Our Daily Bread 437: Khalab & M’ Berra Ensemble ‘M’ Berra’
April 13, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Khalab & M’ Berra Ensemble ‘M’ Berra’
(Real World Records) 23rd April 2021
Treating the hypnotizing and often mystical voices and music of the Tuareg with a less intrusive style of congruous trance, loops, re-contextualized captured moments and sophisticated synthesized effects, the Italian polymath (producer, DJ, author, broadcaster on Italy’s national radio station Rai Radioz) Raffaele Costantino, aka Khalab, approaches his collaboration with musicians from the M’ Berra Refugee Camp with a great sensitivity and respect.
On Khalab’s latest African partnership, this time with Arab and Tuareg members of the sprawling tented refuge, he draws attention to yet another sorry tale of forced dispossession; highlighting the plight and limbo status of the 60,000 Malian refugees stuck since 2012 over the border in neighboring Mauritania. In the ongoing, but only the most recent wave of fighting in Mali, many people have abandoned their homes in the desert bordered regions of the country, many caught up in the Tuareg’s near seventy-year fight for an autonomous state within the north-eastern reaches of Mali: known as the Azawad.
A review like this can’t hope to do the subject matter of this struggle justice or devote the space to all the atrocities and convoluted history, but in brief the Tuareg’s heritage is often opaque, with even the name argued over by etymologists: There are many in the community that would rather the term disappeared, preferring instead to use ‘Kel Tamashek’. A loose confederacy in one way of atavistic tribes, with a lineage to the Berber, who can be found throughout north and western Africa, the Tuareg have lived in Mali for a considerable time: centuries. In the last decade their fight against the Mali government over rights, representation and self-determination was hijacked by a boosted insurgency of international Islamic militants affiliated to ISIL. This ill-fated campaign nevertheless gained a lot of ground in its early stages, including the legendary ancient hub of learning and trade, Timbuktu; overwhelming the Mali government forces, who were forced to seek help from former colonial masters France. This intervention was semi-successful in stopping the momentum, and managed to gain much of the ground lost: however unstable that remains. It also didn’t help the cause when those Islamist forces more or less turned on the Tuareg Liberation groups.
Switching to terrorist guerilla tactics (including bombings), but still a major force to be reckoned with, the Islamist fighters have since spread mayhem to Mali’s neighbours in the region. The situation is made worse by an internal crisis in government in Mali (a coup last year brought in a still going, but unstable, interim government that is supposed to step down when elections can be held).
In this tumult of insecurity, is it any wonder Malians have fled?
Being a musician in this volatile environment has proved especially dangerous. Just last month on the blog we featured the Malian artist Anansy Cissé and his new album Anoura, which was put back by a culmination of problems that included a kidnapping and beating on the way to play at a festival in the country. It’s a common, shared experience of nearly everyone you speak to from the music community in Mali, who are trying desperately to eke out a living: many forced to abandon their homes for sanctuary in less dangerous parts of Africa, even the world.
Camped out in the Mauritania land of the lyrical griot storyteller, the many known and also fairly obscure musicians and singers that feature on this project are examples of this forced exodus. Featuring members of the Tamasheq speaking Tartit ensemble alongside others from the Arab and Tuareg communities, stories and harsh realities are voiced on an attuned album of desert song otherworldliness, the dreamy and rustic, earthy. Khalab having worked with an eclectic array of musical partners over the years, including the Malian percussionist maestro Baba Sissoko, takes his collaboration very seriously indeed; taking, we’re told, reverential ‘guidance’ from Tuareg ethnologist Barbara Fiore.
An entwined production of Tuareg roots and subtle (for the most part) electronica, Khalab takes the essence, sometimes just strands or excerpts of the source material and adds a sense of both Afro-Futurism and the cosmically trance-y. In similar sonic territory to Kutiman, Invisible System, Ammar 808 (at his most sub-bass frequency vibrating best) and even last year’s Vodou Alé treatment by Belgian electronic duo The Ångströmers of the Chouk Bwa troupe’s Haiti traditions, this vivid transformation sometimes offers the most translucent of electronic pulses, reverberations and washes to a stringy, spindled, trinket ringing and tinkering cattle trail wandering of and both the spiritual and aching messages of the Tuareg.
Some tracks seem to be just a gauzy atmospheric soundtrack memory of the nomadic life, whilst other performances are beefed-up with slow but punchy drum breaks. Polygon Kosmische synth shapes appear with rhythmic patter Techno on the looped buoyant motion (with a touch of Hailu Mergia keyboards) ‘Curfew’, and there’s a soulful House Music club groove that sits beneath a Modou Moctar like blues mirage on the festival sampled ‘Reste A L’Ombre’. Talking of Moctar, you can hear many similar echoes of the desert rock ‘n’ roll, blues vibe of groups like Tinariwen and Tamikrest; which is unsurprising as the members of Tartit who appear on this record share a similar heritage, roamed the same Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao trails.
Khalab knows when to let his partners breath, and even perform more or less without any additional synthesized effects or production; leaving the final say to a most beautiful hypnotizing, wandering desert yearned outro from the camp’s gifted primal blues players. Despite the crisis this project was born out of, Khalab and M’Berra Ensemble prove a transportive combination of imaginative, emotive and authentic Tuareg music and contemporary electronic sonic techniques. The music of displacement and anguish has seldom sounded so spellbinding and cosmic.
Of Interest…
Tamikrest ‘Tidal’
Kel Assouf ‘Black Tenere’
Invisible System ‘Dance To The Full Moon’
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Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 370: Tamikrest ‘Tamotaït’
March 10, 2020
LP REVIEW
Words: Dominic Valvona
Images: Shida Masataka
Tamikrest ‘Tamotaït’
(Glitterbeat Records) LP/27th March 2020
It’s been well over seven years since Mali was last thrust into the world’s media spotlight; the Nomadic Tuareg’s, or as they would rather be called, the Kel Tamasheq, age-old cause to gain control of an autonomous region in the country’s northwest border was abruptly hijacked by a less than sympathetic branch of al-Qaeda. Declaring an independent state, known as the Azawad, in 2012 the Kel Tamasheq were soon compromised by their far more radical destructive partners: their ambitions reaching far further with an insurgency that threatened to destabilize the entire country. In their wake these extremists reduced many historical and revered sites to dust, and imposed the harshest forms of Islamist rule wherever they went: much to the distress of the Kel Tamasheq.
Though this initial insurgency was more or less all-over within a year, the Mali government was forced to seek military assistance from the former colonial overlords, France, who stymied but never quelled the insurgency and uprising. They did however restore some stability to the west of the country and centers of government. In the last few years Islamist terrorist campaigns run alongside ever bigger and more terrifying sporadic and haphazard attacks. Government advice in the UK describes these as indiscriminate, going on to advise avoiding ‘…all large gatherings, including music festivals, sporting events and any public marches or demonstrations. The Festival au Désert in Timbuktu was cancelled in January 2017 and has not taken place since due to security concerns. Festivals in other parts of the country, such as the Festival sur le Niger in Segou, are also vulnerable to attack. There may be a heightened risk of attack during election periods’.
It’s a multifaceted conflict with many dimensions, and has subsequently spread from Mali to the neighbouring countries of Burkina Faso and Niger. This is all despite the presence of 4,500 French troops in the Sahel region (a colossal area between the Sahara, to the north, and the Sudanian Savanna, to the south) and a further 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping force.
The spiritually restless Kel Tamasheq population, trapped between a hostile government, armed militias loyal to al-Qaeda and the encroaching threat posed by global corporations eager to commodify their desert home, remain stuck in the middle.
Still without a homeland, though liberated from their draconian partners, they’re once again left, as wanderers in their own lands, the unofficial guardians and custodians of the Saharan wilderness. For now only a dream, best realized and protested through music, the rock’ n ’roll Bedouins Tamikrest emerge from the barren landscape with a message of “power and resistance and hope”. Exiled from the southwestern Saharan crossroad town of Kidal, home but also the birthplace of this entrancing desert rock band, the Tamikrest troupe lives between the bordering regions, Algeria and also Paris. They paid homage to that strategically and spiritually important cultural trading town on their last album, back in 2017; an album that exuded both the sadness and suffering of the dispossessed people who cling to the Saharan hub that is Kidal, a town which has seen its fair share of fighting. Fought over, conquered and reconquered over time, it remains a symbolic home: This is after all the town that nurtured them and where it all began.
Supposedly back with the most powerful statement since the group’s 2013 Chatma album, the message of Tamikrest’s fifth studio album is once again one of hope and reflection: a message that is literally reflected in the translation of the album’s Tamotaït title. Not that you’d know it from the poetically earthy longing vocals, but songs like the opening mirage-y gritty blues boogie ‘Awnafin’ are powered by a message of ‘defiance’, whilst the group’s percussionist and singer Aghaly Ag Mohamedine declares a message of a “revolution in the Tamasheq culture”, when discussing the sirocco Future Days (at its most heavenly and liquid) buoyed narrated ‘As Sastnan Hidjan’. For something so revolutionary in rhetoric, and born out of such a tragic upheaval, the latest album is mostly an articulately electrified soulful affair that lingers and resonates between the sand dunes and the cosmic. Despite some rough and fuzzed guitar and a rocking beat, Tamikrest articulate a sighed, almost hushed form of gospel blues; especially spiritually diaphanous and enriched when a chorus of sweeter male and female vocalists weigh in, as they do on the down-and-sandy slide guitar and drum tabbing yearning ‘Amidinin Tad Adouniya’, and with the gossamer Balearics camel-motion ‘Amzagh’ – which sways close the backing music of the band’s label mate, the Saharan siren Aziza Brahim.
Arguably always open to embracing sounds and music from outside Mali, Tamikrest find an affinity with the perfumed alluring coos and gauzy longing of the Moroccan singer/actress Hindi Zahra. Connected not just geographically but through the group’s transcendent guitarist Paul Salvagnac, who played in Zahra’s band for several years, the acclaimed siren – known for singing in both English and the atavistic Berber languages – casts a suitable spell on the album track ‘Timtarin’. So congruous and at ease with the setup, apparently she recorded her vocals without any rehearsal, on the first take. Her turn on this atonal dream sends the band on a wind across the Sahara towards Persia.
Tamikrest also find kinship with the traditional music of Japan. Whilst on tour in the Far East, Ag Mohamedine was drawn to the spindly threaded and quivered sounds of the three-stringed, plectrum strummed ‘shamisen’ and five-string ‘tonkori’: an odd looking instrument said to have been shaped to resemble a woman’s body, the strings are openly strummed with one hand, whilst the other hand plucks out individual strings. Guesting on the album’s closer, ‘Tabsit’, Atsushi Sakta and Oki Kano lend an Oriental resonance to the group’s desert shimmered guitar tones in a union between two very different worlds. It’s another congruous fit, one that transcends both.
Remaining true to the sound that has so defined them, Tamikrest have also continued to expand sonically across their quintet of albums. Roots music taken on a voyage of discovery to a myriad of compass points, Tamotaït once more transforms the lingered traces of desert blues and rock’ n ’roll to produce a richly woven tapestry of fired-up protestation and hope.
Related posts from the Archives:
Tamikrest ‘Chatma’
Tamikrest ‘Kidal’
Terakaft ‘Alone’
Glitterbeat 5th Anniversary Special
Support the Monolith Cocktail via Ko-Fi
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 300: Kel Assouf ‘Black Tenere’
February 5, 2019
Album Review: Dominic Valvona
Kel Assouf ‘Black Tenere’
(Glitterbeat Records) 15th February 2019
Mirroring the borderless Nomadic freewheeling of the Berber ancestral Tuareg people, a loosely atavistic-connected confederacy (to put it into any kind of meaningful context) of diverse tribes that have traditionally roamed Sub-Saharan Africa since time immemorial, Kel Assouf channels a wealth of musical influences both historically and geographically into an electrified reworking of (as vague and over-used a term as it is) desert rock.
Headed by charismatic Gibson Flying V slinger front man Anana Ag Haroun, who’s own lineage takes in both the landlocked behemoth Niger and bordering Nigeria, the highly propulsive, cyclonic spiraling trio propel that heritage into the 21st century; thanks in many ways to the futuristic cosmic electronic and bass frequency production of the band’s rising innovative keyboardist/producer Sofyann Ben Youssef – a name that should be familiar to regular readers as the dynamic force behind the multimedia musical Pan-Maghreb Ammar 808 project (one of our albums of 2018) and member of the electric jolted Algerian borderlands Bargou 08.
Informed, if not driven, lyrically by Haroun’s Tuareg roots, the Black Tenere album wastes no time in drawing the listener’s attention to the violent struggles endured by the Bedouin in their fight for autonomy and survival. A diverse society of various people, grouped together in an age that demands definition and demarcation, even the term ‘Tuareg’ is highly contested: arguably brought into the lexicon through the language of European Colonialism, though etymology traces the term back further to multiple sources. Haroun would prefer we used the original ‘Kel Tamashek’. The elliptic soft lunging rhythmic desert canter opening ‘Fransa’ poetically, in earthy earnestness, encapsulates these struggles and travails:
“The war during the French colonization was won
by the swords, shields and spears of our ancestors.
How do you want potential allies to provide you with modern cannons and
missiles?
Do you see your sisters every day climbing the border mountains (Tassili),
clandestinely, exhausted, on their knees with bruised feet.”
Much is made of the past and ancestral rights, but the plight of the Kel Tamashek is ongoing. For now an uneasy truce exists between the various city-state governments and their rural and desert populations, especially in Mali, the Kel Tamashek uprisings that first kick-started a decades long fight for an autonomous state, known as the Azawad, in the north eastern desert regions of the Mali, began in the late 1960s; continuing throughout until more recent times when they made worldwide headlines as their struggle was hijacked spectacularly by Islamist insurgents – worryingly gaining ground as a Trojan Horse within their nomadic allies fight for independence; the destructive Islamist fascists horrified many when they took the ancient seat of West African learning and trade, Timbuktu, and preceded to demolish it like barbarians. Former Colonial masters France were forced to intervene, finally halting the insurgents progress before forcing all groups involved back to where they started, and many across the border. Far from ideal, the Islamist usurpers dissipated to a degree but then switched to sporadic acts of terrorism, carrying out smaller militia attacks in Mali’s capital.
In the bordering Niger, the Kel Tamashek have remained more obscure as they fight to maintain their lands and way of life, which is being eroded by climate-change and over-desertification (when relatively dry land becomes increasingly arid, losing bodies of water, vegetation and the wildlife with it).
Sonically given a dynamic but equally yearning, even romantic (especially on the gospel organ and mulling guitar accompanied ethereal-scenic paean to a virtual oasis, ‘Taddout’), boost to the nomadic heritage, they have a certain synthesized edge and twist missing from fellow desert rock groups such as Tinariwen (a major influence on Kel Assouf) and Tamikrest. Those familiar circling trance-y guitar riffs and camel-ride motions of the desert rock genre remain, yet the influence of heavy-hitters such as Hendrix, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin blend with acid psychedelic rock and more languid stoner rock, ‘astral ambience’ (their words not mine) and even club beats, take it in new directions. Add to this bubbling stew Haroun’s absorption of the cross-pollinating international music of his hometown – for the last eleven years – of Brussels, and the inclusion of local Belgium jazz drummer Oliver Penu adding off-kilter swerve, bounce, shimmery cymbal crescendos and limber, and you have a truly exciting global sound that evokes tribal medicine man dances, ambient traverses, rockier elements of Funkadelic, the Muscle Shoals studio, Black Merde, Terakaft and labelmates Dirtmusic: Sonorous beats and various desert settings from Africa, Mid Western America and the Australian Outback are evoked at any one time in this blazing mix.
A stunning rock odyssey that draws its multiple sources together in both defiance and in the spirit of communication – the Kel Tamashek plight, as guardian-custodians of the desert, translated via the poetic heartfelt earthy soulful lyrics of Haroun – Black Tenere stretches the roots of nomadic rock and blues to reflect ever-expanding musical horizons as the global community grows ever-smaller and music becomes more fluid and spreads with ease. Kel Assouf are on another plane entirely; propelling rock music into the future.
Words: Dominic Valvona
Our Daily Bread 245: Vieux Farka Touré ‘Samba’
May 4, 2017
ALBUM REVIEW
Words: Dominic Valvona
Vieux Farka Touré ‘Samba’
Six Degrees Records, 12th May 2017
Lucky enough to have witnessed firsthand the erudite guitar majestic skills of one of Mali’s leading artists last year, as part of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections Festival line-up, I still find myself decidedly jealous of the intimate small audience that were invited to Vieux Farka Touré’s Woodstock Session later that same year in October. A studio recording with a difference, played out and developed live in front of just fifty lucky people in Saugerties, N.Y., Touré’s latest blurs the boundaries between performance and the processes of making an album.
Ever the consummate maestro and backed by an equally accomplished band of musicians, there was some initial apprehension on Touré’s on allowing an audience in to the studio. Though we have the finished product, free of any mistakes, restarts and disagreements, it seems this audience far from unnerving the band, egged it on, with the results sounding effortless and natural. There were overdubs of course and one of the songs was recorded back home in Mali – the calabash driven Ni Negarba. But far from cutting corners or relying on the back catalogue, Touré has fashioned an entirely new songbook of vocal and instrumental material for Samba. Some of which amorphously touches upon unfamiliar influences, including reggae on the unapologetically roots-y swaying Ouaga.
Still a commanding presence, though he makes it look easy and so serene, emanating almost uninterrupted waves of phaser-effect guitar permutations and nuanced fretboard noodling, Touré continues to languidly merge his own lyrical form of worship and goodwill with the blues, rock and R&B. Often alluded to as some kind of Saharan Hendrix, his heritage and reputation is actually linked to the more urbane capital of Bamako in the southwest of Mali, which has its very own amalgamation of styles and unique history. Still, those desert blues styles, synonymous with the Tuareg especially, do crossover and can be detected in Touré’s music.
Touré is as the Songhai title of his new album Samba translates, the second son of the late Ali Farka Touré, a doyen of the Mali music scene himself who left an indelible mark. If we expand on the title’s meaning, “Samba” is a byword for “one who never breaks”, “who never runs from threats, who is not afraid”. It is even said that those adorned with the name are “blessed with good luck.” Inspired by his ancestry, imbued with three generations, Touré’s album is suffused with special tributes to his family. In the mode of a praise song, the spindly weaved heartfelt Mariam pays homage to the last born of the family, his youngest sister, but is also by extension a paean to both the women of the Peule and “all sisters of the world”. Samba Si Kari, based on a song Touré’s grandfather used to sing to him as a child, pays a reflective impassioned tribute to his parents. Expanding the goodwill further, to those outside the ancestral line, he’s also penned, what sounds like, a hoof-cantering percussive camel ride with celestial desert sky illuminations keyboard – courtesy of old pal Idan Raichel –, sweet dedication to his manager and friend Eric Herman’s daughter Maya. The press release offers a further subtext to this particular song, one of multifaith cohesion; Touré a Muslim and Herman a Jew, spreading a message of tolerance.
Outside the family sphere, Touré confronts both Mali’s recent Jihadist takeover – only stopped and defeated by the intervention of the country’s former colonial masters, France – on the radiantly rippling, chorus of voices, funky blues number Homafu Wawa, and environmental issues on the dexterously nimble-fingered bluesy rock, Nature.
The almost never-ending efflux, the constant lapping waves of textures that Touré plays, which offer a cyclonic bed on which to add the deftest licks, have never sounded so sagacious and free flowing. This ain’t no Saharan Hendrix at work, this is something else entirely, and better for it. This is the devotional, earthy soul of Mali, channeled through a six-string electric guitar.
Originally scheduled for 2015, the Woodstock Session would have still been a revelatory showcase and classic, but with that extra year, with the travails of being in constant demand on the road and the rapid turn of events Samba in 2017 makes even more sense, resonating with a message of respect, peace and tolerance.
Our Daily Bread 237: Tamikrest ‘Kidal’
February 21, 2017
ALBUM REVIEW
Words: Dominic Valvona
Tamikrest ‘Kidal’
Released by Glitterbeat Records, 1 7th March 2017
It’s been five years since Mali was last thrust into the world’s media spotlight; the Nomadic Tuareg’s age-old cause to gain control of an autonomous region in the country’s northwest border was abruptly hijacked by a less than sympathetic, franchise of Al-Qaeda. Declaring an independent state, known as the Azawad, in 2012, the Tuaregs were soon compromised by their miscreant partners; their ambitions reaching far further with an insurgency that threatened to destabilize the entire country. In their wake these extremists reduced many historical and revered sites to dust, and imposed the harshest forms of Islamist rule wherever they went: much to the distress of the Tuaregs.
Though it was more or less all-over within a year, the Mali government was forced to seek military assistance from the former colonial overlords, France, who rapidly quashed the insurgency and uprising, restoring, a sort of, peace to the region. An uneasy calm continues, albeit with a haphazard terrorist campaign (more recently in 2015, with an attack on a hotel in the Mali capital, Bamako) replacing the Islamists previous emboldened charge across the country, and a spiritually restless Tuareg population, trapped between a hostile government and the encroaching threat posed by global corporations eager to commodify their desert home.
Still without a homeland, though liberated from their draconian partners, the Tuareg are once again left, as wanderers in their own lands, the unofficial guardians and custodians of the Saharan wilderness. For now only a dream, best realized and protested through music, the rock’n’roll Bedouins Tamikrest emerge once more from the barren landscape with a message of “power and resistance”, on their fourth, equally entrancing, album Kidal. Paying homage to the strategically and spiritually important cultural trading town of the title, the highly-acclaimed (and rightly so) Tamikrest exude both the sadness and suffering of the dispossessed people who cling to the southwestern Saharan hub that is Kidal: a town which has seen its fair share of fighting, fought over, conquered and reconquered over time, it remains a symbolic home to the Tuareg. This is after all the town that nurtured them and where it all began.
Preserving an increasingly endangered ancestral culture and language, Tamikrest’s cause cannot be separated from their music. Yet, rather than protest with bombast or angry rhetoric, they articulate their woes with a poetic, lyrically sauntering cadence. Oasmane Ag Mosa’s earthy lead vocals resonate deeply, even if his timbre maintains a stoic dignified pitch. Backed by Aghaly Ag Mohamedine and Cheick Ag Tiglia on backing and duets, a lulling sweetness transcends, which on occasions adds a certain romanticism to the impassioned struggle. Swaying effortlessly between the meandering and up-tempo, the accentuated dynamics of Mosa and Paul Salvagnac’s entwined, untethered and contoured guitar work, Mohamedine’s “gatherer” Djembe rope-tuned goblet drumming, Nicolas Grupp’s askew backbeats and Tiglia’s smooth, free-roaming bass lines transport the listener to the mystical topography of the desert. Tamikrest’s mirage-style emerges into focus on the opening shimmering camel-procession Mawarnih Tartit, before traversing the vast plains with a drifting echo of Afro funk on Wainan Adobat. But perhaps one of the group’s most off-kilter, dizzying, entranced spells yet is the twilight hour twanged, giddy War Toyed, which has an almost dislocated rhythm. And definitely among their most reflective explorations, Atwitas features Salvagnac’s sublime, mournful and pining slide-guitar work; redolent of Ry Cooder’s own parallel American desert blues evocations.
Written in the desert but recorded in the urban capital of Bamako, Kidal was produced by Mark Mulholland (his last production, the Tony Allen and Haiti ensemble collaboration, AHEO, made our top albums of 2016 features), and mixed by Grammy award winner David Odlum. As a result, the album subtly embraces a wider musical palette, with hints of country and folk on the haunting Tanaka, and, what sounds at times like a strange Malian XTC on the plaintive cry for freedom War Tila Eridaran. And so it has already been noted that western artists, such as Hendrix and even Pink Floyd have had an influence on many African bands. A mutual exchange of course, the home of blues taking a little something back from the West. There’s still no mistaking that inherent African desert sound and passion, even if Kidal reaches out beyond the barren reaches of Mali’s borders for an ever expansive and diversified sound.
Assiduous, confident and articulate, the musicianship shows not so much a progression as a balance between the meditative and rock’n’roll spirit of the Tuareg musical resistance. Tamikrest are as brilliant as ever musically, and Kidal is, despite its plaintive and lamentable subject woes, a beacon of hope in an ever-darkening world of uncertainty.
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