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Under the Ahwach Moon, created in 2014, is a sound-collage made of various ‘sound-check’ recordings in Morocco. Together with Zouheir Atbane, Gilles Aubry spent several weeks traveling the country in 2013 for their project, “An Anthology of Ears Preservation,” which included research on cultural preservation through listening practices and the sonic materialities of traditional music. Aubry writes, “I consider the ‘sound-check’ as a special moment of the music practice, not yet part of the music ‘spectacle,’ but rather a necessary preparation for it, in which all the elements are tuned together: instruments, voices, amplification technique, musicians’ mind, and space.” In essence, Under the Ahwach Moon reveals the social, material, and spatial dimension of music through the recording of sound-check situations.

In this piece Aubry says listeners can hear “traditional Moroccan music instruments mostly from Berbere (or rather Amazigh) regions including the lutar, the rebab, the bendir, the zamar, the raita, the qsbah, voices, as well as excerpts from the Paul Bowle’s collection of traditional Moroccan music from 1959.” Also heard, are Aubrey, Zouheir Atbane and Robert Millis rehearsing with this material for a performance which took place in Marrakech in April 2014.

The piece was broadcast in 2014 for Picnic Radio, a collection of stations that operate in ethereal and physical space collaborating with people around the world; and a radio art project curated by European-based organization, Zonoff.- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2022, José Alejandro Rivera