Tinariwen – Amatssou (Wedge 2023)

Things are becoming weirder and weirder if you’re a music lover in the present times. I was looking for a copy of Tinariwen’s new album since when it was released earlier this year. I ordered my copy last April through a bookstore who also sells records in Milan, and at a certain point I came back since no message for the order was sent to my phone trough SMS as I was told it would have happened.

Once at the bookstore, I canceled the order since the guy there told me that the Italian distributor for Wedge was not sending to the physical shops the CD version of their albums, and I don’t own a stereo system through which listen to vynils. At a certain point, Tinariwen came to Milan, near where I’m living, for a live exhibition, so I hoped to grab a copy of their album in that occasion, but I had to let it go since that night I had a special lession for my theatre workshop: in one week we would have been onstage so I needed to rehearse more.

Finally today I was skimming through the shelves of that bookstore again coming from a cinema, and, before Tool, i found out a section for Tinariwen – and the CD was there! I suppose the distributor changed his own mind, or maybe simply the physical CDs came from California where the label is located and the distributor needed to finally honor his commitment. It doesn’t matter anymore: Tinariwen’s last CD, Amatssou, that means ‘Beyond the Fear’, is now spinning on my old PC where I’m writing this review and I’m happy about the purchase. 

The story of Tinariwen is more adventurous than the story of how I obtained my copy of their last album, as it happens to many intriguing forms of art. All started when a young Ibrahim Ab Alhabib, orphan and exile in Algeria started listening to rai and chaabi music, along with Touareg melodies and the blues. He tried to reproduce such styles with a self-built guitar, with which he performed in Touareg refugee camps from the 1980s on.

At the end of the 1990s Ab Alhabib and his acquired friends and fellow musicians Alhassane Ag Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableine met at the Festival Au Désert in Mali Justin Adams, a musician who at the time was part of Robert Plant, the ex Led Zeppelin singer, band. The two produced Tinariwen’s first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (Wedge, 2001), and in few years, also thanks to the diffusion of Mali musicians in the Western world – the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré and Rokia Traoré amongst the many others – they became one of the best new sensations from that musical environment.

Tinariwen, as it happened to the most famous guitarist Ali Farka Touré, is the kind of group who produces almost always the same kind of records without becoming manieristic or cloying. It is obviously a matter of accents – as an example this last album sees an important presence of violins to flank the notorious electric guitars – but this music always sounds fresh and thrilling to the listener, maybe also because of the experience of the musicians involved.

Anyway, from Amassakoul (World Village, 2004), their second album and the one I listened to the most in the past years, and this last Amatssou, the evolution is evident. The production by Daniel Lanois (U2, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan among the many others) help sounds to be fresher and more vivid than in the past, and the many musicians and featured instruments involved – lute, pedal steel guitar, piano, banjo, violin – help the music to sound as renewed from its inside.

The album is divided in three parts by two interludes played by an African fiddle with only one string and this division helps the music to be more sharp and precise at the same time. Ken Alghalm, the opening track, is a three minutes ride that leads us in the middle of Tinariwen’s world. Tenere Den is the first track with the add of the violins, and as in many other occasions we hear the voice and the melody backing each other creating a nice and intriguing unison: when the voice leaves, the guitars and the violins are free to express themselves giving you an intense sense of freedom.

Obviously this is hypnotic music as the music produced by musicians coming from a desert can be. Not that much telluric as the music by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, but nonetheless psychedelic. Arajghiyine has as a base this nice interlocking between guitars and percussions, where melodies and rhythm mix together perfectly, whereas Tidjit with its almost limping strut represent at perfection the music of the band, thanks to a guitar sound that electrifies the air filling it with circular melodies.

Jayche Atarak is another immersion into the deepness of the desert’s vision, one of the most slowed down and relentless tracks of the entire album. Even the hand claps will give you that sense of needing to take a rhythm with your own body since the musical instruments aren’t enough. Imidiwan Mahitinam is a choral singing for the union of all Touareg people to give life to the revolution.

Ezlan is a song where at the beginning the violin creates a small wall of sound for the guitar to cling on it, and with moments of decline and expansion it procedes along the track creating an intense emotion into the listener. A guitar solo erupts from the sound mass creating a link between the Touareg music and the most classic American blues. Anemouhagh is driven by small percussions and a potent choir exalting another time spiritual unity for all Touaregs in order to prevent their soil to be exploited. 

Iket Adjen has another classic intro of electric guitar followed by percussions, a true trademark by this band, while the final Nak Idnizdjam, beginning also with a nice, long guitar solo, talks about the Touareg people once united and now dispersed “by this whirlwind of confusion”. Possibly this division and loneliness is what’s “behind the fear”, as the title of the album states. The Outro is for percussions and a female voice.

Far from being a product for the Western listener to consume, as it happened in the past decades where there was a need, at least during the 1980s, to prepare people to listen to new kinds of music, after the 1990s there was an original and sincere interest for styles coming from all over the world with their own specificities and characteristics, and Tinariwen are a vivid example of how a music group can be himself and at the same time mix his style with instruments coming from other parts of the world without misrepresenting himself.

We live times in which we’re almost forced to disappear, while at the opposite we need to learn from minorities how to rethink ourselves, our false privileges, and to ask ourselves what we really want. Music stories like the one of Tinariwen can help us, but also their music, with this psychedelia that can open our minds again – I wonder how they can sound live, after appreciating on me the effects of a live version of Riley’s In C – and let us free to use that openness for whatever we want.

A free gift maybe not that much welcomed due to the period in which we’re living and the tricks power uses against us, but nonetheless this gift is here for those who will be able to take advantage of it. Ethnic music is more than a music genre, is a state of mind. Experimenting with a tradition means starting with love and going wherever you want to go. And this is a lesson worth learning.