Tags: Psychedelic Rock

Review: The Mdou Moctar mixtape series started in 2021. It is music made from sounds captured in the back of a van while on tour including field recordings, cell phone voice memos, interview clips, conversations and more. The Niger EPs now continue on that theme and look closely at the roots of the band, which lay in long bus rides across West Africa sitting next to people and talking about music. As such the music here is solely from recordings in Mdou Moctar's home country of Niger between 2017 and 2020 when the band was at weddings, picnics, rehearsals, and impromptu house concerts.

Review: Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg, Niger musician best known for his personal sound; he calls it Tuareg guitar music, drawing on styles like takamba and assouf. His music was originally circulated not via the internet, but rather an informal trade network of memory sticks and mobile phones in the Sahel region of North Africa. This musical scarcity captured the imagination of the net-based musical audience at large, following Moctar's formation of a four-piece band and emergent touring schedule aided by motorcycle, not to mention his demo music being leaked on a compilation documenting the cellphone based music of the Sahel in the early 2010s. 'Niger EP. Vol. 2' tops up the artist's latest EP series, laying down a further four entrancingly electric songs recorded at various weddings, picnics and house concerts.

Review: Famous as the nephew of the world famous sitarist Ravi Shankar, Ananda Shankar carried the torch by contributing several greats to the continuing tide of prog rock and Western electronica. One such project was Sa-Re-Ga Machan, first released in 1981, and which lent a jungle-safari theme to the already established electronic rock fusions he'd laid down on his earlier self-titled record. Seguing through rollicking, schools-out psychedelic odysseys, not to mention humid, wonderfully sublime tropical soundscapes on which we can't tell what's synthetic and what isn't, this is an worthy new reissue from Life Goes On; worth every penny.