad Massi releases his 10th album Sequana. She performs 2 titles at the Grand studio with guitarist Malik Kerrouche.
Sequana is the tenth album by Souad Massi, singer, author and composer of Algerian origin. Usually recognized for her folk and chaâbi music, her palette of sound colors widens towards the Sahel, the Caribbean, Brazil, and sometimes rock. Souad has completely renewed the team that accompanies him, thus opening a new chapter in a career that began in the 1990s and marked by a departure from Algeria for France. She flies away here in search of the sun of her childhood, light and softness », while tracking down the cruelty which pushes the dictators to cut off the hands of the poet. Supported by justin adams (Rachid Taha, Tinariwen, Robert Plant…) in production, accompanied here and there by Piers Faccini Where Naissam Jalal, Souad Massi digs her furrow as a committed, emancipated woman, a woman of her time who sings her fights like never before.
What should be kept in any case is contact with nature, because it is beautiful, but also because it knows how to resist, says Souad Massi. On the cover, here it is from the front, two daisies placed on the eyes, delicately. ” I had the feeling of being fragile, vulnerable, and no longer having this ugly and ugly vision of the nature that we destroy “. Beneath the flowers, eyes closed, we reconnect with the essential. Paradoxicallycontinues Souad Massi, it is a form of denunciation or indignation in the face of what we are experiencing and what our gaze perceives “.
Sequana is a collection of eleven songs, nine of which are written and composed by Souad Massi, which attempt to capture the passage of time and the essential – what we must preserve and pass on. ” My album revolves around human relationships, the malaise of today’s adolescents, the loss of bearings to the dangers of totalitarian regimes that push people to take all the risks to leave their countries. “. Here, everything is metaphor and paradox, everything is cocoon and chrysalis, everything is drive, and everything is link. In writing Sequana, Souad looked, for example, at the mysteries of the multicolored Peacock butterfly, whose larva loves stinging nettles, and which dies as soon as it is deprived of links with its congeners.
By virtue of this law of transformation, Sequana displays an unusual diversity of musical styles, distilled with delicacy, over the course of inspiration, rock, folk, calypso, bossa, reggae, sounds from the Orient or the Algerian desert. Suggested by the English producer Justin Adams, this palette of colors was validated, then magnified by an adventurous Souad, who welcomes on a title Piers Faccini, or the young Syrian flautist Naïssam Jalal. See the official clip of One Star.
Souad Massi belongs to a large and rich family, that of folk, whose DNA is defined by the guitar, the concern for observation and the intelligence there is to transmute wounds into songs. Born in 1972 in the popular district of Bab-el-Oued, Souad Massi listened to Algiers chaâbi and the Kabyle song so important in terms of poetry. She liked the songs with texts specific to the French repertoire, then, she says, learned to understand the singular lives of popular artists, such as Michel Berger or Dalida. And then, she adored the melodic country of Kenny Rogers, and dubbed the societal abrasures of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez.
Souad Massi’s new songs, sung in Arabic and French, have been conceived in a duel mode, imposed by a pandemic dialectic: how to return its rhythm, its harmony to a world plunged in a cottony fog, where the withdrawal and the loneliness take the place of a watchword. ” COVID has brought out buried anxieties. The unknown has always scared me says Souad Massi. Everything that we do not control, the anxieties of the evening, the abandonment, the loneliness… To create, to put words on these deep troubles, I have to seek the living forces, the rhythm, the drive “.
Souad Massi slips into bossa nova-tinged nostalgia on Hope, a title designed with Michel Françoise. She seizes the poetry of the Arabic language to describe the uneasiness of adolescence – delicate transformation of the chrysalis – through the myth of the goddess Sequana, the one who, according to our ancestors the Gauls, watched over the sources of fresh water. It is in a group, in the family, that memory is worked on, this essential asset that allows us to move forward.
Intellectually square, with a scientific background (Souad Massi is an engineer, graduated from the School of Civil Engineering), she made her way artistically between the musical currents that inhabited Algiers in the 1990s. Passed through flamenco with the group Triana from Algiers, then heavy metal with Atakor, Souad Massi studied Western classical music. In this sense, it is the pure product of an “open city Algiers”, long celebrated.
Coming to Paris in 1999 to sing at the Cabaret Sauvage, her first cassette under her arm, Souad Massi was noticed by the Island-Mercury label. Since then, she has chosen to live in France. ” Algeria, she says, is inscribed in me, these are parallel worlds that nourish me and from which I draw my resources, like a plant, in reality “. Exile is something else. Exile is “those people who cling to planes leaving Kabul when the Taliban return. For them, I wrote Draw me a country. But also, because I cannot subscribe to the discourses of fear that are developing here, to create a country where one would be singled out for having a color other than white. From this chaotic and broken world, however, hope has not been erased. ” A single star is enough to invite us to think about our own relationship with others and to get to the point “: life and resistance to the forces of destruction.
Performed titles
– Draw me a country Live RFI see the clip of RFI Videos
-Mirage Feat. Piers Faccini, from the album Sequana
– medley Raoui, Dar djedi (“my grandfather’s house”), Everything has to be done (duet with Francis Cabrel), Paris (duo Marc Lavoine)
– Only one star Live RFI see the clip of RFI Videos.
Line-up: Souad Massiguitar voice, Malik Kerroucheguitar.
Sound: Benoît Letirant & Fabien Mugneret.
► scrapbook Sequana (Backing Track Productions 2022).
Souad Massi Playlist
-Leonard Cohen” Here it is »
-Ella Fitzgerald” one note samba »
-Kenny Rogers” sunshine »
-Freddy Mercury” The show must go on “.
Concert February 3, 2023, Salle Pleyel, Paris.