Eight kilometres outside Essaouira, between the douar of Ghazoua and the surf break at Sidi Kaouki, there is a family house named after a Corsican village in Balagne. That is where HabibiSly filmed his debut single, after discovering Gnawa music and following it to Essaouira.

Rabbath is the Paris-born son of the Syrian-French double bassist François Rabbath, trained at the Nadia et Lili Boulanger conservatoire and then taken on the road for twenty-five years across four continents at his father’s side. His own project runs on synths, piano, and talkbox, absorbing the Levantine modes of his upbringing through the club nights of Paris’s 18th arrondissement.

“Dar Algajola” is the first single from his debut EP Habibi Rhapsody, due in September on Heavenly Sweetness, directed and produced as a video by Athys de Galzain on location in Essaouira, where he records with Saad Tiouly, a young Casablanca maâlem, guembri player and Gnawa singer who has spent years working inside the tradition before pushing it outward into folk, rock and Mediterranean territory, and Aziz Atmani, a Moroccan gnaoui who blends traditional North African sounds with electronic and ambient music.

The guembri’s three-string bass drone and the iron clatter of the krakebs sit inside Rabbath’s synthesiser beds, the Gnawa call-and-response riding over programmed percussion, the talkbox bending between Arabic and club frequencies. Gnawa ceremony is built to keep going until the room changes state. This track is built the same way.

Stream and listen to “Dar Algajola” HERE