HOURIA | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Five years after her album Chants mystiques d’Algérie, Houria Aïchi resumes her exploration of the little-known heritage of the musical traditions of Algeria. Always using the tools of her first profession, sociology, to guide her collection in the collective memory, she pursues the noble project of bringing to light the endangered culture of the Aurès. Chants courtois de l'Aurès introduces ten songs of the love of men for women, the singularity of which is to be explicit. It is not about an ethereal ideal of a symbolic woman loved as the dew dreams of a flower, but about Zina, Fatma, Louisa, Delilah, women of flesh and life. These songs speak of the jubilation of feeling, of desire, of the attraction of bodies. Certainly, we hear the pain of absence, but it is not a poetry of unhappy loves: this repertoire is joyful, does not hold its head in its hands to cry. It describes happiness in love, the happiness of loving a woman.