Les Abranis were formed in Paris in the late 1960s by Shamy El Vaz and Karim Abdénour, two young Algerian workers of Kabyle Amazigh ethnicity. Their sound was a fusion of modern innovation and traditional roots, mixing elements of funk, rock and psychedelia with their people’s own folk tradition, and singing in the Kabyle tongue to celebrate this marginalized cultural identity. It was an approach that attracted the disapproval of the Algerian authorities – who would have preferred them to sing in Arabic – but which made them heroes to diasporic communities in France and North Africa.
Album No. 1 (also known as Id Es Was), was originally released in 1983 as a private-press album with a limited distribution among those communities, and is now reissued for the first time. It reveals a group comfortably inhabiting the two overlapping cultural and aesthetic worlds that underpinned their sound.
