Azu Tiwaline is a French-Tunisian producer who decided, somewhere along the way, that the question "what is dub techno" had a different answer if you asked it in El Djerid instead of Bristol. Her work braids Berber rhythm, Saharan trance and the kind of low-end physics you only get from sound systems built by people who care. Livity Sound has put out her records. I.O.T. Records has put out more. The clubs that book her tend to be the ones with proper rigs.
THE FIFTH DREAM, her 2023 LP, is the obvious starting point. "Mei Long" is the entry track — eight minutes of slow, deliberate bass pressure that does not so much build as it accumulates. "Golden Dawn" opens the record with desert horizon and ends up somewhere closer to a sub-bass meditation. "Long Hypnosis" is exactly that. "Antennae Opening" is the one where the rhythm finally relaxes into trance.
What she is making
The word she uses for it is "electro-dub" but the word does not quite cover what is going on. "Reptilian Waves" works in a register most techno producers cannot reach because they have never been in the desert at three in the morning. "Let The Night Start" — her collaboration with Paul St. Hilaire — sits at the genuine intersection of King Tubby and the El Djerid, two places nobody else thinks belong on the same map. They do.
Why it matters now
Dance music is currently very loud and very fast. Azu Tiwaline is making music that is loud and slow and patient and somehow more physical than anything tearing around at 160 BPM. She is also one of the few producers actively building a vocabulary out of where she is from rather than where the trend is. That is a rarer thing than it should be.
Start with "Mei Long". Sit with it. The album is doing what it says on the cover — fifth dream — and the slowness is the point.
Allastair Voss
