Tusk Festival 2015 — Maurice Louca

Hailing from Cairo, Maurice Louca is an electronic musician whose expansive work has necessarily led to him forming a trio with a drummer and bass player to fully realise it in the studio and on stage. On first listening, his hypnotic North African electronica conjures the notion of how Adrian Sherwood’s classic On-U Sound productions might have sounded had he grown up in Egypt. Louca also provides this year’s Sun City Girls connection as Alan Bishop pops up blasting a sax midway through latest album Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute The Parrot). Released on Khyam Allami’s Nawa label last year, the record is also infused with the dream-state vocals of Electro Chaabi MC Alaa 5, Louca deftly applying fat-bottomed dub aesthetics to his psychedelic take on shaabi in a way that you may find immediately irresistible. There’s both a timelessness and an immediacy to Louca’s music that, paired with its sublime cultural splicing, can cause total psychic displacement – not to be listened to whilst operating heavy machine