5 Questions with Guedra Guedra
5 Questions with Guedra Guedra
Emerging from the textured streets of Morocco, Guedra Guedra creates music that blurs the boundaries between memory and transformation. His creative process begins with raw field recordings, fragments of rituals, conversations, and ambient life. He then reshapes these using modular synths, granular effects and analog tools. Like a sonic archaeologist, he embraces distortion and accidents as the vital elements, weaving these imperfect sounds into immersive compositions that unfold beyond conventional time. For Guedra Guedra, music is both a meditation on heritage and a radical experiment in futurism, inviting listeners to experience sound as a living, breathing landscape.
What’s your go-to workflow when you’re building a track from scratch? Are there any studio rituals or tools you can’t live without?
My creative process always starts with listening. I don’t just listen to music, but to the world around me, to records, and to archives. Field recordings are often the seed of a new piece. Whether it’s a fragment of a traditional chant, the sound of the street, or a distant rhythm captured during a village ceremony, these sonic traces become the raw material I build from.
My workflow is hybrid, part instinctive and part sculptural. I usually begin by selecting a sound or rhythm that evokes something: a memory, a place, a tension. I work a lot with Ableton Live, but I never treat it as a linear timeline. For me, it's more of a sound laboratory. I sample, loop, re-pitch, glitch, and layer. I love stretching textures, deconstructing and reassembling rhythms until they lose their original function and become something new. It’s a bit like sonic collage, or even archaeology.
I often process organic sounds through synths, drum machines, or granular plugins to create textures that feel both ancient and futuristic. My go-to tools include some Arturia machines, Spectrasonics instruments with custom sample libraries, and various Reaktor 6 ensembles I’ve either built or modified. But honestly, it’s not about the gear. It’s about listening differently.
One ritual I always return to is isolating a loop and listening to it for a long time, sometimes for hours, to feel how it breathes. I close my eyes, move around the studio, and try to perceive how the rhythm interacts with the body. If the loop moves me physically and emotionally, I know I’m on the right path. That’s when I begin improvising with my machines on top of the loop to develop a new idea.
Another part of my workflow is what I call temporal layering. I use voices, rhythms, or textures from different regions and eras, and allow them to coexist in the same sonic space. I never rush the process. Sometimes a track begins with a simple field recording and takes months to evolve into a full composition. I like to let things mutate over time. That’s the essence of the MUTANT album.
“Sometimes a track begins with a simple field recording and takes months to evolve into a full composition. I like to let things mutate over time.”
Can you walk us through your process for capturing and transforming raw sounds, any memorable ‘happy accidents’ or technical mishaps that ended up in a finished track?
Absolutely, capturing and transforming raw sounds is truly at the heart of my creative process, both technically and philosophically.
It often starts in the field: I record everywhere - markets, ceremonies, streets, people talking, even digitizing samples from vinyl records. I carry portable gear like a Zoom H4 or H6, contact mics, and binaural recorders. What I’m looking for is not just “clean” sound, but texture, rhythm, atmosphere, sometimes even imperfection. I’ve captured whispers carried by the wind, distant radio interference, or overlapping chants from different sides of a street. These fragments carry stories, even if they’re noisy or unstable.
Back in the studio, the transformation begins. I use tools like granular samplers, pitch shifters, modular effects, and convolution reverbs with my own impulse responses. I often break the sound down completely, reshape it, and recontextualize it. The goal is not to imitate or preserve, but to imagine, to stretch the memory of the sound into something speculative. That’s why I say my music is like a “speculative archive.”
As for “happy accidents,” there have been many. On the track ‘Enlightenment’, for example, I started with a synth improvisation I had recorded two years earlier. I never thought it would make it into an official album. One day, while organizing my files to archive them, I listened back to that sound, and at the same time, I had a raw field recording playing in the background. The collision of the two sounds sparked a flood of inspiration, and I immediately started developing it into a fully produced song.
The same thing happened with ‘Four Lambs’. There’s a field recording in the middle of the track that I captured over seven years ago in Taroudant is a Moroccan city. I was walking down the street when I heard a fragment of a Hamadcha Brotherhood ritual. When I listened back in the studio, I realized the sound was quite distorted; it had clipped badly. But luckily, I hadn’t deleted it. When I started working on MUTANT, that recording came to mind right away. I wanted to build something raw and brutal, but that would resolve with a radical calm at the end. That distorted recording became the emotional core of the track.
Sometimes, technical mishaps, a mic overload, wind distortion, or even someone talking over a take create sonic material that feels more alive than a perfectly captured sound. I embrace those imperfections because they remind us that sound is always in motion, always in flux. In a way, they reflect the entire ethos behind MUTANT: transformation, unpredictability, and life encoded in rhythm.
If you could invent a new instrument or audio tool to help tell your music, what would it do, and how might it help push the boundaries of African electronic music even further?
If I could invent a new instrument or audio tool to support my music, it would be a climate-responsive microtonal synthesizer. One that doesn’t just reproduce sound but reacts to the environment, like traditional instruments made from wood, skin, or natural fibres, something that already exists in some ways, I imagine.
In many African and oral music traditions, temperature and humidity directly affect tuning. A drum’s pitch shifts as the sun rises. A string resonates differently in the dry heat of the Sahel or the ocean air of the coast. These so-called “imperfections” are not flaws. They are part of the musical identity, rooted in place, in time, in material. So my dream instrument would listen to the weather, respond to light, heat, and air, and let its tuning drift organically.
It would also break away from the fixed metric grid. In many African rhythms, time is not a line; it’s a cycle. My tool would allow for non-linear looping, polyrhythmic layering, and asymmetrical pulses, without snapping everything to a grid. Like in a village ceremony, where multiple patterns intersect not to dominate each other, but to coexist in tension and resolution.
This kind of tool would not only push African electronic music forward. It would bring it closer to its roots while opening portals to new hybrid forms. It would allow music to be climate-sensitive, materially informed, and rhythmically liberated, just like the traditional forms that continue to inspire me.
“My dream instrument would listen to the weather, respond to light, heat, and air, and let its tuning drift organically.”
When you’re not in the studio, what’s your favourite way to reset your ears or clear your head?
Walking in nature or by the sea helps me reset. I just listen to the environment without thinking; it clears my mind and refreshes my ears. Spending time with family and friends, walking randomly through a space, cooking and exploring world cuisines also help me relax and find new inspiration.
If someone pressed play on your track, 'Drift of Drummer', for the first time, what’s the one feeling or image you’d want to flash through their mind?
I’d want them to feel a sense of movement, heat, dust, and transformation, like memory and future dancing together.
