Rai

What it is

Oran had a cassette industry before it had anything anyone would call a record label. Through the early eighties the shops along the Algerian coast were selling tapes made in a fortnight by young singers who called themselves cheb and chaba, young man and young woman, over drum machines and synthesisers. The material underneath was already old: bedoui poetry and the wedding music of the Oranie, carried by women called cheikhas whose songs were frank about drink and desire in ways that made several authorities uncomfortable. Rachid Baba Ahmed produced most of the records that fixed the pop version, and by 1988 Cheb Khaled, Cheb Mami and Chaba Fadela were selling across the Maghreb and into France. Cheb Hasni was shot dead in Oran in 1994 and Baba Ahmed a year after him.

What it sounds like

A drum machine and a hand drum arguing, with everything else stacked over the top. The kit is a Roland or an Oberheim playing a hard preset with a bright snare, and across it a derbouka, played live and fast, filling most of the sixteenths. The lead line is a gasba, an end blown reed flute with a breathy tone, or a piano accordion, or a synthesiser doing an approximation of both. Handclaps arrive in blocks. The bass is a synth repeating a short figure. The vocal is the reason these records exist: melismatic, pushed hard at the top of the range, often doubled at the octave, and mixed well in front of the band.

Key elements

• The kick on the aBeat 1 and the a of 1, then beat 3 and the a of 3. The same two note cell twice, and it puts a lurch under the vocal that a kick on the beats never does.
• Open hats on the offbeatThe open hi-hat on the and of each beat, four a bar, with the closed hat only on the beat and the e. It is a machine preset and it dates a record to about 1985 inside one bar.
• A machine backbeatSnare on 2 and 4 with a ghost on the a of 2, plain and quantised, because the derbouka over the top is supplying all the movement anybody needs.
• The derbouka, playedEleven strokes in bar one, running from 52 to 78, recorded live over the machine. It is the part that stops the record sounding like a demo of a drum box.
• The gasbaAn end blown reed flute playing the melody the singer is about to sing, then answering the line after it. In the eighties records a synthesiser often stands in and nobody minds.

How to get them

• Pick a machineA Roland TR-707 or an Oberheim DMX, and use the presets rather than building a kit from scratch. Half the identity of these records is the sound of one specific box in one specific Oran studio.
• Open hat on the andPut the open hi-hat on the offbeat eighth and the closed hat on the beat and the e of each beat. The two lanes never share a step and the open one is supposed to ring into the next sixteenth.
• Play the derboukaRecord it live over the machine rather than sequencing it. The point of these records is a hand drummer running slightly ahead of a metronome, and quantising the lane removes it entirely.
• Gasba or accordionAn end blown reed flute or a piano accordion carrying the vocal melody before and after the singer takes it. A synth lead will do if you play it with the same ornament.
• Vocals in frontTrack the lead twice, put the second an octave up at half the level, and mix both well above the band. Everything else on a rai record is accompaniment and gets mixed like it.
• Swing0.56. The derbouka pulls the record off the grid anyway, and the machine underneath needs a matching lean or the two parts sound like separate recordings.

Reference points

Cheikha Rimitti, Cheb Khaled, Chaba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui, Cheb Mami, Cheb Hasni, Cheba Zahouania, and the producer Rachid Baba Ahmed. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.