We jet through the Internet, we zap through the world. What do we discover? Our knowledge doesn't reach beyond the surface of our computer screens. Hamid Baroudi is a long-standing inspiration to us all to leave behind the world of computers and instead travel and engage with the world for ourselves. I have known Hamid since he left the group Dissidenten as their lead singer back in 19??. Back-stage interviews moved on to meetings at his record company and then to running into each other on the train from Kassel to Berlin, encounters which were followed by spontaneous telephone calls: 'Hey, what are you doing?' One recurrent line from these meetings has been the need to travel, explore, engage, discover. Travelling in Hamid´s case might start just around the corner, talking to the people in the corner shop. Or it might take him somewhere distant and new. Hamid is a tireless traveller who would have fitted easily into the 17th or 18th century world of discoverers. But Hamid belongs to the present. He has updated the traveller´s journal with DAT Recorder and video camera as he moves between worlds, between his Algerian motherland, Spain, and his life´s centre point, the small German town of Kassel. He meets musicians for projects in Egypt, works on remixes in Japan with his friend DJ Krush, visits Paris to check out the Rai scene there, and journeys with the nomadic Tuareg people of the Sahara. Wherever he is, he talks and listens to people, and records their stories and songs. Sure, Hamid is a popstar. If you take only that viewpoint, however, you will remain on the screen´s surface. Hamid is an entertainer in the African tradition of that concept, where a musician is being asked much more than just to idle away time. He is a mediator between geographies, generations, cultures and experiences. A song by Hamid about life in the Streets of Algier ('what is it called' from his 199? album 'City No Mad') will lift the veil from the Arab world more than any Reuters report about extremist killings. Flamenco guitars used in a Hamid Baroudi song will teach us more about the cultural and historical connections of North Africa and Europe than any Thomas Cook travel guide. Hamid, however, will not allow random accidents in his music. Even a simple 'groove' - one of his favorite terms - will always be set within a wider context, such as the connecting currents of European Techno and North African Trance music. There´ll be much laughter and cheerfulness when you´re sitting down with Hamid Baroudi for a chat and a cup of North African Nana tea. You´ll get a completely other side of him, however, when talk turns to new ideas, fresh information, and the search for visions of the future. His earnestness and enthusiasm is infectious. Everything his DAT recorder and video camera can absorb will later on turn into his foremost passion, music. With Hamid, the stale notion of world music' revives into an actual context, which reaches way beyond that tired marketing term. 'Record companies don´t have it easy with me,' says Hamid. 'Some would like to corner me in an ethno-niche. In their imagination that´s to do with acoustic, exotic instruments and an unplugged session as opposed to electronic music. That, really, is one of the clichés that Dissidenten and I tried to destroy us back in the1980s. Those taboos are long gone. Now is the time to cross-over, There are no fixed points anymore.' For Hamid this breaking up of patterns will never mean succumbi
