Currents 001Anwar Bougroug

I’ve been DJing quite a lot between Dubai, Berlin and Paris, while also spending more time figuring out what I want my own music and artistic world to sound and feel like.

I’ve also been diving deeper into myself and trying to understand why I do the things I do, the choices I’ve made, and how those choices have shaped the life around me. The more I understand myself, the clearer I become about what I want to communicate as an artist.

A lot of things have changed creatively as a result. I’ve even started designing differently for Bougroug, and the brand is going through a revamp behind the scenes that I’m really excited to share next year.

More broadly, I’m focused on building Anwar as a complete world, through DJing, production, visuals, fashion and performance, and those different parts of my creative life are starting to connect much more naturally.

I spend almost all of my listening time on SoundCloud. I’m constantly looking for artists who bring their migrant experiences, Global South references or the sounds of where they come from into a contemporary club context.

Growing up as a Moroccan immigrant kid in Norway shaped my music taste a lot. I was surrounded by so many different ethnicities and cultures, so I learned quite early to understand music from a global lens rather than through one specific scene or genre.

I also understood quite young that music is a shared language. You don’t need to come from the same country or speak the same language to connect through rhythm and sound. That’s what I find so exciting about music today: artists can take their own language, culture and references and build something completely new from them.

Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of darker, more hypnotic jersey club, sultry gqom, baile funk, percussion-heavy club music and Arab sounds. I still love 90s and 2000s hip-hop, R&B and pop too, especially when those references are reworked into something unexpected and contemporary.

I recorded it recently at home in Dubai, and I wanted it to feel close to what I would actually do on a dancefloor. I was thinking about community, connection and radical joy. What does it sound like when people from completely different places are having the best time together?

A lot of my favourite experiences as a DJ have come from playing to very diverse crowds, and I wanted the mix to reflect that feeling of different people connecting through the same rhythm.

I wanted to put my whole world into one cohesive story. There are Brazilian and baile references, guaracha and Latin club sounds, SWANA vocals and edits, percussion-heavy tracks and darker electronic moments throughout the mix. I approached the track selection through energy and movement rather than genre.

I never really understood why music from different parts of the world needed to exist in separate boxes. So for this mix, I wanted those musical languages to coexist naturally. A Sherine edit can sit next to something Brazilian, which can move into something darker and more electronic, and to me that makes complete sense. The thread connecting everything is movement, connection and collective joy.

A lot of percussion, bass, vocals and movement. It moves quickly between Arab references, Brazilian sounds, Latin club, guaracha, baile and harder electronic moments, but I wanted it to feel like one continuous world rather than a collection of genres. There are darker, more hypnotic moments and others that are playful, sexy and twerky. Ultimately, I want it to feel like the kind of dancefloor I love being part of: diverse, energetic, slightly chaotic and full of joy.

Most of the time I’m working in Ableton. I have some hardware as well, but a lot of the process begins in my head before it exists anywhere else.

Collaboration is also becoming a really important part of how I think about production. Making music doesn’t always mean sitting alone in front of Ableton. Sometimes it means travelling somewhere, meeting someone, exchanging ideas and seeing what happens when your musical language meets theirs.

You can learn so much by working alone, but working with the right person teaches you something completely different. You both bring your own taste, culture, technique and perspective into the room, and something can emerge that neither of you would have made alone.

Maybe a bit basic, but reverb. I love what reverb can do to a sound. Something very dry or ordinary can suddenly become huge, distant, strange or emotional. I also love that element of surprise. You can put reverb on something almost experimentally and suddenly hear a direction you hadn’t thought of before.

A track often starts with an emotion, a rhythm or an idea of what I want people to feel. Very quickly I start imagining the dancefloor and the different characters on it. Could I play this in one of my sets? Could another DJ play it? What kind of room does it belong in? What happens physically when people hear it? Sometimes I imagine the purpose of the track first and work backwards from there. The starting point can be anything: a drum pattern, a vocal, a sample, another artist who inspired me, or something I discovered while experimenting.

Ultimately, the reason I make music is connection. Growing up between cultures made me understand early that music can travel somewhere language sometimes can’t, and that possibility is what keeps pulling me back to it.