Sahel Sounds
This week's Upfront mix is a vivid trip through the unheralded backstreets of Mali, Mauritania and Niger, from a man who knows the lay of the land better than almost anyone.
About this mix
When I started Sahel Sounds as a blog, it was meant to record the sounds I came across in my travels in West Africa. The label has continued in that vein, and creates some pretty disparate sounding records - from scratchy archival tape transfers culled from the National Radio in Niger to slick DIY bedroom productions out of Bamako, from mp3s found circulating on memory cards, to blown-out live recordings of desert rock bands.
What really ties the music together on the label is geography. It's also all music that for one reason or another, doesn't make it onto the world stage. One of my motivating factors is to showcase underrepresented genres and style. It's what drives any music digger, when you're listening to something and you think: "Why hasn't everyone heard this?" I think to honour this music, from another place and culture, you need to approach it with caution and respect – and not pasteurise music for the dreaded Starbucks 'World Music' market, but just let it exist on its own, as real living music.
In the past years, with frequent trips back to the Sahel, I keep accumulating music at a faster rate than I can do anything with it. While on the ground, I'm in a flurry of recording and digitizing. And I'm barely at home these days, as we just finished up a movie with Mdou Moctar, and more of the label artists have started to tour throughout Europe.
This mix was a chance to check in, and dig into the vaults – a well needed exercise on my part, so thank you Boiler Room. It's a preview of things to come, through tracks that are in various phases of production. Most of these will be on records and cassettes in 2015. Inchallah.
Boiler Room says...
There's a particular moment early on in Objekt's already semi-legendary Freerotation set where, logic cast to the wind, he throws himself gung ho into a blend between DJ Skull, Mørbeck and a third of breathless barked vocals and artillery drumming. Objekt being Objekt, it works – though it really shouldn't. The track in question quickly got ID'd as a deep cut off Balani Show Super Hits, a compilation running down 90s/00s street-dance music from Mali. Not something you'd typically expect sandwiched between choppy, ballistic techno.
It forms a small but prescient reminder of how music, now more than ever, derives charge from the context it is dropped into; that, unmoored from situation or temporality, the message is totally malleable. That is something Christopher Kirkley – the man variously putting out records, films and academic dispatches under the Sahel Sounds umbrella – appreciates all too well.
Like a localised Awesome Tapes From Africa, he's not merely cherry-picking music as a flight of fancy but investing time and resources positively, too. Focused on a central chunk of the Sahel belt, he clearly has a fathoms-deep knowledge and appreciation of the land, allowing him to dig deep and unearth no shortage of treasures, old and new.
The Upfront kicks off with a kind of vocal über-modulation that has a curiously close cousin with contemporary rap (genuinely), set against a bright backdrop that resembles mist clearing in the humid morning air. Over the course of a half-hour he cycles back round to that tranquility, taking in stops along the way via transcendent incantations, feverish drumming and ripping, ramshackle guitar solos. There's little else like it.
Tracklisting
Upfront mixes
Our weekly audio mix series where we call upon the most interesting artists/DJs/record labels and ask them to peer into the near future. How they take it from there is entirely open to interpretation.
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Moon B
100% homegrown goodness from LA-via-Atlanta PPU mainstay Moon B, coming through with warped funk that's as shiny as it is syrupy.
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Fantastic Man
The aptly-named Fantastic Man (aka Mic Newman) showcases the sun-kissed sound of modern Melbourne. Spring has arrived.