All around Kidal, the Malian desert stretches in every direction.
Endless horizons of rock and sand, barren and parched. This is
the southwestern edge of the Sahara, the home of the Tuareg
people, and the town of Kidal is one of their main cultural
centres. Fought over, conquered and re-conquered, it remains the
symbol of Tuareg defiance and hope, the spiritual home of a
dispossessed people. It is also the town in which Tamikrest first
came together as a group, and on Kidal, Tamikrest's fourth studio
album, the band pays homage to this place that's nurtured them
and their people. It's a cry of suffering and the yell of
rebellion. It's power and resistance. This is pure Tuareg
rock'n'roll. "Kidal talks about dignity," Ag Mossa says. "We
consider the desert as an area of freedom to live in. But many
people consider it as just a market to sell to multinational
companies, and for me, that is a major threat to the survival of
our nomadic people." The Tuareg have always been nomadic people,
their lives in motion across the desert, sometimes taking with
them only the bare essentials. But for one brief moment they
possessed a home after the Tuaregs rose up in 2012 and declared
the independent state of Azawad in the northeast of Mali. It
lasted less than a year, as first al-Qaeda conduits swept in from
the north, imposing Islamist rule, and then the French
arrived to liberate the area - once again leaving the Tuareg with
little or no chance for self-determination. But the dream
remains, still trapped between governments and the greed of
global corporations. "Kidal, the cradle of all these uprisings,
continues to resist the many acts perpetrated by obscure hands
against our people," notes band associate Rhissa Ag Mohamed.
"This album evokes all the suffering and manipulation of our
populations caught in pincers on all sides." The songs on Kidal
evoke a long history. And for all the electricity, as Ag Mossa
observes, "It's very traditional if you go deeply into what I'm
playing." Everything here is focused. Everything burns. Ag Mossa
punctuates his lyrics with inspired bolts of guitar. Even an
acoustic song like "Tanakra" maintains a luminous edge. With
Kidal, that blaze is roaring. Recorded in Bamako, Mali in the
summer of 2016, the album was produced by Mark Mulholland
(Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra) and mixed by David Odlum,
who received a Grammy for his work with Tinariwen. It's an album
that's taken two years to make, Ag Mossa says, "because we share
the same difficulties of our people." And the songs here mirror
their joys, their pain and their unwillingness to accept things
as they are. There's a raw beauty in Tamikrest's rock'n'roll.
It's there in the driving, insistent groove that powers the
songs, the lean, snaking bass lines and the guitars that twine
and twist around the melodies, and the utterly natural musical
blending of Sahel Africa, the Maghreb, and the West a
reflection of influences as diverse as Pink Floyd, Rachid Taha,
and flamenco. Yet the Sahara, and the people who live there, is
always firmly at its heart. "This music was founded on a very
precise cause, the Tuareg cause," Ag Mossa told journalist Andy
Morgan in 2013. They might be threatened on all sides, but they
won't give up, and this album celebrates who the Tuareg are, the
Kel Tamasheq ("those who speak Tamasheq"), the keepers of an
ancient and endangered cultural voice. Tamikrest's new album is
the music of defiance, of hope. It's rock'n'roll from the Sahara,
the sound of the Tuareg dream, a dream that will be renewed
again, in their ancestral town: Kidal.