Album | Sahara – Thanas Kas (De/Al/Be) | Transonic Label (Be)

Sahara

Kadija: Why are you going there?

Thanas: Well… from what I can see on this map, it’s the last village before the desert.
Then, nothing.
I like nothingness.
Everything accelerates as the immensity reveals itself. To paint this landscape, I would need ten thousand canvases. And when, for the first time, I decide to listen to it, this new landscape begins to whisper.
Here, silence is golden and the sun hits like a hammer. If you ever feel like getting lost here in January, beware of the second, but above all the first. Because after being loved too much, silence has deserted this place.
For a month, I wandered among the dunes, welcomed by a clan living about thirty minutes from the village of M’Hammid El Ghizlane, at the edge of the Moroccan Sahara.
There was almost nothing.
A small mud hut, turned into a studio. A few instruments. A computer. Microphones. And all around, the desert.
I began recording what was there: the wind moving through the dunes, footsteps on the sand, distant voices, insects, birds, silences, friction, the almost imperceptible movements of the landscape.
Then I began listening to them differently.
The wind became musical material. The sound of footsteps became a rhythm. A distant voice, a possible melody. Silence, an instrument.
Sahara was born out of this act of listening.
The album is an immersive sound piece built from field recordings made around M’Hammid El Ghizlane and in the surrounding desert. These recordings are gradually layered with instruments, electronic textures and musical fragments, as though the music were emerging directly from the landscape.
I am not trying to reproduce the desert.
I am trying to recapture what it does to you when you stay there long enough.
A sense of space. Slowness. Solitude. Heat. Waiting. The gradual disappearance of all points of reference.
And perhaps also that strange feeling that, when everything seems silent, something is still speaking to us.
Sahara is a sonic journey between presence and absence, between matter and silence, between humankind and a territory that seems entirely capable of existing without us.
A record made among the dunes, in a small mud hut, at the place where the road ends.
Then, nothing.
I like nothingness.