WORLD
BY DAVID HUTCHEON
Imarhan
★★★★
Essam
CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
Fourth album from Tamanrasset Tuaregs out to bring the sounds of the city to the dunes.
How do you re-model the desert blues 25 years after Tinariwen brought Tuareg guitar music to Europe? Algeria’s Imarhan stand a little further down the current pecking order – below Mdou Moctar and Tamikrest – but that gives them latitude. “We took risks,” they say, perhaps not quite aware of what a leap into the dark this is. Unlike the others mentioned, Imarhan are city dwellers, as influenced by white noise as by open space. This creeps in: as fingers squeak on guitar strings on Ahitmanin, an ominous electronic drone fills the background; by the second track, Derhan N’Oulhine, the drone has become a pulse, nudging the band towards ecstatic take-off. That arrives on Tin Arayth, when the shredding of Moctar and the rhythms of Tinariwen collide and all brakes are released. As closing track Assagasswar fades out, we are left with a synthetic breeze, the sound of the 21st-century Sahara.