Guides · August 2026 · 2 min read
How to behave in a room where music is happening.
Ten small things that make the difference between being a guest and being an audience. None of them are about music.
The journal · Field notes from Morocco
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Essays, guides and field notes from the people who plan the journeys — what we heard, who we recorded, and what is worth travelling for.
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How to behave in a room where music is happening.
Ten small things that make the difference between being a guest and being an audience. None of them are about music.
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Culture · June 2026 · 2 min read
The guembri, in five minutes.
Three strings, a camel-skin face, a body carved from one piece of wood, and a bass line that has not changed in three hundred years.
Essays · May 2026 · 2 min read
Chefchaouen after the day trippers leave.
Between four in the afternoon and ten the next morning it is a different town. On staying two nights in a place designed to be seen in five hours.
Fieldwork · April 2026 · 2 min read
Recording in Ouarzazate: three days in the studio.
A desert blues band, a visiting rhythm section from Lisbon, and a room with no isolation. Notes from a session that should not have worked.
Guides · February 2026 · 2 min read
When to go, month by month.
The weather answer and the music answer are not the same answer. A month-by-month read on both, including the two months most people wrongly avoid.
Fieldwork · January 2026 · 2 min read
The women’s choirs nobody records.
Half of ahwach is sung by women, and almost none of the available recordings include them. We went to the Ourika valley to ask why.
What we write about, and why we bother
We are a travel agency, so the honest answer is that these pieces help people find us. The less cynical answer is that most of what we learn on a journey never fits into an itinerary — who taught whom, which village still sings a thing, what a ceremony is actually for — and it seemed a waste to let it go unrecorded.
Everything here is reported first-hand. We go, we listen, we ask permission before we record, and we name the musicians. Where a piece touches on something we sell, we say so in the piece.
Written by the people who plan the trips — Lucas in Essaouira and Paris, Omar in Fez, Khadija in Marrakech. New stories roughly twice a month.