CLANDESTINO FESTIVAL | JUNE 7 – KAJSKJUL 46

Débruit & Alsarah’s music is a combination of ancient and contemporary; Sudanese poetry and French electronic collage dub. The duo’s first collaboration on wax is called Aljawal, which means ”the traveler”: a suitable name for this collection of songs that all are the result of the meeting of two musical nomads.

Débruit, the French afro beat surrealist and groove scientist who mixes elements from hip-hop and dance music with samples, field recordings and other sound fragments from Senegal, Congo, Cairo and Paris. Forever a student, always with his head buried in the new sounds – traditional or contemporary – in search of a way to merge them with its own highly analog rhythmicity, a sort cut-and-paste dub with dark spring reverbs and primitive rhythm boxes. Débruits genre defying groovyness has made him a sought-after remixer for Lee Scratch Perry, Zero7 and many others.

Alsarah was born in Sudan and now lives in Brooklyn. Singer, songwriter and musicologist specializing in East African retro pop. Her youth was as geographically fragmented as her music moves between genres: from her childhood in Khartoum, on to Yemen to escape Omar al-Bashir’s coup in 1989. Civil war in Yemen brought her family to the USA in the mid nineties, where she began to study music. Alsarah has since collaborated with The Nile Project and Kombo & Afro Simba Band. Her melodic, entrancing singing voice fits Débruit’s rhythm world like hand in glove, together they take the listener on a bumpy ride from Somali pop on to bass heavy dub dreams.