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However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads - this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.

"The cellphone is such a fixture of west Africa. Everyone has a phone even in villages lacking reception," explained Kirkley, who collected MP3 memory cards in the Tuareg city of Kidal in northern Mali. "They're not just phones, they're all purpose media devices. In the west we maintain a repository of data on hard drives, in Sahel, the cellphone does the same thing."

Kirkley originally travelled to Mali to make field recordings, but soon took to trading tunes with the locals: "I'd carry my netbook while walking down the promenade in the evening and offer to trade songs, filling excess space on the cards with albums on my own hard drive - Townes Van Zandt, John Vanderslice, Elliott Smith ..."

Despite claims on some blogs, his collection came from trading alone and not collecting discarded memory cards. "It's a funny notion," he laughs. "The idea of discarded unused memory cards laying around in west Africa."

Returning to Portland, Kirkley teamed up with Mississippi Records to put out a vinyl release of his field recordings (Ishilan n-Tenere: Guitar music from the Western Sahel) but also wanted to do something with the mobile phone MP3s. He says: "I chose some of the more DIY, electronic, modern recordings and put them together on a cassette. It ended up being ripped online, back to MP3. It's a weird chain of analogue to digital to analogue to digital."

Music from Saharan Cellphones begins with local heroes Tinariwen, who are swiftly followed by the song Desert Blues, a solo track from Tinariwen songwriter and guitarist Abdallah.

The third track on side A is a sharp gear change from Abdallah's twanging guitar and a reminder of just how all-conquering Auto-Tune has been. Slathered on the oeuvre of artists from T-Pain to Bon Iver, it's found its way to the desert, too; an unattributed track (apparently from Niger) features a singer crooning in French beneath heavy layers of the pitch-tweaking effect. Kirkley only has scant information on the song: "It's by a Tamashek band from Niger. Apparently their name is Emsikta. I'm doing my best to find the band. I'd love to do a proper release with the group."

Listening to the mixtape is like sitting beside a desert radio controlled by a restless herdsman. The second side has twitchy guitar and biscuit tin drums, an unidentified Touareg musician noodling on an 80s synth and French hip-hop coming together in a mesmerising mix of sounds.

Kirkley says he'd like his next project to be a tape of non-African music from Saharan cellphones but fears it might have less appeal: "It would probably only be interesting in the ethnographic sense, I can't imagine a lot of people wanting to buy a cassette of Le Bouche and the Scorpions."
Listen to Music From Saharan Cellphones Topics

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Desert discs: how mobile phones are at the root of Saharan music

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However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara.

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interview with Christopher Kirkley

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Christopher Kirkley is an archivist, artist, curator, and occasional DJ who runs the project Sahel Sounds We recently discussed some of his projects, the relationship of his work to academic ethnography, and how digital music is being archived in the Sahel. Excerpts from our conversation are reproduced below. Christopher Kirkley and Mdou Moctar, the star of Akounak, in Agadez, Niger. . His work examines contemporary popular musics in an evolving technological landscape in the Sahara and Sahel regions of West Africa, from the interplay of localized traditions with transglobal influences to new media models of cultural transmission. ES: As someone following a pretty traditional path for ethnomusicologists [i.e., graduate school] and full of critiques (as well as praise) for the profession, I love that you describe yourself as a "guerrilla ethnomusicologist" and "non-traditional ethnographer." Can you elaborate on this idea? How do you see your relationship to academics and ethnographers in general? Is that related to how you got involved in your work with Sahel Sounds?
Sahel Sounds began as a blog in 2009 to share field recordings and has evolved into a record label, perhaps best known for its compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones. The blog continues as a platform to explore arts and music of the region through nontraditional ethnographic fieldwork. Currently, Chris is fundraising for the production of what may be the first-ever Tuareg language fiction film, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai ("Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It")-an homage to Purple Rain and The Harder They Come , and drawing on the experimental filmmaking of Poverty Row, Italian Neo-Realism, and Jean Rouch- which aims to provide an alternative to the dominant narrative of contemporary Tuareg music-as-rebellion by dramatizing the music scene in Agadez, Niger.

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CK: The title is definitely a reflection of how I started working in the field. I originally went to West Africa just to record music. It was kind of project-based, almost like an art project: the idea was to take a field recorder, travel to a part of the world that I didn't know anything about, and see what I could record. But my impetus for doing that was based around ethnomusicology and ethnomusicological recordings.

At the time, I was playing a lot of folk music and had gotten into a lot of archives, like the Library of Congress archives, the Lomax Archives . . . some of the stuff that was online. . . . I got to listening to these old recordings, and it was really cool because you not only hear these folk songs that had sort of disappeared-they were there, but it was a source of music for me, an inspiration. So I felt that it was important that this stuff had been recorded. And in some of the more interesting ones you could hear some interesting stuff happening in the background. For example, there's this one recording where you could hear a train in the background as this woman played at a migrant worker's camp in Fresno.
ES: I think in many ways that's the case, or at least for me. I'm coming at it from the opposite end, in a way: the path that I'm following is in some ways very cautious, and also beholden to a system that can, in some ways, be inhibiting. So it's really refreshing to read about your work and about just jumping right in, getting things done.
I thought that, well, whoever recorded this might have had the advantage of being an ethnomusicologist, but I had the advantage of having recording equipment a thousand times better than what they had. So, I thought, "Well, I don't have the educational background to do this, but I have a technological one-up on these recordings." And if I just go out, I can just see what I could record. And that was the beginning of the project.

I think that's come to define my work, because I see that when you're over there in the field, by putting yourself out there and by just jumping into something, you can find a lot of things that maybe aren't being represented [on the Internet, etc.]. Coming from outside academia, it's hard for me to really critique it-I studied engineering, not ethnomusicology-but there's a perceived lack on my part of just jumping head on in to something, of saying, "Well, I don't have a background, but I'm just going to go ahead and get started with something."
ES: Previously you've talked about how, when people run out of storage space for digital files, they simply delete them and replace them with new stuff. Do you still see that going on? Have you seen anyone locally making efforts to store these media, or to create an archive?
CK: Well, I think there's a way that these approaches really complement each other. I'm not trying to answer certain questions-I'm almost leaving a lot of things open when I'm asking these questions. For example, if I talk to someone like Mariam Ahmed about her role as a woman guitarist [almost unheard of in Tuareg music], she didn't answer my questions. But you know, my reflections on that are often: Is it a big deal that she's a woman guitarist? Is it because I'm a man, or a foreigner, that I can't get in there to really answer these sorts of questions? I'm reflecting more on these things rather than really answering the questions. But I think that by posing these questions and making these recordings, someone like yourself can use that for their inquiries, so we can kind of generate a collective body of knowledge and assist each other.
ES: Are they storing much information about their files?
That's one thing. Another thing that really interests me is just accessibility of information. When I worked on a project of Hausa pop music from films in Nigeria, and I found an old article by Brian Larkin about it, I wrote him, and he got me in touch with Carmen McCain, a doctoral student who was working in Kano. She put me in touch with a bunch of musicians. And through that I was finally able to put out the record. I found that even though they'd done a lot of extensive work on this music, finding really fascinating stuff like how people in Nigeria are influenced by Bollywood films, they're making their own movies, and making their soundtracks that copy Indian film music . . . that narrative and that music really wasn't accessible in the sense of even being able to listen to it. It was there in academic journals, but sort of outside the realm of accessibility to people outside that field of study.
ES: You had to do a lot of tracking people down to get information for your Music from Saharan Cellphones project.
CK: Yeah, and the people who are really doing that are the people who have cell phone shops and music download stores. Because those people sell music, there's a financial incentive. But I think also, just like here, there are people who are just into music and they just save everything. I've met a couple people-one kid in Tchintabaraden [Niger] has tons of external hard drives of music and video. Everything he saves and backs up. And it's cool to see that. Hard drives are really expensive there. But I think that people like this kid, with his hard drives, are going to be really important for archiving the music, but especially the videos. Cell phone videos have been shot at different festivals and musical performances. I just imagine that, whether or not that's valued now, fifty years from now, when Niger has really got it together, that stuff is going to be just as important as our Library of Congress. Right now it's just somebody who's storing it because they want to keep it.

CK: No. Sometimes there are the id3 tags on the mp3, with information about who created it. But some of the mp3 stores rebrand everything; they'll change the tags to put the name of their business in. It's kind of annoying-there's all this information there and it just gets wiped out.

CK: Yeah. But I think that a lot of it is getting easier. I noticed this a lot with Saharan Cellphones -I'd have a song, I wanted to know who it was. I could send out mass emails to thousands of people and I'd never find out what it was. But if I just went to Agadez and asked the first kid on the street, he'd be able to say who it was, the name of the song, where he recorded. So all that information is there, it's just not accessible because of these barriers of Internet accessibility. But the information's there.

Chris is planning to release Akounak by July 2014. We've linked to a short teaser below; a longer one is viewable on the project's Kickstarter page. Keep an eye out for more about the film at Sahel Sounds.

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Interview: Christopher Kirkley, Sahel Sounds, and Guerrilla Ethnomusicology

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Christopher Kirkley is an archivist, artist, curator, and occasional DJ who runs the project Sahel Sounds We recently discussed some of his projects, the relationship of his work to academic ethnography, and how digital music is being archived in the Sahel. Excerpts from our conversation are reproduced below.

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trailer

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a story of Sahel Sounds [official trailer]

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artist page

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Les Filles de Illighadad come from a secluded commune in central Niger, far off in the scrubland deserts at the edge of the Sahara. The village is only accessible via a grueling drive through the open desert and there is little infrastructure, no electricity or running water. But what the nomadic zone lacks in material wealth it makes up for deep and strong identity and tradition. The surrounding countryside supports hundreds of pastoral families, living with and among their herds, as their families have done for centuries.

It takes its name from a drum, built from a goat skin stretched across a mortar and pestle. Like the environs, tende music is a testament to wealth in simplicity, with sparse compositions built from a few elements: vocals, handclaps, and percussion. Songs speak of the village, of love, and of praise for ancestors. It's a music form dominated by women. Collective and communal, tende is tradition for all the young girls of the nomad camps - played during celebrations and to pass the time during the late nights of the rainy season.

In the past years, certain genres of Tuareg music have become popular in the West. International acts of "desert blues" like Tinariwen, Bombino, and Mdou Moctar are synonymous with the name "Tuareg." But guitar music is a recent creation. In the 1970s young Tuareg men living in exile in Libya and Algeria discovered the guitar. Lacking any female vocalists to perform tende, they began to play the guitar to mimic this sound, replacing water drums with plastic jerrycans and substituting a guitar drone for the vocal call and response. The exiled eventually traveled home and brought the guitar music with them. In time, this new guitar sound came to eclipse the tende, especially in the urban centers. If tende is a music that for women, the Tuareg guitar was its gendered counterpart.

Fatou Seidi Ghali, lead vocalist and performer of Les Filles de Illighadad is one of the only Tuareg female guitarists in Niger. Sneaking away with her older brother's guitar, she taught herself to play. While Fatou's role as the first female Tuareg guitarist is groundbreaking, it is just as interesting for her musical direction. In a place where gender norms have created two divergent musics, Fatou and Les Filles de Illighadad are reasserting the role of tende in Tuareg guitar. In lieu of the djembe or the drum kit, Les Filles de Illighadad incorporate the traditional drum and the pounding calabash, half buried in water. The forgotten inspiration of Tuareg guitar, they are reclaiming its importance in the genre and reclaiming the music of tende.

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Les Filles de Illighadad - Artist Page - Sahel Sounds

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Les Filles de Illighadad come from a secluded commune in central Niger, far off in the scrubland deserts at the edge of the Sahara. The village is only accessible via a grueling drive through the open desert, but what the nomadic zone lacks in material wealth it makes up for deep and strong identity and tradition.

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music video

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Fatou Seidi Ghali (Les Filles de Illighadad) - Telilit

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article from The Guardian

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Les Filles de Illighadad are in their dressing room, listening to music on their phones and scrolling through social media apps. Fatou Seidi Ghali, the band's lead guitarist and singer, leans in to show me a Snapchat she has just received from a friend: in a hilly desert, a white-robed man is riding a horse at full speed. He tries to stand up in the saddle and falls off into a plume of sand. Fatou looks up at me, laughing.

The group are from a small village called Illighadad in the Tuareg region of the Sahara in western Niger. While the region has produced some celebrated guitarists, acts such as Bombino, Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen's Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Fatou is the first ever Tuareg woman to play guitar professionally.

She started the band in 2016 with her cousin Alamnou Akrouni, who plays percussion and sings. A third member, Mariama Salah Aswan, recently left to start a family and was replaced by Fatimata Ahmadelher, the Tuareg's second-ever female guitarist, who also contributes vocals and percussion. They are in their late 20s, they say, although they have no birth certificates. Fatou's brother, Abdoulaye Madassane, joins them on tour, providing rhythm guitar.

Another brother, Ahmoudou, introduced Fatou to the instrument, albeit inadvertently, when he brought one home from Libya. Fatou, aged about 10, began teaching herself to play in secret, sneaking off to practise every time her brother was out. The sight of a woman holding the guitar was in itself controversial. "My father told me to stop wasting my time," says Fatou, talking through an interpreter. "That I should be busy looking after the cows." But she persisted, and people began to take notice.

Among them was Christopher Kirkley, a music fan from Portland, Oregon, who started the record label Sahel Sounds in 2010 as a way of bringing south-Saharan music to a wider audience. He had heard about Fatou playing guitar at weddings, and managed to track her down. After hearing her play at home in the village, Kirkley recorded Les Filles' eponymous first album, with Alamnou playing tende, a traditional Tuareg goatskin drum, and Fatou playing fingerpicked blues on an acoustic guitar. They play folksongs they have known all their lives - love songs and odes to nomadic life - with the sound of local people laughing and singing along in the background.

Tende music, named after the drum, is played at traditional Tuareg courting rituals, where all the women in a village sing to each other in a call-and-response style. As they sing, men approach on camelback, trying to catch the eye of a potential suitor while the camels' hooves move in time with the music.

How important is music to the Tuareg? This question elicits quizzical looks. "Everyone listens. Everyone plays," says Fatimata.

"For love, for pain, for enjoyment," adds Abdoulaye. "When there is tension in the village, musicians come to calm everyone down." Different occasions require different kinds of music, tende being one and takamba, a faster style built around a three- or four-stringed loot instrument known as the ngoni, is another, often played at weddings.

Fatou played the ngoni before she ever picked up a guitar. She created Les Filles' sound by combining these influences - tende, takamba and hausa music, a folk style from Nigeria. The band's success means she is treated "like a queen" when she returns home, with local people asking for photos and offering motorcycle lifts wherever she goes. She is modest when I ask what she hopes to achieve with her band: "Helping the village, buying medicines, supporting my brothers and sisters."

We meet shortly after their performance at the Womad festival, and Fatou and Fatimata are arguing heatedly in Tamasheq, their native tongue. The gig didn't go well, at least not in their view. The sound engineers struggled with the calabash - a pumpkin-like fruit cut in half and partly submerged in water, drummed to mimic camels' hooves - and the band had to swap instruments a few times to try to get rid of the feedback. The crowd was enraptured nonetheless.

Like the Guardian, Womad recently removed "world music" from its lexicon to avoid the inadequacy of grouping together hundreds of geographically disparate genres. The festival's name recalls another term that may be more fitting for Les Filles: "nomad" is a tag worn proudly by the Sahara-roaming Tuareg people, and an equivalent Tamasheq word, amahegh, meaning a Tuareg of noble heart, translates as "free man". As they continue on a world tour that has already taken them to Australia, Israel, Sweden and Canada, Les Filles are giving the words new meaning.
Les Filles de Illighadad's world tour continues. Their second album, Eghass Malan (Sahel Sounds), is out now. Topics

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'My father said I should be looking after the cows': the first female Tuareg guitarist

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Les Filles de Illighadad are in their dressing room, listening to music on their phones and scrolling through social media apps. Fatou Seidi Ghali, the band's lead guitarist and singer, leans in to show me a Snapchat she has just received from a friend: in a hilly desert, a white-robed man is riding a horse at full speed.

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record label website

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Sahel Sounds - music and culture from the sahel

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Music and culture from the Sahel of West Africa

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compilation record

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Music from Saharan cellphones is a compilation of music collected from memory cards of cellular phones in the Saharan desert.

In much of West Africa, cellphones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.

The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights -- music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They're also songs that tend towards this new world of self production -- Fruity Loops, home studios, synthesizers, and Autotune.

In 2010, various versions of saharan cellphone music were released on cassette. Many of the songs were unlabeled, giving no insight to their mysterious origins. In the past year, the artists have been tracked down to collaborate on a commercial release. As such, 50% of the proceeds go directly to the artists.

The official vinyl release is available for purchase here:
littleaxerecords.weebly.com/distributed-titles.html

The original cassette was also remixed and reinterpreted here:
boomarmnation.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-saharan-cellphones

chris
sahelsounds

released December 2, 2011

Collected in Kidal, Mali, 2009-2010 by Christopher Kirkley
Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic
Front cover graphics by Mystére
Back cover images from cellphones in Kidal
sahelsounds-003

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Music from Saharan Cellphones, by Various

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Music from Saharan Cellphones by Various, released 02 December 2011 1. Group Anmataff - Tinariwen 2. Yeli Fuzzo - Abandé 3. Amanar - Alghafiat 4. Negib Ould Ngainich - Guetna 5. Papito ft. Iba One - Yereyira 6. Mdou Moctar - Tahoultine 7. Kaba Blon - Moribiyassa 8.