Tunisian underground music
Encyclopedia
Tunisian underground music refers to music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 performed by Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...

n artists that play or compose in a style different from the established Tunisian mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....

. Using the term underground
Underground music
Underground music comprises a range of different musical genres that operate outside of mainstream culture. Such music can typically share common values, such as the valuing of sincerity and intimacy; an emphasis on freedom of creative expression; an appreciation of artistic creativity...

 to define a performing arts
Performing arts
The performing arts are those forms art which differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some physical art object...

 movement or scene in tha Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...

 world, including Tunisia, takes on a slightly different meaning compared to the one generally understood when used in the western countries. Given that contemporary Tunisian mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....

 music includes only a few different musical styles, underground music has come to include any artist or band that sings or composes in a different genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

. For instance, while there's nothing underground about reggae, Tunisian reggae bands are considered part of the Tunisian underground scene.

State of the Art

Although small, the underground music scene in Tunisia is growing fast. Over the last 5 to 10 years there has been an impressive increase in the number of bands trying out all sorts of musical genres. However, the most active scenes are undoubtedly the Tunisian heavy metal
Heavy metal music
Heavy metal is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the Midlands of the United Kingdom and the United States...

 bands
Most of the heavy metal, dark and gothic
Gothic rock
Gothic rock is a musical subgenre of post-punk and alternative rock that formed during the late 1970s. Gothic rock bands grew from the strong ties they had to the English punk rock and emerging post-punk scenes...

 bands in Tunisia sing in English. While several bands compose their own music most of these bands predominantly perform covers. In contrast, most Tunisian rappers perform in Tunisian (the local Arabic dialect). The Tunisian rap scene is very productive but it is still widely based on self-producing MCs such as Afrock, Balti, Psyco-M, and T-Men.

Some Tunisian Underground Artists

New upcoming bands include Neshez , Zemeken , Myrath
Myrath
Myrath, formerly known as X-Tazy, is an Oriental metal band from Tunisia formed in 2001.- Biography :Myrath , a metal band from Tunis, Tunisia, started out as a teenage cover band formed in 2001 by guitarist Malek Ben Arbia and became in just a few years, a respected band by the international...


http://www.myrath.com, Checkpoint 303
Checkpoint 303
Checkpoint 303 is a non-profit musical collective from the emerging Arabic and Middle-eastern underground electronica scene. The activist musical project was launched by Tunisian SC Mocha and Palestinian SC Yosh in 2004 and has secured an avant-garde position on the Arabic underground music scene...

  and
Firas Louatihttp://www.firaslouati.com

See also

  • HarDoos.com: Online Metal Community, News and Gigs in Tunisia.
  • TuniZika.com: A blog
    Blog
    A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

     about alternative and contemporary Tunisian music. It features a downloadable audio program (in mp3
    MP3
    MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

     or podcast
    Podcast
    A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

     formats) which presents every other week 4 contemporary Tunisian artists. Most of the bands selected are promising unsigned artists.
  • Zanzana.com: A Tunisian website dedicated to the local metal, punk and gothic fans. It has a large database of artist interviews and profiles as well as concert listings and runs a forum related to the radio program Zanzana hosted by Karim Benamor on Radio Tunis Chaine Internationale (RTCI).
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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