★Sahel Sounds
Enregistre Pour Yehia Le Marabout
Some of the most intense music we've ever heard from the Mali scene – a set that takes the older takamba rhythms, but gives them a propulsive feel from lots of fast percussion and guitar lines – all served up with little other instrumentation at all, so that the whole record's this long rhythmic jam that's mighty amazing all the way through! Notes are spare, but the intense sound is more than enough – and some of the rawest Saharan sounds we've ever stocked.
Taaritt
Amazing cosmic synth from late-80s Niger. An aural relaxation manual, somewhere between ambient library music and minimal wave, throwing ancient Saharan folk ballads deep into the future. Polyphonic analog synthesizers and drum machines interpret ancient Saharan folk ballads in an imagined science fiction future. A proposed relaxation guide, sonically lying somewhere between ambient library music and minimal wave. Recorded in Niger and France in the late 1980s and never before released.
La musique electronique du Niger
Mammane Sani Abdullaye's 'La Musique Electronique Du Niger' is a spellbinding side of organ pieces written and released on cassette in 1978 and plucked from obscurity a few years back by Sahel Sounds' Christopher Kirkley. Born to a relatively well-to-do family in Niger, Mammane was previously a UNESCO functionary and during one of his meetings came in contact with a Rwandan delegate with his Italian "Orlo" organ. He managed to persuade the delegate to sell it and came into possession of the firs…