Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and we are live now in the WNYC performance studio with Moroccan psychedelic rock band Bab L’ Bluz. Their sound puts traditional North African instruments through modern sounds. Their latest album is called Swaken, which means the space in which two dimensions overlap. Let's get into it with Yousra Mansoor. Nice to meet you, Yousra.

Yousra Mansour: A pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Brice Bottin, the co-founders of Bab L’ Bluz. Nice to meet you as well.

Brice Bottin: Nice to meet you too.

Alison Stewart: The first song we're going to hear-- well, first of all, you tell me what we're going to hear. What song?

Yousra Mansour: Hello, a pleasure to be here, and we were going to play Ila Mata. This is the only song that we performed from the first record instead of the the latest one.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's hear it.

[MUSIC - Bab L’ Bluz: Ila Mata]

Alison Stewart: That was Bab L’ Bluz. My guests are you Yousra Mansour and Brice Bottin. All right, first of all, I have a million questions. First of all, tell me about the instrument that you're playing.

Yousra Mansour: Well, it's a handmade instrument especially for the band because we wanted to put two instruments in one for airlines issues, to be honest. The upper one is the awisha is the instrument that Gnawa masters start to learn before getting to the gimbri, which is the instrument that Brice is playing. It's like an ngoni or tihardant. It's like from Sub-Saharan origins, and you can find it in Morocco. It's not very famous. It's not like the gimbri, which is really famous instrument. The second one is the mandole that we can find in East Morocco and Algeria especially. It's a special mandole with the quarter tones.

Alison Stewart: Tell me about your instrument, Brice.

Brice Bottin: Me, it's originally, it's kind of like a gimbri from Morocco, as Yousra told you, but it's a solid body one, because the idea of the band it was to do like a power trio, but to replace the bass by the electric gimbri, and the electric guitar by the electric awisha and mandole that Yousra is playing.

Alison Stewart: Your music, it's so easy to get into the musicality of it, but you also want to listen to the lyrics too. When you're writing a song, what comes first, the music or the lyrics?

Yousra Mansour: I think it depends, but mostly it's the music. When you have the music, you can start to have top lines for singing and then you imagine what is the best subject to talk about with this melody. It can be the inverse process as well, but we do it mostly this way.

Alison Stewart: What was that last song about?

Yousra Mansour: Ila Mata was about diversity, about how beautiful it is to be from different backgrounds and to share these differences and to celebrate these differences, because they are not source of conflicts. There must be just something to highlight. What a beautiful thing to share cultures and to learn from other cultures. Especially nowadays, it's these crazy times. We think we need something to get together all human being. It's about human being. It's not about where are you from or what is the color of your skin, but about we are, at the end of the day, all kind of similar.

Alison Stewart: Brice, will you introduce us to the rest of the band?

Brice Bottin: Yes, with pleasure. For you, ladies and gentlemen, Moulay Isham, percussion and flute from Agadir.

Alison Stewart: Nice to meet you.

Brice Bottin: On the drum, ladies and gentlemen, Moulay Ibrahim Lubogos, drums and backing vocal.

Alison Stewart: What is the next song we're going to hear?

Yousra Mansour: You're going to hear a song called Imazighen, and it's about llocal population of North Africa called the Amazigh or the Berber. This is a song about a conflict between the people who speak Amazigh and people speak Arabic. Even in Morocco, they share 50% of DNA and still fighting sometimes just because there is an identity crisis. It's just a song about that. We are all a Amazigh, and even if we have something from outside, that's beautiful also.

Alison Stewart: This is Bab L’ Bluz.

[MUSIC - Bab L’ Bluz: Imazighen]

Alison Stewart: That was Bab L’ Bluz. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, we're talking with Yousra Mansour and Brice Bottin. Was I close sort of?

Brice Bottin: Perfect.

Alison Stewart: Not exactly, but I tried. Co-founders of the Moroccan psychedelic rock band Bab L’ Bluz. They're here towards the end of their US tour following the release of their latest album, Swaken. What does Swaken mean?

Yousra Mansour: Swaken actually means possessions, and it also mean getting into and to trance, but deeper than trance and maybe opening or getting into another dimension. It is used a lot in the Chaabi in Morocco. It's a sort of music where people dance until they have no energy, sometimes they fall. After, they lose consciousness just because they release something. Swaken is when you go deep, deep, deep into music and trance and you open the doors of mystical stuff, but in a beautiful way.

Alison Stewart: I told you I just got back from Morocco, and it was just so interesting to see how beautiful the culture was.

Yousra Mansour: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: It really was. I wanted to tell you that. When you were making this album, where did you make it? All over?

Brice Bottin: We were actually on the road and we were touring. Some of our stuff were finished in Australia, I remember.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Brice Bottin: Some in France, some in Tunisia. We recorded finally in London. No, not in London. In a box. At a real world studio or label.

Yousra Mansour: The UK.

Alison Stewart: What did all those different locations, how did they influence your writing?

Brice Bottin: In a positive way. We just have good vibration with some places. We met people. Sometimes they make us discover the culture, interesting stuff that we didn't know it exists. It influenced us in a good way and it gave us positivity, I think.

Alison Stewart: What's the last song we're going to hear?

Yousra Mansour: The last song is Iwaiwa Funk. It's funny because it's just talking about how life is not eternal. We think that it's really important to remind people that we are, at some point, all going to die. That this is beautiful because everyone, we are all equal when it comes to that, and that we should not be scared. We should celebrate the memories of each person that is with us, because anyway, we have the same end, all of us.

Alison Stewart: That's so beautiful.

Yousra Mansour: In Togo, we've learned this. People celebrate funerals like wedding. They dance. We've been there and we saw people dancing and we thought it was a wedding. They told us that these are funerals, and it was very touching.

Alison Stewart: This is Bab L’ Bluz.

[MUSIC - Bab L’ Bluz: Iwaiwa Funk]

Alison Stewart: That was Bab L’ Bluz. My guests have been Yousra Mansour and Brice Bottin. Thank you so much for joining us.

Brice Bottin: It's our pleasure.

Yousra Mansour: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.