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.
The journal · Field notes from Morocco
Our stories
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 · August 2025 · 2 min read
What a lila actually is, and what it is not.
It runs all night, it is a healing ceremony rather than a concert, and the part visitors find hardest is that nothing is being performed at them.
Culture · June 2025 · 2 min read
The oud makers of the Marrakech Mellah.
Four workshops remain in the old Jewish quarter, and between them they supply most of the ouds played in Morocco. We spent a week watching them work.
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.