2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The National
Why Ammar 808 is moving Tunisia's mezoued folk music to the dance floor
It's the sound of weddings, community gatherings and late-night celebrations. The spiralling wheeze of goatskin bagpipes dances over urgent percussion, while the singer delivers refrains of hope, salutations and streetwise wisdom shaped by Tunisia 's working class.
Yet despite its infectious joie de vivre, the mezoued folk music genre remained largely absent from cultural institutions and national television, dismissed for decades as unsophisticated and unworthy of the mainstream exposure.
That fractured history drew Tunisian producer Ammar 808, real name Sofyann Ben Youssef, and became the foundation of his vibrant new album Club Tounsi. Across the eight-track collection, mezoued music is reimagined from community hall staple to dance floor filler, with its signature sound backed by sleek synths and the propulsive beats of the Roland TR-808 that inspired Ben Youssef's moniker.
The album is part of a continuing national appraisal of the genre, he tells The National
'The way mezoued music has evolved, from being banned on national TV to becoming a source of pride, that story really excites me,' he says. 'I wanted to do a form of homecoming album, something that speaks to people who were once told their culture wasn't refined enough.'
The creation process reflects a deeper journey. Club Tounsi marks the culmination of a decade-long path that began with a dodgy computer.
'Around 2012, I was working on an album built around mezoued, but a hard disk crash destroyed everything except a single track,' Ben Youssef recalls. 'A whole album, just like that, gone with the wind. It made me think that perhaps it wasn't the right moment to do it.'
The years in between weren't wasted. His deep listening, collection of field recordings and training as a musicologist – the same approach he used on albums Maghreb United in 2018 and Global Control / Invisible Invasion in 2020, which explored North African and South Indian folk music – laid the groundwork for what became Club Tounsi.
That rich approach results in barrelling songs layered with meaning. Opening track Douri Douri features the voice of Tunisian folk singer Brahim Riahi sailing over percolating hand drums and pulsing 808s.
'The title means 'turn around in circles' and the arrangement is almost entirely instrumental,' Ben Youssef says. 'There's a moment in the song when the percussion comes in – culturally in mezoued songs or gatherings, that's when someone steps into the middle and does a solo dance, while everyone else claps around them. That image really shaped the track.'
Mezoued's history of expressing heartbreak is also heard in Aman Aman, an almost cyberpunk synth remake of an old Tunisian folk song, with new vocals provided by Mariem Bettouhami.
'The lyrics are extremely sad. It's about a person who was left behind,' Ben Youssef says.
'But when you hear the traditional versions, it's full-on rhythm. You cannot sense the sadness in the lyrics through how the arrangement is put. So for me, it was like a challenge to say, 'OK, this woman has a broken heart.' That explains the auto-tune, in a way, because her voice sounds completely broken.'
These bold fusions serve a larger purpose, with Ben Youssef hoping Club Tounsi acts as a bridge for a new generation of Tunisians to re-engage with their cultural heritage. He says his homeland is no different from many parts of the region where western cultural trends often take the lead. With Douri Douri garnering more than six million views on TikTok, he believes the recontextualisation – not dilution – of traditional sounds is the way forward.
'Sometimes you don't understand certain music, even if it's from your own tradition. There's this blockage, a social phenomenon of self-rejection and looking for something from beyond borders,' he says.
'My job as producer is bridging that gap, finding ways for young generations to rediscover their tradition in more international fashion.'
In doing so, Ben Youssef is also shining a light on Tunisia's bubbling electronic music scene. He sees a kinship between the genre and mezoued – with artists in both often stigmatised for working in forms dismissed as culturally uncouth. Still, he believes the music's future is bright – precisely because it does what all enduring art should: offer a deeper understanding of homeland and history.
'I think what I tried to do in Club Tounsi is imagine the future of the dance floor in Tunisia, or in the Arab world, not from the codes of electronic music but from the codes of our own identity and tradition,' he says. 'When you approach it that way, electronic music becomes just a tool of translation and emotion. I think we have a lot of work to do when it comes to exploring electronic music from within our identity.'
