More than a double poster, DuOuD & Mahmoud Goma Tribu is a wedding imagined by the world music expert, Mr. Alain Weber.

On the one hand, DuOuD – Smadj & Mehdi Haddab – often called “the terrible children” of the oud.

On the other side, the Pharaoh of Luxor: Mahmoud Goma and his brightest partners playing oud, percussion and dance.

Here is the very first meeting between the popular music of Upper Egypt and the avant-garde vision of DuOuD.

And there is one thing to unite them: a sense of celebration and celebration.

An electric and inspired wedding that promises long nights.

…

At the risk of being electrocuted, the oud vibrates according to the psychedelic deviances of SMADJ and Mehdi Haddab, sorcerer’s apprentices of a trance not so far from the sacrosanct “tarab” of the courts of yesteryear, where feverish and exalted sultans tore off their clothes, under the influence of the “chetan”, the devil of poetry.

Their universe, “trash” or “kitsch” according to critics, is the creation of a sound universe flirting with futurism, populated by cinematographic visions, scopitones and other orientalist reveries. The creativity of DuOuD – SMADJ & Mehdi Haddab -, gypsy thieves of notes, ignores any ethnomusicological rule and appropriates the styles, gimmicks, rhythms and tics of a moving and kaleidoscopic oriental Mediterranean world.

From Yemen to Egypt, from the Maghreb to Istanbul, their spontaneity of play is that of mischievous children crushing a fragile collage of emotions where nostalgia, the potential prerogative of timeless music, holds a preponderant place.

This hidden grace is found to be the same as that of the music and festivals of Upper Egypt where peasant rudeness rubs shoulders with the joviality that has long disappeared from our formatted and urban musical masses.

The dance of the men is the same as that of the women, all equipped with a scarf around the waist to accentuate the movement of the hips. The accuracy and grace of the movement astonishes, at first glance, within a male society originally warlike.

But with Mahmoud Goma’s kaff saidi, (“saidi” from Upper Egypt), a musical and rhythmic mix of Bedouin “kaff” and Nubian dances, anything is possible! The shudder of the body under the fast rhythm of the “maksoum” is accentuated by this unique way of playing the tabla in Upper Egypt.

The magnetic scents of the oud, both pentatonic and modal, African and Arabic, and whose ancestor sleeps in the tomb of Ahmose (1500 BC), resonate with the same ambivalent sound range as those of DuOuD mixed with a certain experimental music of the 70s.

Mahmoud Goma, star of Luxor, declaims, in front of the Valley of the Kings, his songs from old musicals, those of a world where “the bride has red cheeks like strawberries and soft lips like honey and where love is bright like the sun”.

(freely synthesized – source Alain Weber)