Rachid et Fethi | Youk-Baba-Jeïm b/w Maghboun (Editions Rallye, 1974)

 

Early last summer, an old friend of ours from our poetry days got in touch, inquiring about some music he'd become obsessed with: that of Algerian duo, Rachid et Fethi. Specifically, it was this video that did our friend in. 

After explaining that the music had broken his heart, he described it and the video as "so geographically specific (like hallucinations of landscape), all these tours of train lines and mountainside snowy sites ... I suppose in the Algerian mountains. And then they leave the video recorder tag on which seems interestingly self-reflexive ... I would like to write about them at some point. Once I learn a bit more.  Just the most amazing thing I've heard in a long time."

We sent our friend what little information we had about the duo, including rips of two Rachid et Fethi tracks from the now-classic Sublime Frequencies / Hicham Chadly release, 1970's Algerian Folk And Pop (which turns 10 years old next year, gulp).

We also promised to procure copies of the remaining two Rachid et Fethi singles, which we boasted might take no more than a couple of months. Now, nearly eight months later, we've added the first one to our collection.

Rachid and Fethi Baba-Ahmed were brothers, and went on to produce a number of releases, mostly Algerian rai, and mostly on their label, Editions Rallye. They appear sporadically in Bouziane Daouidi and Hadj Miliani's L'aventure du raï: Musique et société, a 1996 paperback we picked up in the gift shop of the Institut du monde arabe in 2004. (The book opens with the assassinations of Cheb Hasni in 1994 and Rachid in 1995.)

We don't know if our friend wrote anything about Rachid et Fethi; if so, it isn't online under his name. We'll of course get in touch with him, as we owe him these long-ago-promised tracks, and will ask him if he's still on the case.

We also want to thank him for steering us to this particular single, which contains, as you'll soon hear for yourself, some of the most haunted, beautiful, glorious eight minutes of music ever lathe-cut into vinyl.

(Listen to "Youk-Baba-Jeïm")

(Listen to "Maghboun")