Global Notes: Sahel Sounds
Sahel Sounds began as a blog in 2009 and has since grown into a record label. The Sahel Sounds blog initially shared field recordings from the Sahel region in Africa. The founder, Christopher Kirkley, still uses the platform to document recordings of the musicians he works with. Sahel Sounds bills itself as primarily an “exploration of sound and music in West Africa, particularly in the Sahel region of Mauritania, Mali, and Niger via filmmaking, field recordings, visual art, mp3 archiving, cell-phone data collection, and cross cultural experiments”.
Sahel Sounds features some of today’s premiere Tuareg musicians, including Mdou Moctar, Les Filles de Illighadad, Amanar de Kidal, and others. The label has also produced films, like the 2015 ode to Prince called Rain The Color Blue With A Little Red In It (Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai), starring musician Mdou Moctar. That’s the name because there’s no word for “purple” in the Tuareg language.
This year, Sahel Sounds collaborated with Imouhar Studio for the film Zerzura, coming out in July. Moctar is on tour in the United States, and will be at the Old Town School of Folk Music on June 6. Worldview’s Jerome McDonnell spoke with Kirkley, an explorer, music archivist, artist, curator and occasional D.J.
Listening to Mdou Moctar
Kirkley: Mdou is a guitarist from Agadez, Niger who plays in that Tuareg Blues tradition. I kind of just stumbled into it on a whim, really. I became really fascinated by music in that part of the world and decided to sort of hit the road and check it out for myself.
I was traveling with a guitar of my own to learn about the music and a small digital recorder. I spent about two years sort of traipsing around the Sahara from Mali and Niger and Mauritania, collecting music, and meeting musicians and just really getting to know the place via this language of music.
Kirkley: I like to get to know a lot of the people that I’m working with. But with Mdou in particular, he’s this very larger-than-life personality, and so we’ve had a lot of opportunities to work on music, but I also pitched him other ideas. I said “let’s work on a film together” or “let’s do a crazy tour.” He’s into these ideas, so it makes it easier to get to come from a similar place. We did a remake of Purple Rain, the Prince movie.
Spending a lot of time hanging out in these weddings, and just seeing the similarities, you know, this competition of musicians trying to make it, and so I pitched the idea of Purple Rain to Mdou. He watched the film and said “let’s make a movie”.
Using technology to share music
Kirkley: When I was first traveling around there, it was about 10 years ago, there wasn’t a lot of Internet. People did have smartphones, actually knock-off, sort of bootleg smartphones, and they were trading a lot of digital music, but they weren’t on the Internet. So, traveling back and forth, I really had to be on the ground in order to talk to people and to get sounds, and I think over the past couple of years there’s been a lot more Internet, and musicians are all on Facebook, for better or worse, and a lot more people are actually using WhatsApp as well, which is this great app to transmit these vocal messages and send sound clips back and forth.
So, suddenly I have found myself inundated by musicians contacting me sort of out-of-the-blue and getting numbers from their friends over this network of people sending me songs, and it’s made my work quite a lot easier, to talk and be in constant communication with that part of the world.
Yeah I think my blog idea was to travel around and document my my own experiences via field recordings. So it was sort of a music travel blog, in a way, and over the years I’ve stepped back in some ways to just let it be a platform for musicians to showcase the stuff that they’re working on and I have less of a role as a collector, and more of that curatorial role.
My record label is definitely a big part of that, I think, we primarily do vinyl records, but working as a record label, we have a commercial line as well, so we have music that we’re releasing, and it provides opportunities for these artists to get some financial affect from from their music, and find opportunities to tour. So, we work a lot with the artist too, to really help them develop their careers as well.
Listening to Les Filles de Illighadad
Kirkley: Les Filles de Illighadad is fronted by Fatou Seidi Ghali and she’s one of the only two female guitarists in the Tuareg communities, so it’s pretty remarkable. She was somebody that I found via her cousin, who I was working with who had sent me her photo and so I said, well we have to go meet her.
She lives way out in the country, like I mean, it’s miles and miles over dirt road to get out to her village. She had picked up a guitar that her brother had brought back from a voyage in Libya, I believe, and over the years she learned to play, but the really interesting thing is she’s combining this music that’s typically a male dominated form of guitar music in the community, and she’s combining it with traditional Tende music, which is a female dominated music, this traditional drumming, which you heard in that track. So she’s taking these traditional village songs and adapting them to the guitar for this really amazing result.
Listening to Amanar De Kidal
Kirkley: Amanar is Ahmed Ag Kaedi, a musician from the north of Mali. His town is called Kidal, and he was really this central band of the city.
In the past few years there’s been this conflict in the north of Mali, and the band became sort of dispersed across Algeria and through Bomako and Burkina Faso, and they were all spread out. Ahmed has essentially been ceased to play music in the north of Mali during the time of the conflict.
He is now traveling around and he plays shows from the capital, to the south, but he’s had a really rough time, I think, with this ban on music that happened in the north of Mali, but now he’s really composing a lot to really use music as a means of transmitting this message of peace and collaborating with other ethnic groups in Mali to really address this problem.
The future of Sahel Sounds
Kirkley: The music is really amazing, and that’s what drew me to this part of the world. And I think now, more than ever, we have a chance to learn more about it, and it’s important for me to let listeners also have the opportunity that I’ve had, and get more context, and be more involved with the artists.
Technology has really opened up this possibility to have more collaboration, and have more of an artist input. So, for the future of Sahel Sounds, I see more of a collective, an artist collective, and an artist driven project where we can engage more in this conversation.
