Lila

Description

Photographer acclaimed, artist born in Algeria and based in Paris, Mohamed Bourouissa has long maintained a deep interest in sound. LILA is his first solo album, a self-proclaimed "musical object" that takes stock of the important relationships in his life — each track is dedicated to a person he was thinking of while composing the record. Featuring appearances from Franco-Senegalese artist Le Diouck and avant-garde Italian figure Valentina Fanigliulo (aka Mushy and Phantom Love), the album resembles a journal of hypnagogic reflections, using weightless synths, broken Auto-Tuned voices, and disjointed beat sequences to sketch a portrait of his inner reality. Bourouissa's first identifiable sound reference dates back to 2009 with Temps Morts, a video named after Booba's first album. Since then, he has followed his intuition: a compilation of experimental sounds from the Arab world in 2017, a collaboration with Jordan Quiqueret to translate the frequencies of an acacia into rhythms, and a duo with Fanigliulo that ultimately gave him the confidence to embrace his abilities. "That's when sound became an integral part of my artistic practice." From the same philosophy arises LILA, from the piano chords and choral echoes of the intro to the microtonal hums of the outro. An album difficult to classify, where traces of pop coexist with remnants of club music, haunted FM arpeggios, and xenharmonic synth drones. The common thread: Bourouissa represents a feeling rather than a sound. Music so tactile that you could almost touch it.