Swedish drone/experimental project Maulén have returned with Enta Omry, a monumental, single-track full-length released via Icons Creating Evil Art. Clocking in at 57 uninterrupted minutes, the album is an immersive reinterpretation of the legendary song by Umm Kulthum.
Recorded across Morocco, including the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert, Enta Omry is presented as both a musical excavation and a living document of place, connection and endurance. It’s heavy music stripped of studio artifice and rebuilt in the open air — complete with barking dogs, children playing and the natural reverb of desert hills.
Which raises the obvious question: why would a metal band from Sweden travel to North Africa to record a 57-minute reinterpretation of an Arabic classic? Maulén mastermind Carlos Ibarra traces it back to a bus ride in 2016.
“In 2016, I was on a bus to a village called Tafraoute in southern Morocco. A woman was sitting on the bus listening to music on her phone’s loudspeaker, and I was quite captivated by the song. I thought to myself, ‘Everything this woman is singing sounds like a metal riff.’ So, I got up and asked her, ‘What is this music?’ She looked at me and answered, ‘This is Umm Kulthum, and the song is named ‘Enta Omry.””
When the bus arrived in Tafraoute, high in the Atlas Mountains, Ibarra found himself transfixed. “I sat on the roof of this beautiful house called Tigmi Ozro, obsessively listening to this song for a week. Looking at the mountains and just feeling the music. That experience really changed me and affected me deeply. Part of me wanted to share this with my fellow musicians and see how they would be affected by this environment.”
He eventually did. In 2022, Ibarra returned with four musicians and two photographers to the same house where he first heard the song.
“I didn’t want to just ‘track’ the song; I wanted to capture an experience and a moment in time. Creating this record was about creating the circumstances for us to work. We brought our own recording equipment and scaled everything down to the bare minimum. We had no amps and a minimal drum kit. With no mic stands, we used selfie sticks and duct tape to mic things up.
“We were not in a comfortable recording studio, but we were in a magical place. It wasn’t easy, but we were capturing magic. For us music is not just recording a song — it’s capturing a moment.”
That ethos shaped the record’s immersive production. Guitarist and producer Carlos Sepúlveda pushed to record in an enveloping format that captured not just instruments, but atmosphere.
“We wanted to capture the music, of course, but also a sensation — the feeling of this magical place that affected all of us,” Ibarra explains. “We recorded in the house, but Lea, our singer, actually stood on the roof at night. The hill behind the house acted as a natural wall of reverb.
“At the same time, you could hear dogs running around and children playing. Since it was the middle of summer, people were active at night, living life. This record is more about capturing a moment—not just us playing, but everything going on around us. It’s more a documentation of time; in some ways, it’s like a photograph.”
Beyond the setting, Enta Omry also serves a deeper purpose: tracing the roots of heaviness itself.
“The purpose was to explore the roots of heavy music,” Ibarra says. “In Maulén, we are mostly immigrants from different places — I’m from Chile, Lea has roots in the Caribbean, and Micke has Finnish roots. We were all drawn to heavy music, which is an ‘outsider’ culture, but it also connects to our heritage in ways we did not know as kids.
“For example, what makes metal sound ‘evil’ is the use of Arabic scales. The melancholy of Chilean folklore, which was a big part of my upbringing, has many connections with Arabic music.”
He continues: “The fact is, North African music is often riff-based. It’s not like European classical music where everyone plays a different part; here, they play a RIFF together, in unison, kinda like Black Sabbath!
“I saw these points where music converged, and I wanted to dive deep into the roots of heaviness. There is history before the blues. The enslaved people were taken from ports all across the West Coast of Africa to the Americas.”
What began as a chance encounter on a bus became a month-long immersion in Tafraoute, Essaouira and Tagounite — 30 days that reshaped the band’s understanding of sound, space and lineage.
“Little did we know that those 30 days spent in Tafraoute, Essaouira and Tagounite would change us all.”
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