Tinariwen Live At Swallow Hill June 5th

Tinariwen are often associated with just one image: that of Touareg rebels leading the charge, machine gun in hand and electric guitar slung over the shoulder. The band ditch this cliché on their fifth album Tassili, and it’s for the best. The founding members abandoned their weapons long ago and on this new album they have engineered a minor aesthetic revolution by setting the electric guitar aside, though it’s the instrument which became their mascot and made them famous. Instead they give pride of place to acoustic sounds, recorded right in the heart of the desert — the landscape of their existence, the cradle of their culture and the source of their inspiration.

You might even call this radical move a return to the very essence of their art, a return which, paradoxically, has also opened the doors to some intriguing collaborations with members of TV On The Radio, Nels Cline (Wilco’s guitarist) or The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

There is some truth in that old cliché of the soldier-musician. In the 1980s, Ibrahim, Abdallah, Hassan, ‘Japonais’ and Kheddou began to play together in and around the town of Tamanrasset in southern Algeria. They would perform at weddings, baptisms or just simple youthful get-togethers. They then spent several years in the same military training camp in Libya before the Touareg rebellion broke out simultaneously in Mali and Niger and sent them out onto the field of battle in the southern Sahara. In parallel, their songs, recorded on cassettes scattered far and wide, helped to broadcast the message of a rebel movement that set out to promote the rights of nomadic people suffering under the arbitrary policies of repressive and distant central governments.

Over the years, the group (losing some of its original members and gaining new ones along the way) became a professional unit that toured the world, headlining at various important festivals including the Eurockéennes de Belfort in France, Glastonbury in the UK and Coachella in the US. Their albums Aman Iman(2007) and Imidiwan (2009) were eulogized by the media and attracted the praises of Robert Plant, Elvis Costello, Thom Yorke, Brian Eno and Carlos Santana. Nonetheless, this success, this universal recognition didn’t alter the essence or spirit of their musical style, which mixes the bitter sound of spiky guitars with the often pantheistic approach of lyrical poetry that celebrates the sacred union between a people and their environment, and is the reflection of painful collective circumstances.