Interview with Imattawan

Azul Farid, we would like you to tell us about Imettawan band. First tell us who are Imattawan?
Azul brothers, thanks a lot for this interview, we appreciate it. We are very proud of Agraw.com as it cares a lot about Tamazight. We visit this website a lot because we find ourselves projected in it. The Imetawen group was founded in the 90s by some young people from Imzouren. It started with the creation of Nekkor, an association of Culture and Art in Imzouren. We used to work together in the house of our brother Aziz, who is still a member of our group. Our first participation was in a concert organized by Nekkor association, and it was a good start for us.

We notice a long period of absence between your first album and the second one. Did you suffer any problems during this period?
There was indeed a long period of silence from our first album to the second one, I frankly regret this period of silence. We also had some troubles.
I traveled to Rabat where I spent almost four years as I had some works there. Looking for a work was important in order to find a living, as we know making music in Morocco can not be depended on yet. The distance between me and the other members of the group was also a reason behind the period of silence.
Our second album was realized in a period while people thought that Imetawen group did no longer exist. This album was produced in some hectic circumstances, it was done very fast.
I am personally not so satisfied with this album. It’s true it contains good music but we didn’t find anyone to work with us and help us. We had a lot of troubles in the musical distribution that we did it ourselves. We also experienced problems in recording this album in Casablanca. We were there all of us but I stayed alone there at the end. There wasn’t enough communication with the technicians of the studio we went to in Casablanca; there might be some clear technical mistakes in this album but we could have avoided them, but this was normal as it was a result of all the troubles we had. Because of all these reasons now we are trying to avoid them in our next coming album, we hope it will be better a lot.

We want you to speak about Rif s music; do you think there is any change in it?
Rif s music has witnessed a lot of changes since it first appeared. I always say that Rif music is not something apparent, there are many schools and singers, each singer has his/her own style and this is a very good thing for our music. I think we can’t define Rif s music
because of the differences in schools and singer s styles, it’s like we are still looking for the right definition of our music.

Now we want to know if you are promising something new to us. Are you still together?
We are still working together. We are currently trying to work on our third album. We have recently met some poets like Khalid El mansouri, Almaouhoubi and Khalid El yahyawi who lives in Spain and who has nice lyrics too.
We are trying to collect some lyrics for the third album, and then we will move to make music composing.

Do you participate alone in concerts or you are accompanied by the other members?
Frankly speaking, when we started as a group, we used to participate all in any concert, but because each of us had his own worries and works, I used to participate alone with my guitar. But lately all the members of our group are participating in concerts organized by different associations from the Rif or from other cities.

Do you make any collaboration with other groups from the outside for example?
Frankly, there’s no collaboration at the level of work but we had collaboration with Imetlaa band that we appreciate a lot. These people helped us a lot and gave us many advice since they have professional members. We also met other singers like Lwalid Mimoun, Khalid Izri, Benaaman and many others.

How do you find Rif music in the Internet?
The different websites that deal with Rif s music are playing an important role now and we can say that they re better than the radio. In these websites people can know more about different singers, read their biographies and also listen to their music. Internet has now become very important for us as it helps promote our music

Thank you brother Farid, we want you to say something as a conclusion.
Thank you so much. We wish you good luck with Agraw.com. We hope you will continue with this website because it is an importnant initiative We like it very much when we find in the internet websites from Rif or outside dealing with our music and singers.
Thanks again brothers, and we hope there’ll be a collaboration with singers and these websites.

Thank you for this interview.

Interview Realized by Miloud El Ayadi
Translated to English by Hicham Boughaba
Mixed by Mohamed Bounda
Produced by Agraw.com © 2006

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