MED-MUSIC
HOUSE NO. 34, Block D, Sector 48, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
MED-MUSIC is not one room but a complex of four stone-walled rehearsal cottages set around a lavender-scented courtyard on the outskirts of Chefchaouen’s Old City, Morocco. Born eight years ago when trumpet-player Amine El-Zein bought his grandparents’ crumbling dye house, the venue kept the indigo-stained pillars of the original tannery, turning them into open-air musical pillars where percussionists practice polyrhythms beside blue-painted vats. By night the same pillars are rigged with soft amber LEDs that let brass sections read lead sheets under the stars, creating what locals jokingly call the “blue acoustics.”
A nominal 200-person capacity is deliberately loose: during spring equinox concerts the cedar doors fold back so that audiences spill into the alleyways, following horn lines that echo off the Rif Mountains. Inside the largest cottage, flexible risers allow strings to sit two metres above winds, reproducing classic Andalusian orchestrations in miniature. A retractable canvas roof can close in sudden mountain rain, while fans powered by rooftop solar panels keep air moving through crescent-moon apertures carved high in the walls.
Programming feels like Amine’s diary read aloud: Sunday sunrise features Sufi chants mixed with ambient field recordings captured in the port of Tangier; Tuesday dusk belongs to Sahara-blues collectives; Thursday nights are devoted to contemporary Maʽluf reinterpretations, often supported by micro-grants from the Tétouan conservatory next door. Audience members routinely become participants—half-broken tablas and battered guitar cases are stacked by the entrance so passers-by can jump in. The venue never burns later than midnight: Amine insists the neighbouring nursing home deserves silence, so the final oud phrase is always followed by mint-tea served from the copper samovar his grandmother used for dye-fabric dye.
Food carries equal rhythmic value. A tiny open kitchen in the eastern cottage serves only three dishes—bissara with cumin, beef-and-prune tagine, and sesame cookies—timed to the ends of sets so that clapping hands can segue into spoon-clinking bowls. Every ticket comes with a digital WAV copy of the evening’s performance, water-marked “MED-MUSIC Archive” and recorded on a vintage Studer A80 that once belonged to Radio Cairo. If a listener revisits Chefchaouen a decade later, Amine will still pull up the same session to prove that music, like indigo, deepens with age.
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- Published: July 28, 2025
