Tagnawit EP

Reda Senhaji aka Cheb Runner effectively combines his Moroccan heritage with club sounds on Tagnawit, which means “the way of the gnawa.” The title makes sense as soon as you listen to the first few seconds of opener “Jawgnawa.” Cheb Runner’s production is modern and club oriented, sometimes hard, but still maintains a  warm, joyful, and organic feeling which carries through across the EP, even in the darker moments (like on the mechanical “Chorufa”). He merges his electronic production with traditional instrumentation and the voices of Driss Filali and fellow Brussels based Maâlem (Gnawa master) Hicham Bilali, and the results are explosive, ecstatic, and suspended somewhere in between different times and places.