Guedra Guedra’s ‘Mutant’ Is Breathtaking and Scintillating » PopMatters
Guedra Guedra’s new LP is filled with thoughtful assemblages of field recordings, digital and analog beats, and some of the year’s most luscious dancefloor melodies.
Mutant Guedra Guedra Domino 29 August 2025
Guedra Guedra, the moniker under which producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts energetic electronic landscapes, invokes a specific scene in and of itself. Among Amazigh groups indigenous to Hassak’s native Morocco and other parts of North Africa, the guedra is a dance and a cooking pot that can be converted into a drum, embodying music, movement, and life.
It suits Hassak’s music on the new Guedra Guedra album Mutant, a breathtaking record filled with thoughtful assemblages of field recordings, digital and analog beats, and some of the year’s most luscious dancefloor melodies. It’s scintillating work from an artist deeply invested in every sound he touches.
Hassak approaches his music with a clear understanding of specific gaps in existing recordings of so-called traditional or folkloric musical practices of groups that are underrepresented and marginalized in the mainstream. Mutant attempts to resist the polarity that has long been present in the commercial music industry, which on one end relegates a group of people to artificial simplicity by attempting to preserve such practices through minimizing the presence of modernity, and on the other samples them in hypercontemporary electronic compositions in which they are an object of exotic interest.
Both ends are alienating, othering. Afrofuturism informs the aims of Guedra Guedra; Hassak hears past, present, and future as an inseparable continuum and weaves together its pieces in meaningful ways, meant to sound an expansive understanding of people from across Africa.
Conceptually, this is an exciting iteration of important strategies worth endless exploration. Sensually, sonically, it’s nothing short of thrilling. As Guedra Guedra, Hassak dabbles in a range of tones and dance styles that keep Mutant unpredictable from start to finish. Artsy synthesized blobs and distant, woodsy lamellophones punctuate the chants of the opening track, “Drift of Drummer”.
Following the single “Paradigm”, Maasai voices are overlaid atop lounge-adjacent grooves without sacrificing the complexities of unplugged rhythms. Pulsing techno basslines on “Ring of Fire” and “Z” make the entire body want to move. The swaying melismas of Amazigh singer Foulane Bouhssine make the string-laced “Tamayyurt” heartrending. Director Jihan El-Tahri speaks in English about the survival of pan-Africanism, accompanied by flutes on “Tribes with Flags”, with a pensive solemnity mirrored in the chill vibes of the final track, “Enlightenment”.
The sounds Hassak uses come from places that are far apart. Chaabi violin techniques from Morocco appear on one track, djembé patterns from Guinea on another, Tanzanian and Kenyan songs on yet another. It is the kind of project that could easily go awry in its quest to honor sounds from across the African continent, instead falling into familiar exploitative patterns of worldbeat. Indeed, music can often be taken out of context without respect for everything that has gone into it, something largely beyond any creator’s control once their art is in the world.
Even so, from Guedra Guedra has emerged something really spectacular. Mutant is a show of collaboration that does not attempt to collapse the vast stretches of space it figuratively crosses but instead understands the importance of each step. This is sensational music, and even more than that, it’s a significant release whose maker gives credit where credit is due and knows how to put things together in a way that hits soul and body all at once.