🇲🇦“Sound Artisans” of Morocco, with Mehdi El Kindi of Les Bonnes Ondes and AMWAJ Festival
Eurowaves #38 Interview
Mehdi El Kindi is an audio professional and the founder of Les Bonnes Ondes, an independent podcast studio based in Casablanca. After more than a decade as a host and producer on Radio 2M, he shifted his focus to immersive sound documentaries and audio storytelling in 2020. He positions his studio as a team of “sound artisans” dedicated to giving a voice to marginalized narratives. He is deeply engaged in structuring the Moroccan audio ecosystem through training and co-organizes the AMWAJ podcast and radio festival.
You can connect with Mehdi on LinkedIn here.
What’s your podcast origin story?
My background is deeply rooted in traditional radio and music. I spent over a decade as a host and producer at Radio 2M, which taught me the foundational power of audio.
In 2020, driven by a desire to explore immersive, long-form storytelling, I founded Les Bonnes Ondes in Casablanca. This vision was truly cemented in 2021 when I created Rencontre en pays Bamanan, an audio journey to Mali exploring the roots of Gnaoua music. Sorting through the massive amount of raw audio material for that project reaffirmed my commitment to deep sound creation.
I also experienced the profound, therapeutic power of the medium when I recorded a piece for our Micro-confidences series about the 2003 Casablanca bombings. All of this shaped the DNA of Les Bonnes Ondes, not as a tech “start-up,” but as a studio of “sound artisans” dedicated, alongside other things, to giving the microphone to voices we aren’t used to hearing.
Share with us an overview of the Moroccan podcasting industry.
The Moroccan podcasting scene is transitioning from a marginal format to a central space for media expression. Moroccans naturally love to converse and debate, but the podcast format is allowing us to move past surface-level opinions into deep, emotional, and factual human stories.
There is a growing appetite for this alternative storytelling from independent creators, but also from NGOs and brands looking to touch new audiences (even reaching the Moroccan diaspora). The ecosystem is currently structuring itself. A big part of our work is dedicated to training this new wave of creators, to ensure we focus on rigorous journalism and finding our unique, local voices in a saturated global landscape.
How was the AMWAJ Festival born?
AMWAJ was born out of a simple conviction: sound brings people together and gives a voice to stories we no longer hear, or that are unheard.
The festival first materialized in December 2023 through a beautiful complicity and co-production between Les Bonnes Ondes, the Institut Français du Maroc who is the main organiser, and the Longueur d’Ondes festival based in Brest, France.
We wanted to create a dedicated space in Casablanca to celebrate audio craftsmanship and foster encounters between listeners and creators.
How does AMWAJ contribute to an international podcasting landscape?
AMWAJ acts as a Mediterranean and African bridge. By bringing together key audio professionals from Morocco, France, and beyond, we create a space for cross-border pollination. It allows for a multicultural dialogue where we tackle shared societal issues, like migration, identity, climate emergencies, and global conflicts, through multilingual projects. It’s also a platform to support emerging audio authors via networking, cultural exchange, and shared masterclasses.
What are some of the biggest takeaways from the last edition and what are your goals for this year?
Our second edition in December 2025 was incredibly moving. We explored heavy, complex societal themes like mental health, gender, the Middle East crises, and Amazigh identity. The biggest takeaways was seeing how receptive the public, especially the youth, is to immersive, sometimes challenging listening experiences, it was also seeing all the seeds from the first edition grow through more and more local production.
Amwaj is a biennale, but we’ll be represented this year in several festivals and events in France (mainly in Paris and Marseille) thanks to partnerships with independent institutions.
On a studio level, our goal this year is still to open up our infrastructure to the local creative ecosystem by offering our professional studio as a collaborative hub for training, audiovisual production, and thematic debates.
Share 2-3 recommendations of your favorite pieces featured in the festival.
Live Music & Talk with Ilona Dip: We recorded this live during the festival. It’s a “mirror game” where classical pianist Ilona Dip resurrects the forgotten scores of female classical composers who were erased from history, confronting them with their famous male contemporaries.
Entre nos mains (by Badr El Hammami): This was an incredible immersive sound installation at our last edition. Through suspended microphones, it broadcasted intimate stories, chants, and crossed memories, deeply exploring Amazigh identity.
Des bruits de soi: A very rare and sensitive audio creation that tackles mental health and bipolar disorders, breaking taboos through a brilliant narrative form.
Thank you, Mehdi!