Rin is an album rooted in the landscape of Brittany, inspired by the enigmatic forests and coastlines and moors but also by the human elements. The remote villages, the nuclear power plant within Monts d ́Arrée, the strange transitional spaces that lie between the rural and the urban. The manner in which the music allows the environment to seep into it marks it distinct from 2020’s Moira, finding Monolithe Noir newly amenable to the energies and moods of the surrounding world, though Rin is far from a simple recapitulation of Western France. Shot through the tracks is anger, tension, and no small amount of provocative defiance. The landscape might be leaching into the music and changing it, but Pasqualini ensures the opposite is true too.

Take latest single ‘Barra Bouge’, its steady rhythmic drumming allowing the track to coil tight like a spring. But the unerring purpose of its slow march is warped by some strange force, think Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England if it wasn’t in England at all. Jawhar Basti‘s vocals urge the fevered build as Mirabelle Gillis’s violin arcs across the dreamscape, a world of lightning and dense cloud always gathering toward its own thunderous end.

Rin is out on the 22nd July via Capitane Records and Humpty Dumpty Records and you can pre-order it now.

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Tasweerah, released last month via 62TV Records / PIAS, is the fourth JAWHAR record and their first since 2018’s Winrah Marah. Described as “a series of freeze-frames of more or less personal portraits,” the album explores what it means to be an artist and his or her value in our increasingly strained and strange modern world. “The songs are, each in their own way, attempts towards a universal portrait of the artist,” the band describe. “They question his place and that of imagination in society, placing ‘creation and the quest for beauty’ at the centre of the album.”

Opener ‘Malguit’ is characteristically rich and shadowy, built on patient percussion and winding guitar and Basti’s evocative vocals. Like many songs on the record, it is thick with a dark romanticism and has deep philosophical roots. Basti describes it as a song about “a traveller who crosses territories in search of an absolute that he calls Errouh (the soul),” perhaps the perfect starting point for an album that explores the search for more than the material. Follow-up ‘Foug Layyem’ tends toward the pop end of the JAWHAR sound, but again has a strong existential bent. “It’s the story of a man who lets himself hover above his life,” Basti explains. “Birds flying send him back to the feeling of having his heart in a cage. Shooting stars make him realize that he is not on the same timeline as the universe that surrounds him.”

The rest of the album follows along similar lines, wrestling with creativity and purpose with admirable elegance and restraint. You don’t need to be able to speak Arabic to feel the pull of the songs, from the taut groove of ‘Sayyed Ezzin’ and gentle slow dawn of ‘Kif Errouh’ to the sparse and lonely ‘El Mooja’ and boldy defiant ‘Chsar’. Basti is able to aim personal experience and philosophical wandering through the prism of several “folk” cultures, resulting in patterns that are very much his own.

Tasweerah is out now via 62TV Records / PIAS and available to purchase from the JAWHAR Bandcamp page.

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