La relève de la musique Touaregs #Tamikrest

Abdallah Ag Elhousseini- Ténéré (Acoustique)

Bombino - Mahegagh (What Shall I Do)

TERAKAFT – Alone (Ténéré)

‚Alone‘ was born out of a need to maintain sanity in times of broken dreams and lies. It might be their most rock oriented album to date but at the same time it is their most poetic. Five years ago with their album "Aratan N Azawad" and even the follow up "Kel Tamasheq", Terakaft was still full of hope, things had started to change. Today the soil that was supposed to blossom is burnt by selfishness and rivalry. 

„There are too many characters in the picture, too many chiefs and not enough people“, says Diara when asked about the political developments in the last years. He used to sing political songs back in the days in his rebel youth when he was still playing guitar with Tinariwen. Nowadays he is only watching with a new feeling growing inside him: “Ténéré”, which is the title he gave to this album, and which translates to: “Alone”. Back in the days when they were sitting in the dunes drinking tea with big hopes for the future, singing their songs into the night, his nephew Sanou was sitting next to him, still a young boy. Occasionally the uncle would hand his guitar to the nephew, so he could  play along with the others. Just before the international success story of Tinariwen started, Diara got stuck on his way to Bamako a missed flight and his place in Tinariwen was taken. Meanwhile Sanou had set up his own band Terakaft. Today Diara and Sanou are the backbone of Terakaft: the guardians of desert blues. Diara is the spirit of the band, as strong as a rock. Sanou – his nephew - is the heart of Terakaft. He brings the life to its spirit. Diara the elder, lays out heavy rhythms pulsing through his guitar. Sanou has become the natural heir to the sound of “assouf”, with his intense rock riffs and an up-lifting attitude towards life.

‚Alone‘ is the 5th album of Terakaft. It was produced by Justin Adams who is one of the musicians from Europe who has delved deep into Tuareg music in the last years. Adams is known as a musician and producer through his work with Robert Plant, Tinariwen and Juldeh Camara. He has geared up "The Caravan" to reach new shores and hit the dancefloors. In these troubled times, they have made an album together, that presents the deep Saharan rhythms as a vital contemporary heartbeat. Standing on the ruins of their peoples dreams they sing to their brothers and sisters about true friendship and tolerance.

Tafouk Tele

Imarhan "Assossamagh" from the upcoming self-titled album 'Imarhan' out on April 29th 2016 via City Slang on LP and CD.

Preorder it on Amazon: http://smarturl.it/ImarhanAmazon
or on iTunes: http://smarturl.it/ImarhaniTunes

Preorder on iTunes

Imarhan - Assossamagh

taken from: Tamikrest - Kidal
Order direct:
goo.gl/jpnbkM
Streaming, iTunes & Amazon:
idol.lnk.to/Kidal

All around Kidal, the Malian desert stretches in every direction. Endless horizons of rock and sand, barren and parched. This is the southwestern edge of the Sahara, the home of the Tuareg people, and the town of Kidal is one of their main cultural centres. Fought over, conquered and re-conquered, it remains the symbol of Tuareg defiance and hope, the spiritual home of a dispossessed people.

It is also the town in which Tamikrest first came together as a group, and on Kidal, Tamikrest’s fourth studio album, the band pays homage to this place that’s nurtured them and their people.

It’s a cry of suffering and the yell of rebellion. It’s power and resistance. This is pure Tuareg rock’n’roll.

“Kidal talks about dignity,” Ag Mossa says. “We consider the desert as an area of freedom to live in. But many people consider it as just a market to sell to multinational companies, and for me, that is a major threat to the survival of our nomadic people.”

The Tuareg have always been nomadic people, their lives in motion across the desert, sometimes taking with them only the bare essentials. But for one brief moment they possessed a home after the Tuaregs rose up in 2012 and declared the independent state of Azawad in the northeast of Mali. It lasted less than a year, as first al-Qaeda conduits swept in from the north, imposing Islamist rule, and then the French military arrived to liberate the area - once again leaving the Tuareg with little or no chance for self-determination. But the dream remains, still trapped between governments and the greed of global corporations.

“Kidal, the cradle of all these uprisings, continues to resist the many acts perpetrated by obscure hands against our people,” notes band associate Rhissa Ag Mohamed. “This album evokes all the suffering and manipulation of our populations caught in pincers on all sides.”
The songs on Kidal evoke a long history. And for all the electricity, as Ag Mossa observes, “It’s very traditional if you go deeply into what I’m playing.”

Everything here is focused. Everything burns. Ag Mossa punctuates his lyrics with inspired bolts of guitar. Even an acoustic song like “Tanakra” maintains a luminous edge.

With Kidal, that blaze is roaring. Recorded in Bamako, Mali in the summer of 2016, the album was produced by Mark Mulholland (Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra) and mixed by David Odlum, who received a Grammy for his work with Tinariwen. It’s an album that’s taken two years to make, Ag Mossa says, “because we share the same difficulties of our people.” And the songs here mirror their joys, their pain and their unwillingness to accept things as they are.

There’s a raw beauty in Tamikrest’s rock’n’roll. It’s there in the driving, insistent groove that powers the songs, the lean, snaking bass lines and the guitars that twine and twist around the melodies, and the utterly natural musical blending of Sahel Africa, the Maghreb, and the West – a reflection of influences as diverse as Pink Floyd, Rachid Taha, and flamenco. Yet the Sahara, and the people who live there, is always firmly at its heart.

“This music was founded on a very precise cause, the Tuareg cause,” Ag Mossa told journalist Andy Morgan in 2013. They might be threatened on all sides, but they won’t give up, and this album celebrates who the Tuareg are, the Kel Tamasheq (“those who speak Tamasheq”), the keepers of an ancient and endangered cultural voice.

Tamikrest’s new album is the music of defiance, of hope. It’s rock’n’roll from the Sahara, the sound of the Tuareg dream, a dream that will be renewed again, in their ancestral town: Kidal.

Kidal

Wainan Adobat

Tamikrest - Wainan Adobat

Badi Lalla - Idi Yani Douhna (feat Imzad)

Terakaft - Aratan N Azawad

Aima Ymaima - Terakaft

Tamikrest - Dihad Tedoun Itran (album "Toumastin", 2011, "Glitterhouse Records")

The Tuareg people are predominently nomadic people of the sahara desert, mostly in the Northern reaches of Mali near Timbuktu and Kidal. The Tuareg are often referred to as "Blue Men of the desert " - because their robes are dyed indigo blue. They live in small tribes with between 30 and 100 family members and keep camels, goats, cattle and chicken which graze the land. 

They are a proud race of people, famous for their fighting abilities and artwork, now staring urbanisation and resettlement in the face. 

The sword is a Tuareg's most valued possession. Many are passed from generation to generation and said to be protected by the victories of its past owners. 




Imarhan N'Tinezraf. Titre  Iliwityan Dagh Tinariwen - Tuareg music

Anana Kel Assouf, his guitar and mini portable guitar amp, playing tuareg rock with an amazing improvised band during a soirée guitare outside Niamey-Niger organized by Rissa Ag Wanaghli 6/04/2013 : Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni (Tinariwen), Afel Bocoum and his band, Atri N'Assouf, Nabil Baly Othmani and his band... and all 20 friends participating to "Le Chant des Dunes" event. Recorded by Arnaud Contreras.

Anana Kel Assouf, Tinariwen, Afel Bocoum and friends Soiree guitare Niger 3

Glitterbeat is committed to global sounds and artists that don’t necessarily rubber-stamp our pre-conceptions of what regional music sounds like.  We live in a world of ever increasing intersections and the global musical conversation does not operate according to straight, predictable, and easily delineated rules. It is a conversation that is being reinvented and revolutionized each day.

Tamikrest - Wainan Adobat

Glitterbeat Records

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