AMMAR 808’s previous album Maghreb United (2018) – a powerful mixture of deep TR-808 bass and Pan-Maghreb beats and voices – received widespread critical acclaim and shook dancefloors throughout Europe, North Africa and beyond. This time Brussels-based Tunisian electronic producer Sofyann Ben Youssef (aka AMMAR 808) has travelled to the Tamil Nadu region of southern India for a breath-taking new adventure. With a suitcase full of recording equipment, he set up base in the pulsing city of Chennai and undertook a collaborative reimagining of the area's rich and resonant musics.
Ranging from trance temple sounds to rap-like street theatre performance and ending with the mathematical richness of Carnatic music, Ben Youssef’s in situ recordings form the foundation of his potent new album: Global Control / Invisible Invasion.
Futurist syncopations meet hypnotic, timeless narratives. Expansive electronics fused with on location recordings.
Life in lockdown has given us time to reflect on the world and our place in it, on fate and free will. Big ideas, and ones that sit at the very heart of AMMAR 808’s Global Control/ Invisible Invasion – an album that’s aptly-named and tooled for these times. He’s crafted them from Hindu mythology and created a philosophical jolt of a disc that sweeps him far from his native Maghreb and deep into the ancient Carnatic tradition of South India.
“When I was 20 I went to Delhi and studied for months,” AMMAR 808 explains. “I learned sitar and tabla and did a lot of recording, and I began to absorb the culture, to learn. Hinduism has a pantheon of gods, and it shows a different culture of freedom. After 2011 and the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, my homeland, I’ve been wondering more and more about freedom and my own identity.”
Those questions, and his exploration of them, took musical form in his mind, simmering and growing over the years until finally in 2019 he was ready to return to Chennai and record. But while the ideas are timeless, the music leans modern, with AMMAR 808 and his arsenal of analogue electronics and subsonic beats, morphing traditional legends and soundscapes into the future tense.