Rachid Baba Ahmed

Rachid Baba Ahmed was born into an aristocratic merchant family in Tlemcen. In the 1970s, he and his brother Fethi founded 'Editions Rachid & Fethi', building a state-of-the-art 24-track recording studio in Tlemcen that became the creative laboratory of the modern Raï explosion.

Rachid introduced electronic synthesizers, funky basslines, and brass arrangements to traditional acoustic Raï, producing the legendary cassette albums that propelled Cheb Khaled, Cheb Sahraoui, and Chaba Fadela to global stardom. Assassinated by religious extremists in Oran in February 1995, he died a heroic martyr of Algerian modern culture.