A new video from Tinariwen, a long-running bluesy psych-rock band hailing from the Sahara Desert region of Mali, appeared on okayafrica.com yesterday. They’ve been around since the early ‘80s and achieved recognition in Europe in the late ‘90s. They began enlarging their impression among American world-music fans with a string of three albums spanning from 2007’s Aman Iman to 2011’s wonderful Tassili, an album actually recorded outdoors in the desert, in a nod to the the band members’ lineage—they’re all Tuareg, a nomadic people whose nation transcends Northern Africa’s borders. Due to recurrent political strife, the band itself has experienced nomadic periods that directly mirror the history of their people - indeed, their story is among the most amazing and compelling in rock history.

Tinariwen’s own story burgeons with myth and mythos in their home country and beyond. Their tale is the stuff of legends. Founding member Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, grew up in desolation in Mali, where he witnessed his own father’s death at the age of four. Later, after seeing a western film, he built his first guitar from a bicycle wire, a stick and a tin can. the band was founded in the 1980’s in Tuareg camps in Lybia, where the nomadic peoples had relocated to find work and a new life away from their homeland of the Sahara. Disillusioned by the promises of Quaddafi at the time, the Tuareg became restless again and longed for home. But the interaction with city life yielded unexpected consequences, they became exposed to Western music—most notably the guitar-driven anthems of Jimi Hendrix and the American Blues—which they mixed with their own soulful dirges which they’d perform in the camps by the fire with battery-operated amps. When revolution broke out back in Mali, they left Lybia behind, hung up their guitars and picked up guns to fight for the Tuareg independence. When the dischord died down, the band returned to music, delivering songs imbued with aching beauty and lonesome poetry. Their music was bootlegged and traded around the region, earning them a devout following. Then in the late 1990s, they were discovered by Western musicians and for the first time, their songs left the Sahara and were introduced to the world. For the next ten years, the nomads now traveled the world, performing at nearly every notable festivals and venues around the globe, providing the world with a taste of the aching beauty and lonesome pleasures of Saharan assouf.

This video is a document of the Tassili recording sessions, and imparts a fine feeling for the sound of the album.
 

 
Their new album, due in a month and titled Emmaar, was recorded similarly, but in Joshua Tree National Park in California, due to conflagrations in Mali. A video was released in December for the song “Toumast TIncha,” and seems to have been shot entirely from a moving car—which you’d think would come off as a cop-out, but no, the effect, when paired with their music, is fittingly hypnotic.
 

 
The new video is for the song “Imidiwan Ahi Sigdim,” and is also a car-cam video, but it’s much more thought out and trippy—most of the action is in a screen-within-a-screen effect, taking place in the rear-view mirror. Trance out.