This fantastic album features live ‘stream of consciousness’ recordings of Agali Ag Amoumine, a griot (a West African storyteller/singer who is a repository for oral tradition) from Timbouctou, who plays in a distinctive style called Takamba, which is essentially a droning electrified guitar, or in this casea more lo-fi electric 3 string lute called a terhardent, accompanying himself with a simple haunting rhythm on a calabash, which is a sort of hollowed out gourd used as percussion.
Fans of the Sublime Frequencies series, especially Group Inerane, Group Bombino, and the other sort of African desert blues groups will find much to love here, as will folks into hypnotic droned out ragas, as Amoumine unfurls glorious gouts of fuzzed out steel string buzz, all anchored by that simpler percussion, all accompanied by Amoumine’s emotive vocals, the result is a droned out desert blues, mesmerizing and trancelike, the ‘guitar’ playing incredible, wild squalls, flurries of notes, warm shimmering buzz, the sound almost looped sounding at times as Amoumine locks into a groove, and while the sides are separated into songs, the whole record plays like one epic continuous psychedelic desert trance jam. The lp also comes with a bonus 7”, the A side featuring a much more mellow, acoustic version of the sound found on the album proper, accompanied by a handful of female vocalists, some of them perhaps children, changing the vibe of the sound completely, while the B side is still acoustic, but is just as frenzied and frantic, droney, tranced out and psychedelic as the electric version.
Although there’s a track-listing, neither the LP or the bandcamp page divide it up into separate songs. 20 minutes burners. enjoy!

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