TripleGo & RAF Camora

Straight out of the Paris suburbs of Montreuil, MomoSpazz and Sanguee began their musical journey after having met in high school. The rap duo, now both 26 years old, go by the pseudonym TripleGo.
You might not have heard of them, they're not the most well known - but despite their discreet nature, their distinctive sound has earned them respect across the industry. They adamantly refuse to be confined to a single genre, but you can easily draw parallels between their music and that of PNL (the most popular French rap group behind 'Cloud rap', an experimental subgenre that has taken over the French music scene).
It's explicitly cosmic and airy but somewhat melancholic. The beats are dark, with heavily auto-tuned voices waving through. MomoSpazz and Sanguee are in many ways pioneers of this new wave movement. Having released four projects so far, the first 'Putana' in 2014, followed by 'Eaux Max' and '2020', with their latest EP, 'En attendant Machakil' having just been released late last month.
Part of this is down to Sanguee and the way he interacts with his effects, sliding through wells of reverb and clouds of pixelation, doubling himself with a personal panoply of tics and ad-libs. These techniques are familiar of course, but Sanguee has found his own restrained-but-sonorous approach, deploying subtly inflected (literal) monotony to hypnotic effect. Sanguee's Moroccan origins undoubtedly play a part too, tapping into the power of trance-through-repetition - he has explicitly cited Gnawa music in the past - and the influence of Algerian Raï, and there is sometimes a devotional feel to the droning close-harmonies he creates with himself. The emphasis is not on lyrical or technical prowess, but simple, evolving rhythmical blocks. On 3's 'Maladresse' his lines land like metal riffs or, in its climactic section, like dancehall toasting. 'Lelele's refrain, coupled with a repeated snatch of what sounds like an oud, make for something that feels timelessly folky despite the reggaeton beat.
Equally, Momo Spazz, a fan of electronic music and French Touch at the outset, draws on his own origins (in Algeria and Egypt) to season the tracks with North African instrumentation. But 3 also opens up new directions for the duo - ghetto house on, er, 'Ghetto House', drill on 'Pop!', the grandiosity of 'P€sos' with its cascading John Carpenter arpeggios, and the beatless rush of closer '2020'. Spazz is never over-fussy, with tracks like opener 'Machakil' almost revelling in their lack of clutter (although most TripleGo usually reveal subtle new details after repeat listens). Everything is in the service of establishing a mood and a flow; 'Ghetto House' takes some of the style's signatures and redeploys them within TripleGo's own atmospheric idiom.
Lyrically too, TripleGo exist in their own, self-contained universe - frequently the theme seems to be solitude, fighting one's corner, whether it's in business or relationships. The language is often hard, defensive, but also admits to inner turmoil, doubt and vulnerability - 'it's you I needed, nothing was going right' Sanguee laments on 'Lelele'. 'Le language est codé' ('the language is coded') is a line that appears on more than one TripleGo track, suggesting that there's more going on behind the protective carapace formed by the words. Sanguee mixes languages, sometimes switching into Spanish, but always sounds most wistful, almost appeased, when he sings in Arabic. That goes for parts of 'Machakil', despite the title meaning 'problems' (in French he also sings 'heureusement qu'on a la fois en Dieu' - 'luckily we have our faith in God') and the entirety of blissful closer '2020'. There's a real flood of warmth here that contrasts with, and even contradicts, the coldness and darkness that can prevail in TripleGo's music. But in a way that warmth is almost always there, even if sometimes it's expressed as a barely perceptible flourish, a flickering figure that perhaps represents both the tug of spirituality and a nostalgia for places that the pair are both intimately connected with but also at a geographical and cultural remove from. I'd be willing to concede that my love of TripleGo might, in some ways, amount to a form of Orientalism, but the yearning they are capable of evoking feels like something intrinsically and powerfully human. As Momo Spazz put it in a 2018 interview, 'the sincerity and emotion that we put into our music are universal values more than anything else… we aim towards a universal music.'

Raphael Ragucci (born 4 June 1984), known professionally as RAF Camora, is an Austrian rapper.
Raphael Ragucci was born in Vevey, Switzerland, to an Austrian father from Voralberg and an Italian mother from Naples. Ragucci settled in Vienna, Austria in 1997 and grew up in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus.
Known initially as RAF Camora, he founded a hip hop crew with the Polish Rapatoi. At 17, he was in the French Connection crew and soon later in French-speaking Assaut Mystik. He founded with rapper Joshi Mizu the band Balkan Express. Family Bizz was a debut joint album with both Assaut Mystik and Balkan Express.