Cartagena have never sounded interested in “songs” as isolated objects. With Tissitania, they frame the album as a complete narrative world: chapters, characters, recurring symbols, and a handmade book designed to sit alongside the music. The band describe it, plainly, as “an audio fiction told in chapters”, beginning with a summoning and ending at an epilogue where the story’s moral lands hard.
“Tissitania is a true feminist narrative.”
Three members answered AFRICA.ROCKS directly, Chams Kouki (guitars), Yassine Alouini (story), and Saif Kechrid (drums), and they were specific about what they wanted this record to carry. “Tissitania is firstly a story about intolerance,” they write. “Yes, it is fiction, although we have some historical starting points and mythological inspirations.” They also insist on the lens they chose. “Secondly, it is a true feminist narrative,” they explain, and then define exactly what they mean by that: “the mother, the sage, the chief of army, and the smart leader” kind of feminism.
At the centre of the album is Ania, “the sacrificed innocence.” In Cartagena’s lore, Ania is born with albinism and becomes the target of fear, superstition, and communal violence. “Ania is born with albinism and is sacrificed by her fanatic, ignorant kin,” they write. “So the story is about acceptance of difference.” They chose the name with care. “In Tamazight, it can refer to states of being, places, virtues, and also ‘anima’. It can also stand for a lamb or sheep”, they explain. “So Ania is the innocence sacrificed by fanaticism, ignorance, and intolerance.”
Cartagena describe Tissitania as a sequence of scenes, each one advancing the plot or widening the world through flashbacks. “Summoning” opens inside “a lugubrious cave” where worshippers call an ancient entity, setting the sonic palette and introducing the band’s North African colours. “Astarte/Tanit” expands the lore through a rivalry that Cartagena place inside their own fictional framework, drawing from older cultural layers around Tanit, while also introducing Teryel, a figure the band reshape from Amazigh and Berber myth.
From “Akham n’Teryel” onwards, Ania becomes the thread that ties the chapters together, as she flees her village and meets Teryel in disguise. Then the record opens into four women presented as flashback figures, each linked through the same sacred stone carrying Teryel’s emblem. Cartagena describe Teryel as an “ancient myth” in Berber culture, often told as an ogress used to frighten misbehaving children, then reworked inside their own universe as “a matriarchal, ambiguous entity” seeking a successor “to rule the world in darkness.”
The band’s own outline is dense, cinematic, and intentionally specific, moving through Elysha and Dido, through Yemm, through Sophonisba, and into Dihya, “Al Kahina”, before returning to Ania and the ending: “Ania is now facing a hard decision. In the end, Ania refuses Teryel’s bargain and flees. She chooses clemency and dies. The story ends there.”
Cartagena are clear about what is researched, what is inherited, and what is invented on purpose. They cite shared Tunisian heritage, family memory, and an “almost imagined lore”, then point to real places that grounded their writing: “Shared Tunisian heritage and knowledge (even a Berber grandmother lullaby. The village ‘Ait Al Kaied’ exists for real in Algeria. We isolated the location with imaginary mountain boundaries. The story takes place around 1000 AD.” They also list sources and historical anchors, then underline the balance they aimed for: fiction that stays close enough to true events to carry weight. “Overall, it is fiction inspired by true historical events, like the battle of Dihya and the tragic story of Sophonisba. In our story, all the women involved are genetically descendants of Teryel’s lineage.”
When Cartagena talk about instrumentation, they talk like sound designers. The goal is not “ethnic flavour” pasted on top of symphonic metal. The goal is atmosphere, time, place. “The main instrument is tablaa (percussion instrument), tuned low to feel more raw and ancient, alongside the drums, to set up the soundscape and spacetime of the story.” From there, they describe an entire toolkit, each instrument chosen for texture and symbolism, and placed to establish the world before guitars and orchestra take centre stage. “We used zokra and mezewed (North African wind instruments) to create a dark, lugubrious world. Gambra (North African bass lute) adds an original touch. Duduk (Armenian double-reed woodwind) is used in every Cartagena track, koukai (wind instrument) for an ear piercing drone, and bansuri (Indian bamboo flute) and saz (long‑necked lute) recorded in a weird way to further build the soundscape.” They also explain the musical rule behind those choices. “When these ethnic instruments lead, they are mostly setting up the spacetime of the tracks.”
One of the defining elements of Tissitania is how the vocals function like character work. Cartagena describe Nesrine Mahbouli’s performance less as “singing lines” and more as interpreting roles inside the plot. “Nesrine did not just sing. She interpreted many roles. She was Dido, she was Al Kahina, she shifted between the narrator, the choir and Teryel (harsh voice for her hateful message).”
“The illustration brought the music to us.”
Because the record is layered, production is part of authorship. Cartagena speak openly about what it takes to hold everything together, especially when the band’s creative life overlaps with professional sound work. “The hardest part is managing work life balance and the graphic illustration. We waited three years for the perfect collaborator, then decided to do the illustration in house to keep it more original.”
The handmade book is not an accessory for Cartagena. It is part of the method. They describe their process as story first, worldbuilding first, then music, with the illustrations feeding back into the sound like a film score. “The story was written by Saif before composing the first riff. Worldbuilding comes before the musical writing. The illustration brought the music to us. What you hear in the tracks is what was described in the illustrations, exactly like film scoring.”.
Cartagena connect Tissitania directly to their earlier work on film, including the Tunisian short film True Story by director Amine Lakhnech. They describe that project as the starting point where they began testing ideas that later became central to Tissitania. “True Story was the first space to experiment with the capabilities of Nesrine’s voice. It was also a first encounter with an Amazigh witchery culture that did not feel cringe to us. You can hear the first attempt at switching Nesrine’s voice in the short movie’s medley.” They also say they composed music and handled sound design for another short film by Lakhnech, Castra, which they describe as completed and due for release.
“The summoning whispers are in Tamazight.”
Even at lyric level, the band treated language as part of atmosphere and access. Some elements remain in Tamazight by design, others moved into English to avoid stacking complexity on top of an already dense narrative. “The summoning whispers are in Tamazight. Dihya’s punchlines were intended to be in Tamazight, but we felt it was already deep enough so we ended up with English lyrics.”
For Cartagena, Tissitania is both a release and a starting line for what they want to build physically and live. They talk about promotion with a mix of humour and frustration, then return to practical goals: finding the right stages and producing a physical edition that meets their standards. “We are focusing on promotion. We are looking forward to finding decent live shows. We are still looking for a good printer to make a physical copy of Tissitania that meets our quality requirements.”
Tissitania reads, in the end, like a band choosing difficulty on purpose: building lore, building characters, building language, building a sonic spacetime that holds the whole thing together. If you listen the way they ask you to listen, chapter by chapter, it’s hard to miss the point they keep returning to. Intolerance always finds a victim. This time, Cartagena decided to give her a name.
Experience the full album now, streaming in its entirety on YouTube.
