https://youtu.be/JHTsNZkH71U?si=T5-N-Eh0DPhfY5jN
https://youtu.be/cxzP_IVlQXQ?si=oAp2NSE72tUjtWNE

“Brahim’s keening take on Afro-blues, is beautiful, bewitching, aquiver with timeless sorrow.” --- Mojo

“This is a sound and message that reaches the heart, beyond imposed borders, curfews and barbed wire, with a dream for the end to the struggle.” --- The Quietus

Sahrawi singer-songwriter activist Aziza Brahim’s fifth album Mawja (Wave in Hassaniya Arabic) is fashioned from a simple but powerful foundational palette: Saharan and Iberian percussion entwining with stately guitars and warm, enveloping bass.

Co-produced by Brahim with long-time collaborator Guillem Aguilar, the record from her oeuvre that Mawja most sonically resembles is her revered and graceful debut Soutak (2014).

That noted, there is a confident eclecticism found here, an expansive take on her vision that even includes a drum pattern inspired by the Clash.

Brahim’s voice, as always, is a wellspring of deep and resonant emotions. The yearning for homeland. The struggle for freedom. The love for one's elders. The unfurling of time. Waves of history, waves of sound. Mawja.

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Growing up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, after her family was forced into exile from Western Sahara, singer and songwriter Aziza Brahim spent hours listening to the radio. Mawja, her grandparents would say as they changed stations. Wave. Medium wave, FM. Radio brought the world to her, music from across the globe carried over the airwaves. When she left, first to study in Cuba, then to live in Barcelona, Brahim never forgot the radio and the education it offered. Now the waves carry her again on Mawja, her fourth album for Glitterbeat. It’s coloured by her own travels, her personal diaspora, and the music she heard through the speaker of that transistor radio as a child.

“Music lets you enrich you.......
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