- The polyrhythmic producer returns with another mesmerizing release.
- When Tunisian producer Azu Tiwaline was young, her mother would often flood the house with ambient music, hoping to create a soothing atmosphere where the two could meditate. But it didn't bring her peace—Azu Tiwaline couldn't turn away from the fact this music was incredibly boring. Later, while living in France, she broke onto the electronic scene producing bass-heavy and boredom-defying dance tunes under the name Loan. It wasn't until she came across the textural bliss of Biosphere's 1997 album Substrata that she could see the untapped potential of genres like experimental and ambient.
"The first time I listened to Biosphere, I realized that maybe I could make my own meditation music," she recently told Untitled-909. Like Substrata, the latest Azu Tiwaline release, Magnetic Service, uses the natural world as its muse. But contrary to a lot of other music that engages with environments, her relationship with the organic cannot be reduced to a rainfall recording from freesound.org reductively preserved in the static amber of a low sine wave. Instead, she wields her productions like a personal dowsing rod, scanning the earth for its divine lessons.
Raw percussion forms the foundation of Magnetic Service, with patterns drawing from Berber musical traditions local to the southern Tunisian region of El Djerid where she lives and the nearby Sahara desert. Throughout the EP dub and minimal techno concentrates bubble on the flame of cyclical and repetitive drum beats, carrying the weight of vast expanses, stories inherited and faraway dance floor memories with every resounding thwack.
The EP's title track and "Tight Wind" were made in collaboration with French sound artist Cinna Peyghamy, AKA Cikkun. Here Peyghamy attaches a contact mic to the hide of his tombak, a goblet drum often used in Arabic and Persian music, creating metallic electroacoustic jangles. Modular synth lines slither in the spaces between the drums' bionic gallop while gusts of scorched sound granules churn at its heels.
Tracklist01. Magnetic Service
02. Terremer
03. Tight Wind
04. Tessiture