Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
In the tiny Nigerien scrubland village of Illighadad, a woman named Fatou Seidi Ghali snuck away with her brother’s guitar, taught herself how to play and, in the process fused male and female Tuareg musical customs into a hypnotizing blend of driving rhythms, dreamy guitar, and enchanting polyphonic vocals sung in the Tuareg language.
The Tuareg people are nomads who live throughout the Sahara; musically, they are known for their rural folk guitar as well as tende, a style of communal music that is also the name of the goatskin-covered drum used to create it. Tende is traditionally performed by young women, while the region’s guitar music is the bastion of men. Guitar, however, is a comparatively new addition, having entered Tuareg tradition in the ‘70s when young men living in exile in Libya and Algeria discovered the instrument and eventually brought it back to the villages with them.
Les Filles de Illighadad is an all-female Tuareg group and Eghass Malan is this particular configuration’s first album; Ghali herself is one of only two female guitarists in Niger. On the album’s opener and title track “Eghass Malan,” the intermingling voices (which at times incorporate yodeling) summon the vibrant, celebratory spirit of a live tende performance. Handclaps, also crucial to tende, are prominent throughout the album, an additional form of percussion that complements the swells of desert guitar.
By merging the timeless tradition of tende with the sonic possibilities of guitar, the music of Les Filles de Illighadad make a striking generational leap from the ancestral sounds of their rural community. Riding on waves of meditative riffs and the percussive power of the tende and calabash, the resonant voices on this album are echoes of pre-modern life, reverberating into the 21st century.
