Last year, the members of Etran Finatawa rode deep into the Sahara, set up a large, lean-to tent, built a fire, and spent three days recording, with occasional drop-in performances from friends and new acquaintances. It sounds idyllic, in a way, friends literally singing together around a campfire, letting ideas flow, keeping it casual. The resulting record certainly has a rustic, homespun character that reflects its origins, but there’s a lot going on inside this music. Unlike the rest of the wave of desert rock bands that have come out of the Sahara in the last decade, Etran Finatawa’s members are not all Tuareg; half of them are Wodaabe, members of another historically nomadic group with its own language, history and traditions.
At the time they were recording, the Sahara was turning red. With war in neighboring Mali, religious fighting in northern Nigeria to the south, revolution in Libya, and mounting economic hardship in the band’s home country of Niger, the band’s ostensibly peaceful surroundings in the desert were more like the eye of a storm. What this band’s music reflects is cooperation among members of different cultures whose ways of life are disappearing in the face of modernity, conflict, poverty, and the calcification of borders drawn hundreds of miles from population centers, more or less at random across the long-time travel routes of the people who have lived there for centuries.
The peril of the times calls for a certain immediacy in the music, which the recording conditions amply provide. The sound is as dry as the desert sand, and it can feel as though the music is being made right in the room with you as a result. Voices wailing at maximum power, clapping, and clicking percussion come through especially strongly, while the cycling guitars and other stringed instruments provide a sort of wire for everything to hang on. Some songs were written, others improvised or adapted from folk themes, and they vary considerably in tone. The in-your-ear vocals of “Eldam” cut sharply and have almost too much presence among the other elements, while “Im Raharan” features an almost droning vocal to go with the hypnotic guitar part that thrums beneath it.
Both pieces of music feel like creations of the moment, and they have analogs elsewhere in the 16-song tracklist, which intentionally jumbles all of the different tones captured in the sessions. The fully composed and arranged songs generally come across quite differently, and they are scattered across the album like plot points among action and exposition. Album closer “Toumast” is one of the finest of these, featuring guitars that circle endlessly while the percussion shifts up and down to alter the sense of urgency around what’s being sung in unison by the vocalists.
The details of the politics underlying the songwriting on this album may elude listeners who don’t speak the language (I am no exception there), but the way the recording emphasizes the traditional rhythms and the texture of the voices sends an accessible enough message about the importance of cultural memory. And the band’s very existence as a unit that features close collaboration among musicians from different ethnic backgrounds is its own statement on the conflict in the region; the politics here are at heart a politics of place, and the band headed to the desert to capture the place they consider home, even though they spend their lives moving through it rather than tied to any one piece of it.
