"It's just a stupid name, to be honest," says Will Horrocks of SwamiMillion, the alias that he and partner Simon Williams are using for their new project in collaboration with Fawda Trio, a Bologna-based outfit who draw heavily on the gnawa music traditionally rooted in the coastal Moroccan town of Essaouira. They will be more familiar to most people as LV, as whom they recently put out their third album, Islands, featuring grime MC and poet Josh Idehen on Keysound Recordings. The new moniker, he says, "probably just came from a weak joke that we forgot the punchline to ages ago."
While the name's origins might not be overly important, Williams says that part of the reason for using a new alias was a desire to reflect a new focus on playing live in the way that they record music. "You can go from one extreme to another when you're making electronic music. You can sit in front of a computer and only click a mouse and make a tune. Or, you know, you can get a mic up, play a bit of percussion and play a synth keyboard," he explains, "Even though it might end up sounding the same, when you're making it, it's a completely different process. We've been enjoying the spontaneity of that more and more, and enjoying not having to use a mouse."
LV
That newfound spontaneity, which grew out of their playing live more regularly, sat very well with Fawda Trio's way of working. They were invited to collaborate with the trio by the crew behind Original Cultures, an ongoing project that looks to bring together different cultures and artists through setting up one-off performances and more extended collaborations, the results of which they release through their label.
Last year, SwamiMillion went out to Fawda Trio's base in Bologna to rehearse together and play a live show. It was through sampling what came of those rehearsals that they produced the Beats for the Road to Essaouira beat tape which dropped last week.
The sessions were open-ended, free flowing affairs, which proved to be a mixed blessing for them afterwards. Williams says, "Those guys are totally up for it. They're always jumping in and having endless jam sessions, which is cool. But it meant that we ended up with an unbelievable amount of stuff to look through for this tape." True to the prolific, scattered tradition of the beat tape, ideas come thick and fast across its 28 tracks.
There is a playfulness in the beats that the short attention span of this format allows and Williams says that it wasn't intended to be a polished affair: "We didn't really go in for any editing or production on the beat tape, it was pretty raw." Their second meeting with the trio was a week spent together in Essaouira, where they recorded the material for an album that's currently right in the middle of the post-production stage. Recording it in the home of gnawa music meant that many other local musicians who the Fawda Trio were in touch with could dip in and out of the sessions.
In trying to explain gnawa music to someone unfamiliar with it, Williams draws on parallels with the electronic music that is home territory for him: "It's quite a physical experience in the way that sub-bass is a physical experience in a club. You don't get the vibrations in the chest, but it's more like the ringing in your ears. Almost like a temporary tinnitus, but in a good way!"
Fawda
The traditional set up for gnawa bands is centred around the role of the krakab, an instrument they liken to metal castanets. "They make this incredibly loud noise. They're pretty much going the whole time, they're the beat driving it on. There's a sort of trance-like element to it." But Fawda Trio have moved beyond the stripped down gnawa setup, and Danilo Mineo's extensive percussion collection is one example of the flourishes they've added to the simple tradition. They explain how it's often those different implements shaken or tapped by Mineo which make up a lot of the percussive elements that you can hear scattered across the beat tape.
No rules have been laid down for how the project will play out, but where the tape was about them building productions around those interesting snippets from the rehearsals, at this stage Horrocks says the album is developing into something that'll be much more of a focus on Fawda Trio: "It's about trying to give them a sound which makes them as powerful on record as they are live."
You can buy physical copies of Beats for the Road to Essaouira on Bandcamp with it getting a wider digital release on December 8.
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