Liquid Crystal Vision (2002) is a 60-minute cult documentary exploring the spiritual and cultural roots of the global Goa trance movement. Directed by Omananda, the film features interviews with pioneers like Raja Ram and Goa Gil, featuring footage from Goa, India, and global parties, highlighting themes of dance as a, "global peace prayer," and personal evolution.
Features insight from key figures, including Goa Gil, Raja Ram, System 7, Youth, Swami, and Alex Grey.
Features music by artists such as Shpongle, Irresistible Force, Banco De Gaia, Space Tribe, and Nick Doof and includes scenes from Goa (India), Portugal, Cambodia, Laos, and Burning Man.
The film explores the freedom to dance, the psychedelic experience, and the connection between ancient rituals and modern technology.
A documentary from 1995, and therefore one of the earliest attempts to document the scene that centered on Goa in the 1990s. The first part of the film takes up Japan, the production of synths by the Roland coproration, even visiting the factory and looking at a new model. There is an interview with Organix,
The second half of the film focuses on the party scene in India in the early and mid-90s. It takes up the movements between Isreal and India of party people, which was huge when I was in India in the 90s. The thing is, the Isrealis I met were not interested in the politics of the region. In fact they were against the whole bloody thing. But they had no choice. Isreal is a machine that eats its own young. The Trance scene was a higher plane. Here is a window on it.
The film depicts a figure sitting in an outdoor environment and wearing a robe and a Hannya mask. The film features receding and shifting images captured in a frame-by-frame manner; though these shots resemble zooms and pans, they were actually derived from positioning the camera on a series of a points.
Atman is a visual tour-de-force built on the idea of a subject fixed at the center of a circle created by 480 camera positions. Filmed frame by frame, the sequence accelerates into an increasingly rapid circular motion, turning stillness into disorienting rhythm.
The seated figure wears the devil mask of Hangan from Noh theater, accompanied by Noh music and the principle of acceleration often tied to Noh drama. The title itself, Atman is a Sanskrit term for "self," sometimes linked to destruction, infuses the film with spiritual unease.
What begins as meditation collapses into disintegration: a hypnotic, unsettling ritual where cinema dismantles identity through repetition, motion, and the terror of looking too long.
Taghounja (1980), Moroccan-Italian filmmaker Abdou Achouba’s ode to Sufi poet Abderrahman el Majdoub’s Qasidas starring Larbi Batma and Omar Sayed, two of the members of Nass El Ghiwane, who will also compose the film’s soundtrack. The film charts a quest for identity by two characters: one, a lyricist and musician (Batma), who strives to immerse himself in his country’s rich cultural heritage; the other, a young boy, who looks at the world around him through the eyes of innocence. Bringing to mind Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966), to whom the film is dedicated.
At Omar Sayed’s instigation, Larbi Batma desperately wanders through a mystical Morocco tirelessly collecting oral poetry, sounds and rhythms primarily drawn from popular music and the repertoire of the traditional religious brotherhoods (Gnawa, Aissawa, Heddawa, H’madcha, Jilala, etc.) While classified as fiction, Taghounja is, strictly speaking, a docu-fiction. However, its approach is markedly different from that of Transes (Maanouni’s essay film about Nass El Ghiwane). Instead of a biopic, it dramatizes the group’s lyrics, sometimes literally, within the sociopolitical life of the time. The parallel wanderings of the musician and the child mirroring the state of affairs of late 70s Morocco, a country still alienated by colonialism, neo-colonialism and the perversion of certain customs and traditions. The quest comes to nothing and Abdou Achouba refuses to give audiences an answer, preferring instead an open-ended conclusion.<å>
Taghounja was awarded a prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Carthage Film Festival, and was widely acclaimed by French intellectuals and artists. However, the politicised audience of students at the Maison du Maroc in Paris gave Achouba a reserved welcome, reproaching him for not being critical enough of the regime. Moroccan film critic and Abdou’s former philosophy teacher Noureddine Saïl said in his weekly radio program, Écran noir, “You may like or dislike Taghounja, but you have to admit that the film includes certain shots that are on a par with works of art.”
Gnawa: Music and Beyond. Jacques Willemont, dir.; Viviana Pâques, scientific direction. Produced by Espaces, 2012; DVD includes English and French versions, both have Arabic with English or French subtitles; color, 58 mins.
Jacques Willemont's documentary Gnawa: Music and Beyond explores the history, symbolism and ritual practice of Morocco's Gnawa traditions. The Gnawa are a population brought to Morocco from West Africa through a history of trans-Saharan slavery. In some ways mirroring syncretic traditions that grew out of trans-Atlantic slavery, like santaría in Cuba or condomblé in Brazil, the Gnawa fused West African religious and musical practices with Islam to create a musically-driven sacred healing ceremony called a derdba. Following an animal sacrifice, this all-night event moves through a series of spirits who possess adepts through trance. Willemont and his team draw upon years of interview footage to explore both how this ritual works and what its various components mean. To this end, the film relies heavily on interviews and analysis by Viviana Pâques, a French scholar of Gnawa music who provided scientific direction for the production. The film aims to demonstrate what can be a clandestine practice in Morocco by sharing a wealth of footage from these interviews with Pâques (who passed away in 2007) and from a recorded ceremony.
Structurally, Gnawa: Music and Beyond is built around the Gnawa ceremony as it has existed in Morocco for generations. To do so, the film layers three central types of content. Interview material with Al Ayachi, a ritual leader called a moqqadem, sits between documentary footage and interviews with Viviana Pâques, who presents an interpretive analysis based on her three decades of work with Al Ayachi and the Gnawa. Partly because of this structural choice, the film presents dual focal points: it aims to preserve and share the secret knowledge held within Gnawa ritual practice while it presents the importance of deep interpretive symbolism as studied by anthropologists like Pâques. She has been a central figure within the study of Gnawa music and ritual, most notably through her two books on the topic, L'arbre cosmique dans la pensée populaire et dans la vie quotidienne du nord-ouest africain (The cosmic tree in Northwest African popular thought and daily life [1964]), and La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrérie marocaine des Gnawa (The religion of slaves: research on the Moroccan brotherhood of the Gnawa [1991]).
In the immense conglomerate of African fusions which we can explore today we find a wholly unique case: the Gnawa. The approach to the Gnawa’s musical expression, of profound social and religious implications, reveals to us not only an extremely rich cultural heritage but also one of the chapters that would have greatest effect on the development of North African societies during the last 500 years: slavery.
The term Gnawa refers to the brotherhood groupings (and, by extension, to their manifestations) of a minority ethnic-religious group of sub-Saharan origin but with an important presence especially in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in Algeria and Tunisia, where they are known as Diwan and Stambali respectively. There is no unanimity on seeing the Gnawiya as a Tariqa or Sufi religious path in the way that some of those more rooted in the Maghreb can be, such as the Qadiriya, Issawiya or Hamdushiya, among others, with which, however, it shares an organisational structure and ecstatic and possession rites, in what are considered the limits of Islamic orthodoxy. The establishing of these syncretic expressions took place over several centuries, during which the animist ritual substrate gradually adapted to Islam, with variations which depended both on the geographic area and the social environment to which the different black communities had to adapt themselves.
The Origins
The origin of the Gnawa, a word that seems to come from the Berber term agnaw/ignawen (dumb) in reference to their ignorance of Arabic and Berber must first be found in the diverse contingents of black slaves who between the 11th and 13th centuries were taken to the Maghreb strip from the Kingdom of Abyssinia, which occupied a strategic position in the caravanserai routes, and from the old Kingdom of Ghana (which today is part of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The traditional slave trade from the great Sudan intensified because of the conquest at the end of the 16th century of part of the Songhai Empire carried out by the Sultan of Morocco Ahmed Al-Mansur, a trafficking that continued until the early 20th century.
The descendants of these slaves, together with other free emigrant black peoples who arrived through the caravanserai routes, mixed with the local population and formed a group that despite its diverse origin acquired its own identity thanks to the figure of Sidi Bilal, the first slave of Ethiopian origin freed by Mohammed and who was the first Muezzin of Islam. These communities would also be known by other names in reference to their geographical origin (Sudani, Bambara), their social status (Ousfan, slaves), their religious affiliations (Bilali) or some of their practices of origin (Bori, in reference to the dance of possession practised by the Hausa taken to Tripoli). The large concentration of the black community in cities such as Marrakech and Essaouira (formerly called the port of Timbuktu) was because both cities had been important slave markets connected to the trans-Saharan route.
Aïsha Devi uses her voice to break through the din of our current musical moment.
Singer, producer and performer Aïsha Devi speaks with Chal Ravens about her personal philosophy, why the voice is her preferred instrument and how she looks at ritualistic traditions as a source of inspiration for a new transcendental electronic music.
Lucky People Center is a Swedish artistic collective, best known for their electronic music, which falls roughly in the Ambient house/Trance genres.
The collective started as an underground illegal nightclub in the city of Gothenburg. Then moved to be based in Stockholm in the early 90's, forming a multimedia and musical collective. Lucky People Center were on tour from 1994 to 1997 and were playing on some major events around Europe during this time. The collective also produced the movies Information is Free and Lucky People Center International.
Lucky People Center is supposed to be more of a loose constellation than a group, and the projects done under the name has various members. The member list is in the sleeve-notes of the album Interspecies Communication listed as David Österberg, Jean-Louis Huhta, Johan Söderberg and Skander Chand, while the movie Lucky People Center International is credited to Söderberg and Erik Pauser.
Proof that Fela Kuti had the power right to the end. Fela was 10 months away from death when this was filmed. It seems more like a ritual than a concert. The performance begins with raw rhythms and bodies on stage and then comes the music; trance rhythm, call and response without the strong brass section one associates with Fela's earlier more famous pieces (not the best audio quality on this film but the power of it still comes through). Fela seems to be in good spirits but his usual on stage banter is absent and he appears to be emaciated. By the 23rd minute of the performance the capacity crowd is starting to reach a frantic emotional high and people are rushing the stage. At the 45 minute mark Femi Kuti comes out for a saxophone solo, perhaps his father did not have the strength for it by this stage, with Fela only playing keyboard up to this point. Now the band takes off and Fela is sadly no longer on stage. He returns later to lead an emotional build up with the brass section from his position at the keyboard and then with the microphone center stage. This is an intense documentation of the last days of a master musician, his band and dancers. "The taste of excitement".
Rarely do I place just music on this blog. I do so here and now because this is an incredible work of art from the depths of human expression that stretches back to the sources of our belief and perception. In short, a trance masterpiece.
