#takamba

[theparanoid]

Babsy Konate - Tounga

(2023 album)

Youtube Playlist | Bandcamp | Spotify

[Electronic, Songhai Music, Cloud Rap, Afrobeats, Dancehall, Downtempo, Synthpop, Takamba]

[piloncillos]

Takamba, Fatoumata Diawara.

[ptseti]

takamba

#sonrhai #sonrhai #touareg #niger #nigeria #algeria #tunisia #niger #Hausa #hausaa_fulanii #mairitanie #gao #libya #tombouctou #timbuktu #touareg #malien #malienne

[moondustairlines]

Fatoumata Diawara - Takamba

[soundgrammar]

Listen to: Hali Diallo by Tallawit Timbouctou

“Tallawit Timbouctou are champions of takamba, a hypnotic traditional music from Northern Mali. Built around the tehardent, the four-stringed lute and pre-cursor to the American banjo, takamba’s droning distortion comes from signature handmade mics and blown out amplifiers. Accompanied by percussion pounded out onto an overturned calabash with mind boggling time signatures, the combined effect is trance inducing.”

[krazygyal]

@yannloubertrand & Héloïse Divilly performing with @orianelacaille at Mainvilliers, France on May 13th, 2022 #974 #maloya #sega #concert #takamba (at Salle Des Fetes De Mainvilliers) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdkqBmIKXEP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[chrisanolan3]

Al Bilali Soudan recording a short film for NPRs Tiny Desk series. Albums on sale now 15% off https://forcedexposure.com/Artists/AL.BILALI.SOUDAN.html

[broadcastemotion]

So glad to have discovered the greatness that is Mdou Moctar! Amazingly unique psychedelic guitar jams from the country of Niger. This is his fifth album “Ilana: The Creator” on Sahel Sounds and the only one I currently own. I am very excited for the new album coming via @matadorrecords next month, “Afrique Victime”. Already have that pre-ordered for future delivery. 😊 . . . #mdoumoctar #mdoumouktar #mahamadousouleymane #psychrock #psychedelicrock #tuaregguitar #tuaregguitarmusic #desertblues #tishoumaren #assouf #tuaregrock #saharanrock #takamba #maliblues #berbermusic #nowspinning #vinyl #records #instavinyl #vinylporn #jhvinyl #iloveDiscogs #vinyligclub #recordcollection #recordsnotvinyls #vinylnotvinyls #vinylcommunity #vinyladdict #vinyljunkie #stoppluralizingvinyl https://www.instagram.com/p/CNk_-cmjB2m/?igshid=fdhejvtyy3nr

[13bis]

Parabolér, Takamba, Alain Peters, 1998.

cf. Alain Peters, le clochard celeste,  Arte Radio.

[quickdisco]

1156. Alain Péters - Vavanguèr (Takamba - 2008)

Compilation du grand artiste réunionnais qui nous fait pénétrer de plein pieds dans l’univers créole par des chansons envoûtantes.

Mangé Pour Le Cœur

Spotify

Discogs

[affairesasuivre]

Ilana : The Creator par Mdou Moctar

Mdou Moctar immediately stands out as one of the most innovative artists in contemporary Saharan music. His unconventional interpretations of Tuareg guitar and have pushed him to the forefront of a crowded scene. Back home, he's celebrated for his original compositions and verbose poetry, an original creator in a genre defined by cover bands. In the exterior, where Saharan rock has become one of the continents biggest musical exports, he's earned a name for himself with his guitar moves. Mdou shreds with a relentless and frenetic energy that puts his contemporaries to shame.

Mdou Moctar hails from a small village in central Niger in a remote region steeped in religious tradition. Growing up in an area where secular music was all but prohibited, he taught himself to play on a homemade guitar cobbled together out of wood. It was years before he found a “real” guitar and taught himself to play in secret. His immediately became a star amongst the village youth. In a surprising turn, his songs began to win over local religious leaders with their lyrics of respect, honor, and tradition. In 2008, Mdou traveled to Nigeria to record his debut album of spacey autotune, drum machine, and synthesizer. The album became a viral hit on the mp3 networks of West Africa, and was later released on the compilation “Music from Saharan Cellphones.” In 2013, he released “Afelan,” compiled from field recordings of his performances recorded in his village. Then he shifted gears, producing and starring the first Tuareg language film, a remake of Prince's Purple Rain (“Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red in it”). Finally, in 2017, he created a solo folk album, “Sousoume Tamachek,” a mellow blissed out recording evoking the calm desert soundscape. Without a band present, he played every instrument on the record. "I am a very curious person and I want to push Tuareg music far,” he says.

A long time coming, “Ilana” is Mdou's first true studio album with a live band. Recorded in Detroit at the tail end of a US tour by engineer Chris Koltay (the two met after bonding over ZZ Top's “Tres Hombres”), the band lived in the studio for a week, playing into the early hours. Mdou was accompanied by an all-star band: Ahmoudou Madassane's (Les Filles de Illighadad) lighting fast rhythm guitar, Aboubacar Mazawadje's machine gun drums, and Michael Coltun's structured low-end bass. The album was driven by lots of spontaneity – Mdou's preferred method of creation – jumping into action whenever inspiration struck. The resulting tracks were brought back to Niger to add final production: additional guitar solos, overdubs of traditional percussion, and a general ambiance of Agadez wedding vibes. The result is Mdou's most ambitious record to date. “Ilana” takes the tradition laid out by the founders into hyperdrive, pushing Tuareg guitar into an ever louder and blistering direction. In contrast to the polished style of the typical “world music” fare, Mdou trades in unrelenting grit and has no qualms about going full shred. From the spaghetti western licks of “Tarhatazed,” the raw wedding burner “Ilana,” to the atmospheric Julie Cruise-ish ballad "Tumastin,” Mdou's new album seems at home amongst some of the great seminal Western records. But Mdou disagrees with the classification. Mdou grew up listening to the Tuareg guitar greats, and it was only in the past few years on tour that he was introduced to the genre. "I don't know what rock is exactly, I have no idea,” he says, I only know how to play in my style." For Mdou, this style is to draw on both modern and traditional sources and combine elements into new forms. In “Ilana” Mdou reaches back into Tuareg folklore for inspiration, riffing on the hypnotic loops of takamba griots, or borrowing vocal patterns from polyphonic nomad songs, and combining them with his signature guitar. You can hear the effect in tracks like “Kamane Tarhanin,” where a call and response lyric lifts up over a traditional vocal hum before breaking into a wailing solo with tapping techniques learned from watching Youtube videos of Eddie Van Halen. There is an urgency in Mdou's music, and the fury of the tracks are matched by their poignant messages. The title track “Ilana” is a commentary on uranium exploitation by France in Niger: “Our benefits are only dust / And our heritage is taken by the people of France / occupying the valley of our ancestors.” Other times, he delves into the complexities of love, but always with delicate poetics: “Oh my love, think of my look when I walked toward the evening / Tears fell from my face, from the tears that fell green trees grew / And love rested in the shade.” As Mdou travels the world, he divides his time between two places, alternating from lavish weddings in Agadez to sold out concerts in Berlin nightclubs. It offers a unique perspective, but also means that he needs to address different audiences. At home, his compositions send a message to his people. Abroad, his music is an opportunity to be heard and represent his people on a world stage. For the cover art, Mdou conceptualized a Saharan bird flying over the desert. “This bird is my symbol because he resembles my artistic look. I wear a turban in two colors. The jewelry in its beak is the symbol of Agadez.” It's a poignant idea, as the bird flies off over the desert, it carries its home wherever it goes. It's not so different than what Mdou hopes he can do with his music. "I'm just an ambassador, like a messenger of music, telling what is happening in my world.” “Ilana” is an invitation to listen, at a time when a message could not be needed more. créditsparu le 29 mars 2019

[heckyeahgnawa]

Multiple groups and languages are part of Gnawa: Amazigh, Sahelian to the extent that these languages and sounds: takamba, tende, gulu drums affected its name and structure; French and Spanish from each colonial era; Sephardic or northern African Jewish. Learn more here.

[humannerve]

Mdou Moctar | Takamba

[dustedmagazine]

Mdou Moctar — Ilana (The Creator) (Sahel Sounds)

Ilana: The Creator by Mdou Moctar

Mdou Moctar, prodigiously talented, nakedly ambitious, creatively restless, Saharan guitar phenom, may be best known outside Niger, to the extent he’s known at all, for soundtracking and starring in the first ever Tuareg feature film Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai (Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red in it). You don’t take the lead in a Purple Rain homage unless you know you’re good, but at the time the comparison seemed like the sort of cute, provocative overstatement endemic to emergent scenes and their promoters. Contra Akounak, Moctar’s new record, Ilana (The Creator) is where he earns the comparison. Not only is Ilana Moctar’s best record, it’s also one of the best Saharan records to reach Western ears, and an early contender for the most exhilarating rock record of 2019. 

Impressive guitar players out of Niger are a franc a dozen these days, but none of them are playing with as much fire as Moctar does here. If you still have a punk-induced allergy to flashy guitar solos, be warned; there’s not a track on Ilana where Moctar doesn’t take every available opportunity to — no other word for it — shred. Fortunately, Moctar earns the right to play his ass off by recruiting a band whose hungry energy matches and spurs on his own and by, for the first time, writing a whole album of tunes worthy of his chops.  

Saharan guitar music (tishoumaren to the locals), like roots reggae, delta blues, black metal, and other styles developed in relative isolation, can be formulaic and, let’s be honest, repetitive, especially given its predilection for trance. Moctar’s earlier records were a bit light in the hook department and leaned on groove and skill to pick up the slack. Formulaic though they may be, there’s not a boring track on Ilana. Moctar has amped up his songwriting through judicious use of a few trade secrets, like the breakdowns of the title track “Ilana,” which break up the insistent groove without sapping it of power. The best songs, like the swaggering “Asshet Akai” and triumphant “Wiwasharnine,” are all sticky licks, whirlwind, heat and flash, the sort life affirming stuff that makes you think rock and roll might have some fight in it yet.  

Tight songwriting isn’t all that elevates Ilana. Credit also goes to Moctar’s band, a classic guitar/drums/bass set up without a calabash or hand drum in sight and a heavier, more dynamic, rhythm section than is often found on tishoumaren records. The interlude “Inizgam” features pained, bluesy playing by Moctar, but the drums and bass make it funky, make it something you can feel. The band’s sinewy, propulsive energy give conviction and strength to Moctar’s riffs, and keep Ilana from devolving into a shredding showcase.   

Ilana is Moctar’s first studio record with a full band, and though the production emphasizes the sort of gritty guitar tone heard on his early recordings, and avoids the bright overproduction characterizing recent records by his compatriot Bombino, Moctar isn’t above spicing up his tunes with studio trickery. Prudent use of reverb and overdubs, the low drone that adds weight and drama to “Kamane Tarhanin,” and the ethereal slides of the closer “Tumastin,” are a few of the subtle touches that give depth and dimension to Ilana without sacrificing its garage band immediacy.

Another new trick: Ilana is an old-school, perfectly sequenced album, greater than the sum of its parts. Even the ecstatic, over-the-top, seven minute guitar meltdown “Tarhatazed” is earned by the rising, bass-heavy excitement of the interlude, “Takamba,” that precedes it and cathartic release of “Wiwasharnine” that follows. Ilana’s show-like flow is its secret weapon; it surges forward, high on its own momentum, turning excess into virtue. Authenticity fetishists beware: Ilana (The Creator), with its smooth sequencing, higher production values, rhythmic dynamism, and Hendrix worship that (finally) manifests itself more in licks than sonics, is a full-fledged pop product. 

You can hear within seconds that there’s a lot at stake on Ilana. Like Purple Rain, Ilana is the sound of a talent coming into its own, skill becoming craft and wanting the world to hear, but auditory audacity alone isn’t enough to explain its vitality. Moctar wrote these songs to let the world know that “the women of the desert need help. They don’t have water to drink, there’s no medicine in the hospitals”[1] and that “for 48 years France has exploited the uranium in our country, and yet we still don’t have roads, medicines and in many places there is no water or electricity...we are modern slaves”[2].  For non-Tamasheq speakers, the lyrics of Ilana will be subsumed by its utility as a great party record, but Ilana’s thematic gravity is inseparable from its more muscular approach and the pleasure it provides. After all, in this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld, but if de-elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy.  

Purple Rain is one point of comparison, but Ilana, in its hunger to be heard, political urgency, sonic temerity, seriousness of intent and commitment to pleasure, back to basics simplicity and willingness to experiment, is a piece of pure, subversive pop in the tradition of Catch a Fire or The Clash. Ilana (The Creator) fiercely and joyously breaks through the groovy solemnity that has become a Saharan trademark because Mdou Moctar wants your attention. Check him out. Before the night is through, you’ll see his point of view even if he has to scream and shout. 

Isaac Olson

[birdofnothing]

BOOMARM NATION FAMILY ALBUM 2017 Buy Now  - name your price released January 1, 2017 All music provided courtesy of the Artists. Artwork created by: BirdOfNoThing 

[krazygyal]

@yannloubertrand performing with @orianelacaille at Mainvilliers, France on May 13th, 2022 #974 #maloya #sega #concert #takamba (at Salle Des Fetes De Mainvilliers) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdkoETrKpLh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=