بسم الله الرحمان الرحيم
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The School of Wind
Sohbat-e Rīḥ
طريق الريح
school
The School of Wind is a radiophonic school without walls, growing through listening, conversation, sound and shared atmosphere. Wind enters as carrier, archive, route, pressure, breath and companion, carrying stories, warnings, songs, dust, memory and ways of knowing between bodies and places.
The school grows through Ait Wadu, the people of the wind, and The Parable of the Goatherd , where the goatherd appears as mediator, storyteller, animal companion and tuner of winds. Listening becomes a way of moving through the world and learning from its atmospheres.
maqāmāt
The maqāmāt are the space-fictions of The School of Wind: stations where geography becomes a practice of listening. Each maqām enters a distinct relation between wind, body, climate, memory and knowledge. The curriculum unfolds through crossing, return and the continual opening of new maqāmāt.
Oceanique البحري
Oceanique opens through sea, coast, crossing, tide, port, salt air and long-distance signal. The ocean gives wind a world of drift, circulation, migration and return. Air moves with currents and weather systems, carrying voices, rumours, warnings, routes and longing between shores. Wind and wave form a hydrocosmological imagination shaped by water, passage, relation and the memory of crossings.
Deserteque الصحراوي
Deserteque moves through arid atmospheres, dust, heat, exposure and wandering. Wind shapes route-making, endurance, waiting and forms of alertness sharpened by vulnerability. It carries sand, traces of movement and knowledge tied to thirst, scarcity and survival. Water enters as life, desire and revolt, while wind teaches how to read what appears and disappears at the edge of perception.
Montagnesque الجبلي
Montagnesque gathers winds of altitude, echo, shepherding, animal presence and reverberation. Ridge, cliff, valley and slope shape the movement of air. Tuning, call, herd and flute become forms of knowledge of terrain, while geomancy reads the earth through contour, fracture and emergence. Wind passes through animals, stone, elevation and breath, carrying a science of attention grounded in place.
Chthonique الجوفي
Chthonique moves underground, toward cave, cavity, chamber, burial and hidden circulation. Wind is felt through pressure, vibration, echo and interior passage. The underground becomes sonic archive and a place of inward knowledge, sensed through belly, depth, resonance and what gathers beneath speech. Air moves through hollows, crevices, chambers and buried worlds.
archive
souffle_001
Jauf of the Earth,
the Mouth of the Mine,
the Breath of the Gasba
In conversation with Mouhcine Rahaoui
For this two-part episode, I invited my friend and artist Mouhcine Rahaoui, born in Jerada, where his father worked in the mines, and later studied at the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan. His work stays very close to the histories and everyday realities of Jerada, a former coal-mining city in eastern Morocco, shaped by extraction, struggle, and the 2017 uprising and its aftermaths.
We talked about estrangement, breath, cavities and underground worlds, the mouths of the worker, the family and the mouths of the mine, and the affects and emotions carried through mining life. We also spoke about Gasba and flutes, and the relation between blowing air through a reed and moving through the tunnels and cavities of the mine, alongside rhythm, protest songs, and the musical and sonic practices of communities from the region.
The conversation is in Darija (Moroccan Arabic), moving between voice, music, and recordings from Jerada.
Very grateful to Mouhcine Rahaoui for the conversation, the stories, and the listening.
souffle_002
Ahl-e Havā: A Sonic Archipelago from Hormuz
For this episode, Ahl-e Havā: A Sonic Archipelago from Hormuz, I began with Ahl-e Havā, the People of the Wind, and with Nasser Taghvai’s film Bād-e Jinn, following wind as presence, possession, rhythm, breath and voice across the southern Iranian coast.
From there, the episode moves through Hormuz as a historical and sonic corridor, between Qeshm and Larak, Kumzar and the Omani shores. I wanted to listen to some of the many winds that have crossed this place, through zar songs, Afro-Iranian and Afro-Arab rhythms, field recordings, pearl-divers’ percussive voices and breath, birds, sea, machines and drones.
I have also been thinking again about Fanon’s “occupied breathing”, and about breathing as something that never belongs to one body alone. Here, the Strait becomes a kind of sonic archipelago, crossed by winds, songs, spirits, labour, voices and machines, long before it became a chokepoint on a geopolitical map.
The episode is a sonic collage assembled from Doha, moving between music, field recordings, film, archives and voices from across the Strait.
current host
The School of Wind is currently hosted by WORM Radio in Rotterdam, where a live or pre-recorded souffle is shared on the last Thursday of each month.
links
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