Portland duo Seffarine will debut its new album at Beaverton's Patricia Reser Center for the Arts on Friday, Oct. 16.

The multimedia concert, "Abaraz," blends live music, film and stories from the edge of Morocco's Sahara Desert. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $40 to $50 through the Reser's website.

"Abaraz" translates to "Gateway to the Sahara." The album grew out of a residency the band spent in Mhamid El Ghizlane, an oasis town at Morocco's southern edge where climate change is reshaping the landscape. The music traces pathways connecting Southern Morocco, West Africa, Andalusia and flamenco, OPB reported on Monday, Oct. 12.

Seffarine founders Nat Hulskamp and Lamiae Naki built the project around the musicians they met in Mhamid El Ghizlane. The Friday concert will feature guest artists from Morocco, Spain, Tunisia and New York City. It will also include video footage filmed in the Moroccan Sahara by Spanish filmmakers Pablo Macias and Soledad Villalba.

In a Nov. 2, 2023, interview with OPB's Think Out Loud, Naki described traveling south through Morocco's Draa River valley to reach the residency site. "As you travel south, you see the oases turning yellow, there are these big washes of yellow of basically the dying oases and it's heartbreaking when you first see it," she said.

Naki, a singer born in the ancient city of Fez, and Hulskamp, an Indonesian-American musician who came to Morocco to study the oud, married in 2009 and moved to Portland. They named their band after the Seffarine, a metalworking square in the Fez medina dating to the 9th century. Naki's family is well known in the square as master metalworkers continuing the tradition. The square is famous for the complex rhythms of its blacksmiths' hammers.

Their debut album, "De Fez a Jerez," placed in the Transglobal World Music Charts top 20 world music releases. Bass Player Magazine called Seffarine a "gorgeous intersection of Spanish flamenco, Arabic and Andalusian music, Persian classical, and jazz."

The "Abaraz" concert was commissioned by the PRAx Center for the Performing Arts at Oregon State University (OSU). It is supported by grants from the Oregon Community Foundation and the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation.

The Reser event listing notes Seffarine is returning to the Beaverton venue. Tickets and show details are available at thereser.org.