Bergsonist: ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ

Navel-Gazers #78 is an interview with Selwa Abd a.k.a. Bergsonist who is going to talk to us about ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ. From my first encounter with its title I knew there had to be a story about this album. Those last three characters are in Tifinagh script which relates to the artist’s North African origins, and in fact convey the word “origin” itself alongside Latin and Arabic scripts. In the liner notes for ‘ASL’ we learn about Selwa’s visits to Errachidia, her ancestral village of origin in Eastern Morocco, from which many of these sounds derive. The work is sonically adventurous, fanciful even - veering into textures and timbres well outside the palette of everyday life in Errachidia or anywhere - and yet Selwa seems to approach her subject through it all with a reverence for heritage, family ties and the local Amazigh community which strikes one as a personal motivation underpinning the whole project. Selwa has lived in New York for around as long as I’ve lived in the UK: one decade and a half. It’s a short enough time to recall living in one’s country of origin but long enough that when you’re there, you now have a sense that you’re visiting. ‘ASL...’ is a vicarious listening experience, the artist’s rendering of Morocco encountered through a fresh set of ears. Let’s dig into the origins of one of 2025’s most remarkable albums.

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel Gazers! Firstly could you please tell us about your background - who are you and how did you get started as an artist?

Selwa Abd: I’m Selwa Abd, aka bergsonist —— a Moroccan-born, New York–based multidisciplinary artist, composer, and performer working across sound, performance, and time-based media.

I started taking music seriously while studying at The New School, while also running Bizaarbazaar, a music blog (now an imprint), and taking sound-related classes. At some point, I realized I needed to make music myself.

A huge shoutout to my teachers Zach Layton, Stephen Decker, Spencer C Yeh and Dafna Naphtali, their classes became a real foundation for me.

Discovering Eliane Radigue’s work, in particular, was a genuine wake-up call. Living in New York at the time, opened up the world of experimental music and sound art to me. Outside of school, I spent most of my time going to shows, interning at Harvestworks and Blank Forms, helping out at ISSUE Project Room, and exploring the city’s underground noise and techno scenes while figuring out how to make work on my own terms…

AC: What’s the idea of the name bergsonist, does it have to do with Henri Bergson?

Selwa Abd: The name bergsonist comes from Le Bergsonisme, Gilles Deleuze’s book on Henri Bergson, which I read in French while living in Morocco. What drew me in was Bergson’s idea of intuition as a rigorous philosophical method, not just a feeling or a vibe, but something precise. His writing on intuition and multiplicity really resonated with the way I approach music.

A decade later, I realized I was still engaging with other Bergsonian ideas almost unconsciously, especially his concepts of memory and the virtual, which I explored in my series As If Reality.

AC: ‘ASL…’ features source recordings from visits to your ancestral hometown in Morocco. What do you remember about these visits and your interactions with the local environment and people during the recording process?

Selwa Abd: It was an unforgettable trip, surreal, spiritual, and far too short. My husband/partner, the musician G. ZIFCAK, came with me, and we arrived with almost no contacts, just hoping to find the village. From the moment we landed in Errachidia, things started falling into place. The car rental agent knew the ancestral hometown because he’d worked there before.

When we reached the village, he ran into someone, and an older woman overheard the conversation and gave us exactly the information we needed. It felt almost unreal. Returning there carried a strong symbolic weight. It’s a small, remote village on a hill, and we arrived just before Aid during Ramadan. People were incredibly warm and welcoming. I recorded field audio and video throughout, trying to do so as respectfully as possible. Even with ancestral ties, being born in Morocco, I live in the U.S. and I stay conscious of that distance and privilege, and of not treating heritage as something extractive. My Moroccan roots are present in my work, but I try to approach it with care and subtlety.

Right after my Roulette show, (who alongside NYSCA commissioned the ASL project), the taxi driver who picked me up turned out to be Moroccan and knew my grandfather. The whole project felt far more spiritual and emotional than I ever expected!

AC: While all gathered from this one particular location in the world, the types of source recordings used in these pieces are drawn from diverse sources: nature sounds, conversations, regional musical instruments and religious chants are all to be found somewhere in the mix.

What are some of the most remarkable examples from your point of view, and which tracks can we hear them on?

Selwa Abd: Infri is one of my favorites, you can hear actual fragments of a conversation I had with our “guide” from the village woven into it alongside manipulated sounds of stones.

And Oeuvres Sociales is really special to me because it has my grandfather's voice in it, pulled from an old archival recording of a conference he gave when he was leading a union. It’s the only audio recording of his voice I have. I lost him when I was so young but somehow his voice is anchored in my memory. There's also this sound of ululation that drifts in and out of the track, that vocal sound you hear at celebrations which I love.

AC: There is a textural sonic quality to your work which I find totally unique. To help us understand the creative process you’re using to construct and compose such sounds, I wonder if we could dissect one specific track, the longest one here Muqqadim. I hear synthesised elements and field recordings on this one amidst other elements which are perhaps a delightful blur of both. How did you create this piece from beginning to end?

Selwa Abd: Honestly I don't have a set method for anything, but as far as I can remember, "Muqqadim" came together in layers.

I started with the recordings of krakeb, those metal castanets from Gnawa music (I have a pair I bought from a m3alam in Merzouga) and built them up as a kind of rhythmic foundation. Then I brought in my FM synths to add more futuristic, spacey sounds, all recorded live in one go while I was just jamming. A looped drum pattern went in underneath to hold everything together. After that I recorded the track, then mixed it with more textural sounds I’ve previously made (derived from field recordings) with my processing tools.

That's kind of how all my tracks go though, I sit in my room for hours, just tweaking things with no real destination in mind. Half the time I can't even remember exactly what I did, because I'm not taking notes, I'm just going with the flow. Every time is different and that's kind of the whole point for me. Though when it comes to live sets, that's a whole other story, I write everything down!

AC: The liner notes for ‘ASL…’ cite your grandparents as inspirations for this project. Tell us about your grandparents.

Selwa Abd: My grandparents were a huge inspiration, both of them shaped who I am and the path I’ve taken today. May they rest in peace.

My grandfather, originally from Settat (and the Errachidia region in southeast Morocco), was a trade unionist. He organized mine workers and electricians at a time when that work was closely tied to resistance against French colonialism. He helped establish training centers, healthcare units, and social housing. He was an important figure in Moroccan history, even if much of his work happened quietly, in the background. He was so calm, and always loving, I remember myself being excited to see him when he was coming back from work.

My grandmother, originally from Fes, was the center of everything. Total opposite of my grandfather. A powerful presence, she worked alongside my grandfather organizing workers, while also holding the family (7 kids and grandkids) together behind the scenes. She hosted, organized, cooked every meal, and even designed part of her house herself. She was always dressed up, always ready to receive guests, she truly loved having people around. I’d say she was the bon vivant of the family, in contrast to my grandfather, who was fully devoted to his work. Every Sunday, without exception, the whole family gathered at their house, where she would prepare incredible food and play music in the background.

When my grandfather died, things got worse, she lost 4 of her kids. The family took a tragic turn. Now after she passed, the house lost something it hasn’t quite regained, even though my father and brother still live there. But their presence is everywhere — photographs, my grandfather’s awards, archival tapes and CDs of my grandmother (I even made an NTS tribute mix from them), books, memories. It feels like a living museum.

AC: This album originally caught my attention due to my interest in unusual alphabets. Its title is displayed in a North African Tifinagh lettering alongside Arabic and Latin scripts. What can you tell us about this writing and about the Tamazight language? Can you speak it?

Selwa Abd: I don't speak Tamazight, which I’m sad about. My grandparents didn't either or maybe they did, just never passed it to their children or grandchildren. Though traces of it live in Moroccan Darija (dialect) anyway, woven into the everyday words we use without thinking. My great-grandparents on my father's side spoke it. While looking at my family’s archive, I found photos of my grandfather's mother, she had a tattoo on her forehead which was prevalent in Amazigh Culture, now less.

I think many Moroccan families, at some point, distanced themselves from their Amazigh origins and leaned into an Arab identity. Then the same drift happened again, families began shifting toward French, letting Darija and Arabic quietly recede. It's a pattern that repeats: a language, a heritage, set aside in favor of something that felt more modern or more prestigious. Studies suggest that 97% of Moroccans carry Amazigh genes, yet so many came to identify culturally and linguistically as Arab. The heritage was always there, underneath.

Amazigh identity is celebrated now, but for a long time it wasn't, and I wish families had held onto that knowledge and protected it. Thankfully some did, you can still find families keeping the language alive, the symbols, the customs..

I’m amazed at how ancient the alphabet is and how the symbols carry a cultural weight that feels almost physical. For this project, during the ASL's live performance at Roulette, I actually worked with a native speaker to translate key words into Tamazight, then brought those recordings into the performance itself, running them through my granular processing box in real time. It was a way of reaching back, reclaiming a memory, a fragmented identity and saying: even when inheritance is broken, it isn't gone.

AC: You’ve lived in New York for 16 years. Have you connected with many other interesting artists there who are on a similar wavelength to you?

Selwa Abd: I've met so many incredible artists it's hard to know where to begin!

Maybe I’ll just focus on collaborations? Two artists I collaborated with musically are: G.ZIFCAK and Miho Hatori. With both of them, I’d say working together felt effortless and intuitive from the start.

Greg (G.ZIFCAK) and I have collaborated countless times, music videos, my projects, ideas, and even a live sonic performance together last year in Bologna. I think it comes down to a shared taste and sonic sensibility; we just understand each other. With Miho, we collaborated on Coins, presented at Roulette a few years back. She brings that same intuitive quality, a real musician and a wonderful friend!

Just last week, I had the pleasure of performing at ISSUE Project Room alongside two legends: NYC's Dafna Naphtali and the incredible Wobbly aka Jon Leidecker. None of us had performed together before, yet it clicked immediately. We built a kind of live processing chain, improvising with vocals drawn from the audience as part of Eva Davidova's piece Audience As Virus. It was great!

AC: What about in Morocco, do you know anyone there doing experimental music - or any kind of music, really - that you’d recommend our readers to check out?

Selwa Abd: On the Moroccan side, strictly local experimental music is harder to point to, but there's so many talented electronic artists worth knowing like 3XOJ, Archidi, Gaouta and many others who are Moroccan but based elsewhere in the world. I brought a number of them together for a compilation I curated for Air Texture: https://musicandactivism.bandcamp.com/album/place-morocco. (A personal standout is Ziryab, a Moroccan artist based in Montreal, who opens the comp with a stunning electroacoustic track.)

AC: Any current projects on the horizon you’d like to mention while you’re here, and or other closing thoughts?

Selwa Abd: My new album Depths is out now on Dark Entries, you can find it here:- (It’s more dance music oriented than experimental but you can definitely find some of my experimental touches) Nothing else locked in on the horizon just yet. Thank you so much for having me!

Selwa can be found on https://selwaabd.net/ and Bandcamp.

Images

0) 'ASL' cover image by Selwa.

1) 'BTS near where my Father used to work, Erfoud region"- Selwa

2) Bergonist Bandcamp image.

3) "me and the guide" - Selwa

4) "me, the car rental guy Mohammed, and his friend visiting his village (ancestral hometown)" - Selwa

5) "photo of the ancestral village" - Selwa

6) 'ASL' reverse image by Selwa.

7) Still from a live performance at Roulette (Brooklyn).