Music From Saharan Cellphones, and the Music We Don’t Know
It is exceptionally easy to listen to new music whenever you want. If someone tells you to check out a band or song, you don’t have to write it down in a notebook, go to the record store, and see if you can even find it. You can just type it in to whatever streaming platform is your choice, and have it ready to listen to in less than a minute. We are so spoiled with music choice in America, to the point that a genuine pop landscape has been terraformed into a conceptual free market where a general public control the popularity of a song from the start. And smartphones and computers make it all so easy! In just a few quick steps, you can even get your own music on Spotify, out there for the world to somehow find.
Not so much in the Sahara. With tech largely still behind in Africa compared to other continents, traditional cell phones have taken over as the dominant technology across nearly the entire continent. With over half a billion people still going without electricity, a classic cellphone, with a battery that can last up to a week without needing to be recharged, is a necessity. And not in the sense of “modern life is manageable in America without a cellphone but is a completely different way go living” either; important aspects of users’ daily lives largely through these phones: authenticating medicine, selling farmed goods, and live disaster reporting are just a few.
Music sharing has also thrived in Africa, albeit in a way that seems a lot more traditionally “cyberpunk,” not so much in aesthetic, but in form and practice. Trading music through SIM cards (also often used and switched out to get across phone costs and data handling) and Bluetooth, people share songs that someone shared to them, and so on and so forth. These artists, without a record deal or even access to a computer, are able to share their songs across entire cities and even countries. And we likely would have never known about it if it wasn’t for a white guy from Portland.
Sahel Sounds is a record label that started as the blog of Christopher Kirkley, a music archivist who focused on the music of Africa, specifically field recordings (using the definition of music recorded outside of a studio, not recordings of a space). Soon, however, he started collecting songs from these SIM cards, saving them onto his laptop as mp3s. And in 2010, Music From Saharan Cellphones was released, with a further two volumes released within a year.
Building off a foundation of traditional Berber music, along with subgenres such as Tishoumaren, the individual artists each bring their own sound to their contributions, whether it be the blown out synth fuzz southern hip hop of “Yereyira”, the reggae on “Soul Tamasheq,” the bizarre minute that is “Guetna”, or the psychedelic rock of “Tinariwen”, in tribute of the Malian group that is also completely worth listening to. You also hear a lot of influence from outside culture, with some of the songs produced in FL Studio, and autotune being a regular addition across even the more traditional songs.
Beyond even the music itself, however, there’s the production, which is just as important to a release like this as what’s actually being played. The music is lo-fi, as it to be expected of songs shared across SIM cards. A good lo-fi album always uses its lack of sound fidelity to its advantages, whether it be Guided By Voice’s immediacy, the Microphones’ isolation, or John Darnielle using the drone of a tape deck on All Hail West Texas. Here, the lo-fi sound immediately gives the music a sense of place, with the compression adding up over the music to give a feeling of all surrounding desert, while also reflecting the very personal way the music was shared. It’s a bizarre, transportational experience that I would recommend to anyone wanting to listen to more music.
But I’m not just recommending the three volumes of Saharan Cellphones. Even on Sahel Sounds, one click away from the download button on Bandcamp, you have releases from artists on this collection, like Mdou Moctar, an incredible guitar player who I’d have never heard about without knowing about this. And I only heard about this after watching a video on Death Grips samples. There’s brilliant music across the world that’s only discovered by people later by complete happenstance: Itoh Masyitoh from Indonesia, Khana Rung Thawi from Thailand, Egschiglen from Mongolia, Ali Farka Touré from Mali. Never be afraid of discovering new music. It’s good for you.
