The women’s choirs nobody records.

If you listen to the commercially available recordings of ahwach, you will hear drums and men. If you stand in a village square during an actual ahwach, you will hear a circle divided in two, and the half that is answering is women. The gap between those two experiences is the subject of this piece.

The simple explanation offered most often is modesty, and it is partly true and mostly insufficient. Recording a woman’s voice and circulating it is, in some of these villages, a thing that requires more negotiation than recording a man’s. But the women we spoke to in the Ourika valley did not describe a prohibition. They described never having been asked.

The recordists who came through in the sixties and seventies were men, usually foreign, usually there for a week, and they recorded the people who were put in front of them. What gets put in front of a visiting stranger is the men with the drums. Fifty years of that produces an archive, and the archive then becomes what ahwach is understood to be.

Fatima, who is in her sixties and has sung in the same circle since she was eleven, put it more bluntly than I am going to manage to paraphrase. She said the drums are the floor and the singing is the house, and then she said that everybody records the floor.

The tamawayt is the part that gets lost. It is the long, unmetered, held call that opens a sequence — one voice, no drums, enormous — and it is almost always sung by a woman. On the recordings it is usually faded in halfway or cut entirely, because it does not fit the track length and because the recordist did not know what it was.

We have started, slowly and with permission, to record some of it. Not to release — that is a conversation we have not finished having, and it is the villages’ to finish, not ours. But it seemed worth at least putting the sound somewhere before the generation that holds it stops singing.