Various
Maghreb Lyon 1972-1998
All located around the «Place du Pont» in the heart of the La GuillotiEre quarter in Lyon, the publishers l'Etoile Verte, SEDICAV, MErabet, Bouarfa and El Bahia have produced hundreds of cassettes featuring Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian musicians. This 3CD-set anthology produced by CMTRA (RhOne-Alpes Centre for Traditional Music), looks back on an alternative music economy, inventive and structured, which developed in Lyon during the 1980s. The music-cassette, the democratic object which spread songs and poems, accompanied the invention of popular, modern Maghreb music forms. These songs _ derived from previously unheard-of encounters between oriental instruments/melodies and the sounds of synthesizers, rhythm boxes and electric guitars _ were multiform and fraternal, with a finger on the pulse of everyday reality: they talk of separation, uprooting and love, and they celebrate or speak with irony of the "return home" myth. They open themselves to the world in denouncing the conditions and ordinary racism of their host-country. As testimony to the teeming diversity of practises and expressions, this music, derived from a socio-economic context typically tied to the history of France, forms an integral part of the French popular heritage and, at the same, contains the codes of a global cultural mix that belongs to "World Music" alone. Patrick FREMEAUX & PEroline BARBET