Alif Hilal, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, Islam El-Ghazouly - In the threshold of your love / Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou - Gnawa music

in the threshold of your love is a collaborative work unfolding between song, ritual and trance, where composition and improvisation remain in close dialogue while preserving the immediacy of oral tradition within a contemporary electroacoustic form. At its centre are Alif Hilal’s original texts, which draw on mystical strands in poetry and are sung and spoken as meditations on longing, devotion, separation and ecstatic encounter. Mohammed Reza Mortazavi’s virtuosic approach to the traditional Iranian instruments tombak and daf transforms these ancient instruments into modern sounds and contemporary sonic textures. Their original voices are expanded into new effects and soundscapes, opening a musical space that becomes universal; a language that transcends individual cultures and nationalities. Islam El-Ghazouly extends the ensemble’s sonic terrain with the Slovak fujara, while Sufi whirling accompanies the performance, allowing breath, movement, and sound to circulate together.

Asmaa Hamzaoui performs with the all-women ensemble Bnat Timbouktou, whose work is rooted in the Gnawa musical tradition. Built around the low resonance of the guembri, a three-stringed lute, the interlocking rhythms of the qraqeb, or metal castanets, call-and-response singing, and ululations, the performance draws on a repertoire associated with the lila, the all-night ceremonial gathering at the heart of Gnawa practice. Raised in a family of Gnawa musicians in Casablanca, Hamzaoui describes her childhood as “like a school of Gnawa music”, learning by listening to the maâlems, the master musicians, who gathered around her father. Today, she is recognised as Morocco’s leading female maalma, or master musician, while insisting that her approach remains “100% traditional Gnawa”.