ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ by bergsonist

© ℗ 2025 BERGSONIST
With support from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and
Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts.

Liner Notes by Rob Goyanes:
The origins of things are almost always blurry. The Arabic word for “origin” is أصل, which transliterates roughly as “ASL.”
In the language of the Amazigh people, who are indigenous to North Africa, it's written as ⴰⵙⵍ. Selwa Abd’s project, taking these words as its title, is an exploration of her own Amazigh origins in Morocco
(Amazigh means “free people”).
Born in 1992 in Casablanca, and living in New York since 2010, Abd’s musical practice hinges on electroacoustic experimentation and
rhythm-based electronic music.
Over the last few years, she’s expanded into multimedia formats, and started digging deeper into post-colonial history and identity. ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is her most personal project yet—pulling material from recent visits to her ancestral village in Errachidia, a region in southeastern Morocco, Abd fuses musical traditions and speculative sonics.

Abd captured field recordings during these visits, which include “conversations with people in the village, walks in the souk, the ambient sounds of an oasis near the Sahara dunes, and the sounds of stones in the quarry where my father once worked,” Abd says.
Her father’s father was a big inspiration for this project as well. A trade unionist who helped organize mine workers and electricians in Morocco—labor struggles were crucial in the resistance to French colonialism—he worked to establish training centers, healthcare units, and social housing. Abd’s grandmother, the matriarchal core of the family, is also a significant presence in the project: the sounds of some of her inherited instruments can be heard on these recordings.

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a portrait of the Maghrebi soundscape, processed through Abd’s eclectic approaches to sound and composition. Voices from Abd’s field recordings are manipulated to create far-out textures. Acoustic samples of a bendir, a type of frame drum, and a qraqeb, a sort of iron castanet, can be heard on this CD, as well as the polyrhythmic rhythms found in North African musical traditions: Gnawa, which consists of religious chants, trance-inducing repetitions that can sometimes last for hours, and Chaabi, a popular folk music played at weddings and festivals. But rather than mere documentation of a place and its culture, Abd takes this material and pushes it into new spaces, showing that not only is the past a blurry thing, difficult to apprehend, but so is the future. Honoring her history as well as her own innovations in electronic music, Selwa Abd’s ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a bridge between what’s done and what’s to come.

New York–based artist and composer, born and raised in Morocco.


Contact: https://linktr.ee/bergsonist.official

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