Enta Omry is the most expansive and intimate work to date from experimental/drone project Maulén. Built around a single, uninterrupted 57-minute composition, the album is a radical reinterpretation of the iconic song by Oum Kulthum, shaped not in a studio, but across Morocco and the Sahara Desert—through travel, endurance, and deep listening.

Maulén is the brainchild of composer, musician, and visual artist Carlos Ibarra. Named after his grandmother, a member of the Mapuche people of Chile, Maulén translates to “a wet valley.” Since its inception, the project has sought out environments that leave a mark on the music—places where sound, space, and human presence cannot be separated.

The story of Enta Omry begins more than a decade ago, during a bus ride through the Anti-Atlas mountains of southern Morocco. “A young woman was sitting a couple of rows in front of me, listening to a song on her phone’s loudspeaker,” Ibarra recalls. “I was captivated by the music and thought to myself: If I were to play her vocals on guitar, it would sound like a metal guitar riff.”

The song was Enta Omry. When the bus reached the village of Tafraoute, Ibarra stayed for a week, listening to the track on repeat from the rooftop of a stone house while watching the pink mountains dissolve into sunset. “This place is special,” he says. “It has a spirit, like a magic aura. Here, time moves at a different pace.”

That experience lingered quietly for years. In 2021, Maulén was selected as artist-in-residence by the Västra Götaland region in Sweden, giving Ibarra the opportunity to finally develop the idea. Alongside Lea Alazam, Carlos Sepulveda, and Stefan Johansson, he retreated to a remote 19th-century mountain sanitarium in Dalsland to begin shaping the work. Eleven months later, with bassist Mikael Tuominen joining the group, Maulén became a fully realized band. “When I was asked to join, I could not believe my ears,” says Tuominen. “This was so insane I just had to be a part of it.”

The project eventually pulled the group back to Morocco—not to recreate the original song, but to live with it. Armed with a mobile recording setup and a clear vision, Maulén spent four weeks moving between Tafraoute, Essaouira, and the Sahara Desert, recording their interpretation of Enta Omry inside the environments that had inspired it. Along the way, they played with Gnawa masters, slept under open skies, and allowed daily life to bleed directly into the music.

“The vision was to capture the feeling of the places where the band recorded,” says producer and engineer Carlos Sepulveda. “The wind, the goats, the cats, the children running around the house.”

Sessions were shaped by extreme heat, sandstorms, physical exhaustion, and illness, often taking place early in the morning or late at night. Rather than treating these conditions as obstacles, Maulén embraced them as part of the work. “Maulén has always been an audio-visual project,” says Ibarra. “Any opportunity to enhance the experience had to be tried.”

Throughout the journey, filmmaker Johan Lundsten documented performances across Morocco, while Tomas Tuoma captured the broader process for a future documentary. The result is a work where sound, place, and image are inseparable—less a recording of music than a document of being there.

At its core, Enta Omry is not a cover, homage, or historical exercise. It is an act of translation—between cultures, geographies, and emotional states—guided by listening rather than ownership.
“In a time when evil forces try to divide us,” Ibarra reflects, “Maulén is about how things are connected.”
Enta Omry stands as a meditation on devotion, displacement, and shared human experience—where a song written decades ago can still open doors, carry people across borders, and transform strangers into collaborators.

LABEL CONTACT

Carl-Marcus Gidlöf
Head of the Snake
Icons Creating Evil Art
Råsundavägen 73, Solna
Sweden
cmg@icea.se