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Friday 27 February 2015

Phoning It In

Who could resist an album called "Music From Saharan Cellphones"? Not me, certainly. Nor should you, not when it means you can dig some highly groovy grooves by paying a mere $5 on Bandcamp.

As the bumpf on the website explains "In much of West Africa, cellphones are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knock-off cellphones house portable music collections". The good folks at Sahel Sounds have done us all a favour by scouring those phones and uncovering some real corkers.

"Alghafiat" - Amanar

"Abandé" - Yeli Fuzzo

Both those artists are from northern Mali. Head north-west from there and you pitch up in Western Sahara, home of Mariem Hassan. George at Jim McLean's Rabbit has been enthusing about one of her videos that we featured the other day, as he is a generally sound man and it was his birthday earlier in the week, I thought we would treat you to one of hers as well. Belated happy birthday, George.

"Sbar" - Mariem Hassan

Is it just me, but does the guitar riff on "Alghafiat" sound like a slowed down version of this?

3 comments:

  1. We have to do SBAR (Situation,Background, Assessment, Recommendations) Reports following incidents at work. Good to see that Mariem has written a song about them

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  2. Irresistible indeed Ernie. And - as they say - if you enjoyed that - you may like to dip into the current Songhoy Blues release.

    Great blog by the way.

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  3. That's a great fuzzy-scuzzt guitar sound on Alghafiat. And thanks for the plug

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