he new album by Tinariwen could well have been called Exile on
Main Street. But other people have already thought of that. It
also could have been called A la recherche du pays perdu
('Remembrance of a lost country'). Except that would have been a
tad Proustian for musicians who grew up pretty much between a
rock and a sand dune, in the midst of their goat herds and camel
caravans. But the idea is apt. As is the painful paradox, if you
consider that while Tinariwen were busy criss-crossing the globe
on their recent triumphant tours (160 concerts played in the past
three years), expanding their audience on all five continents,
becoming one of the latest musical phenomena of truly universal
calibre, the frontiers that encircle their desert home were
closing down and double-locking, forcing them into exile to
record this their eighth album. Over the past five years, their
beloved homeland in the Adrar des Ifoghas, a Saharan ain
range that straddles the border between north-eastern Mali and
southern Algeria has, in effect, been transformed into a conflict
zone, a place where nobody can venture without putting themselves
in danger and where war lords devoted either to jihad or
trafficking (sometimes both at the same time), have put any
activity that contradicts their beliefs or escapes their control
in jeopardy. Even though the 12 songs on this new record evoke
those cherished deserts of home, they were recorded a long way
away from them. And, as a result of this separation, at a time
when the political, and humanitarian situation in the
region has never been so critical, the feelings and the emotions
that the band managed to capture on record have never been so
vivid. In October 2014, making use of a few days off in the
middle of a long American tour, the band stopped off at Rancho de
la Luna studios in California's Joshua Tree National Park. The
place has become the favoured refuge of the stoner rock tribe.
Josh Homme and his Queens of the Stone Age were the first to make
it their hive, and since then, whether in use by P J Harvey or
the Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop or the Arctic Monkeys, neither the
mixing console nor the kitchen ovens have had a moment to cool
down. For Tinariwen, the geographical location of the studios -
lost in the middle of that horizontal desert, that mineral
immensity, where Man is reminded of his own insignificance in
ways that can only, in the end, either kill him or sublimate him
- proved to be particularly propitious in terms of creativity.
And the human climate was just as favourable. As session followed
session, musicians who know the place well dropped by to add
their own touch to that pre-industrial boogie which comes from a
world where only the essential and metaphysical passions of space
and time have any meaning. Such was the case of Matt Sweeny,
guitarist of fine pedigree (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Prince Billy and
Cat Power) and an avowed fan of the band. Kurt Vile, ex-member of
the duo War On Drugs, now spearheading a noisy indi-folk combo,
also took part in the debate. As did Alan Johannes,
multi-instrumentalist, sound engineer and producer of the first
few albums by Queens of the Stone Age, a band with whom Mark
Lanegan, the other guest on the album, has also been a singer.
From their angle, one might have expected all these contributions
to result in something pretty heavy, with those American guitars
coming into to reinforce the "ishumar" (name of the musical style
of which Tinariwen precursors) guitars of Ibrahim, Abdallah
Hassan and Elaga. In effect, lovers of those yet abrasive
riffs that are the band's signature won't be disappointed. But
neither will those who love the funky, danceable side of
Tinariwen, which comes through loud and clear courtesy of bassist
Eyadou and percussionist Sarid, a veritable rhythm machine in the
mould of Sly and Robbie. All that potential has been wonderfully
honed by the album's mixing engineer Andrew Schepps, who has
previously worked with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Johny Cash,
and Jay Z. That happy encounter between Tamasheks and rockers was
already in evidence back in 2011, with the involvement of Wilco
and TV On The Radio on the album Tassili, which was recorded in
the depths of the Sahara. It was as if those musicians, coming
from their world of high tech, leisure and entertainment, sought
to reinvigorate the way they do things by working with artists
who have been forced by necessity to reduce everything to its
essence, and who bear a different destiny. In that sense, Ibrahim
and his tribe restore meaning to an activity which has been
partially drained all existential significance. In a cultural
environment that has been overtaken by the petty and the
superficial, the members of Tinariwen fascinate because they
incarnate a salutary break and come across as the ultimate heroes
in the midst of an army of less puppets. Having said that,
in M'Hamid El Ghizlane they're heroes for real, so much so that
the youth of the area know how to sing their songs in the same
way that people in other parts of the world know how to sing the
Stones or Led Zep . It was there, in that oasis in southern
Morocco, close by the Algerian frontier, that the band set up
their tents for three weeks in March 2016 to record this eighth
album, accompanied now and then by the local musical youth in
question, or by a local Ganga outfit (a group of Berber 'gnawa'
trance musicians). The album is called Elwan ('The Elephants'),
not Exile On Main Street, though it fits nicely into that 'road
record' category nonetheless. There are road records just like
there are road movies. In American cinema, a road movie always
unfolds the same way. Characters travel from one place to another
in search of some truth, of a future might offer them some kind
of revelation. But they always end up reconnecting with their own
past, their origins. Of course, it's an impossible return,
because that past, those founding origins have been irrevocably
erased. It's the same for this record, so musically powerful and
yet poignant in human terms: every song evokes a land that can no
longer be found, a lost world, with all that this implies in
terms of emotional range, from nostalgia for a joyous past to the
tragic recent loss of a territory, and of the dream that it
nourished. The emotional 'bite' of that loss imbues some of the
songs by Ibrahim, such as 'Imidiwan n-akal-in' (Friends from my
country), 'Hayati' (My life) or 'Tenere Takhal' (What's Happened
to the Desert). It's in that last song that the famous elephants
of the album title make their appearance, an animal metaphor to
describe those 'beasts', whether militias or multinational
consortiums, who have trampled everything in their path:
kindness, respect, solidarity, ancestral traditions and the
values essential to life in the desert, where both the human and
ecological equilibriums are extremely fragile. But the songs
written by Abdallah, such as 'Sastanaqqam' (I Question You), or
those penned by Hassan, the deeply disturbing 'Ittus' (Our Goal),
also evoke a similar sense of helplessness and disempowerment.
The same goes for 'Nannuflay' (Fulfilled), written by Eyadou, one
of the 'kids' in the band; it's a song echoes that sense of
absolute crisis. Having said that, between the weariness of the
old fighters of the Touareg rebellion of the 1990s (Ibrahim,
Hassan, Abdallah) and the dynamism of a youth that's still
emerging (Eyadou, Elaga, Sarid, Sadam), you get a wonderfully
symbiotic mix. The meeting of two such disparate generations in
one band is relatively rare in today's musical world. In
Tinariwen, it's a meeting that celebrates, even more powerfully
might otherwise be the case, the capacity of music to make
experiences as intense and cruel as exile beautiful and, in some
ways, even attractive, experiences that would surely end up
destroying those who lived them, if this form of aesthetic
didn't exist.
