Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez Volume Three (Sublime Frequencies)
Group Doueh - Beatte Harab (Sublime Frequencies)
It’s a shame how often albums like the newest from Group Inerane and Group Doueh get classified with the lamentable genre tag “world music.” The term itself establishes a cultural binary--America/modern Western civilization standing across some imaginary line from everybody else--which is divisive at best and more often represents a condescending stylistic ghetto into which the West places all it considers foreign. What we do with that categorization varies. Many simply ignore that which has been presented to them as an empirical other. Some are willing to embrace another culture’s artistic offerings but only when a more familiar element has been forced upon it (i.e. the quasi-New Age recordings Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan did for Peter Gabriel’s label, or the ongoing appropriation of Australian Aboriginal instruments by whatever could be said to exist of a hippie subculture at this point in time). There is a smaller minority still who would prefer the music of different cultures stripped of Western elements, the type of listener who might praise the rawness of a field recording or the aesthetic purity of more traditional musicians--as if these groups existed in some sort of cultural fortress, willfully isolated from the “corrupting” influence of the West; as if these notions of a pure and undiluted culture were not a patronizing imposition. One might even suggest that the grouping of both Group Inerane and Group Doueh into a single review is the product of some sort of short-sighted Western reductionism, since the two groups share little directly in common aside from a record label and a home in the Sahara desert. But imbued in these seemingly casual similarities are cultural undercurrents that bridge the divides of East and West, of ancient and of modern.
Much has been made of Group Inerane’s role in the development of the “desert blues”--a shorthand for the distinctly North African combination of influences which coalesce into a sound characterized by hypnotic interlocking guitar acrobatics, driving percussion, and group vocals--coming out of Mali and Niger over the past several decades. Other Tuareg groups like Tinariwen have achieved success in recent years with a sound which, while slightly more restrained than much of Group Inerane’s more frantic material, is no less compelling. Looking back even further, many would point to artists like Ali Farka Toure as early proponents of the sound--which is an accurate assessment in the sense that he was among the first to garner widespread success with traditional North African music played on Western instruments such as guitars, but fails to consider that such artists weren’t attempting to provide some sort of aesthetic genesis through a self-conscious mélange of influences. Theirs is work which belongs to a more extended tradition, but like many traditions rooted in the more distant reaches of history--from agriculture to warfare to modes of transit--contemporary tools gradually become incorporated into the method.
The latter two of the three aforementioned traditions are important to consider when examining Group Inerane’s work, as the band is comprised of Tuaregs, a Saharan group whose unbroken millennia-long nomadic lifestyle has come into direct and often violent conflict with colonial and post-colonial governments whose existences are predicated on the rigidity of borders and strict control over the movements of people. It is undoubtedly a mistake to conflate an artist and their craft too literally--when art becomes too direct a parallel to life, art itself, as an independent, subjective act of creation, becomes subsumed and destroyed by the very same objective situations which may have inspired it. To ascribe art’s power solely to the circumstances of its creation sells short not only the artist but the work itself. So while there may be a temptation to hang the band’s aesthetic character around the neck of their ethnic identity, theirs is a sound that’s made as much in spite of their background as it is because of it.
Guitars From Agadez Volume Three is imbued with a hardscrabble determination, a leaner, darker version of their sound than was presented on their first release. The change in tone is hardly surprising, considering the circumstances surrounding each recording. The first album, the band’s initial exposure to a worldwide audience, was a raucous affair, a careening mixture of distorted, bluesy guitar and ecstatic group ululation recorded at a wedding celebration. Group Inerane’s follow-up album (the second volume in the Guitars From Agadez series featured a different band, the equally impressive Group Bombino), however, was recorded after Adi Mohamed, one of the band’s guitarists, was killed in a gun battle with the Nigerian military, an exchange that lead guitarist and vocalist Bibi Ahmed barely escaped. A sense of solemnity pervades the album. The songs are anchored in mournful minor keys and never really indulge in the sort of flashy instrumental work of the band’s preceding release. But, like the band’s other material, the musicians work in spite of life’s hardships, never surrendering to grim fatalism. Theirs is an inviting sound, a pulse as steady as a heartbeat, a study of darkness and light. They are a group so attuned to their collective aesthetic goal that no outside force, no matter how much it might seep into the music, ever takes the reins.
The work of Western Sahara’s Group Doueh might at first seem less battered by oppression’s iron fist. It’s an easy presumption to make, and not entirely untrue. Nobody in the band is taking up arms against a government, much less dying as a result--Doueh, the band’s leader, runs a cassette duplication shop to supplement the band’s income from playing wedding receptions. Unlike Group Inerane’s album, Group Doueh’s contains no references to any sort of strife, political or otherwise. But despite less of a David-and-Goliath quality to the music, the band’s work still bears the distinctive fingerprints of the fissures left in the wake of Spanish colonialism’s retreat; subsequent power grabs by Morocco and Algeria; and the ensuing civil warfare, displacement, and oppression of native groups which has pervaded the country for the past thirty-five years.
It’s rarely accurate to paint a single individual or their work as a sort of social microcosm, but many seemingly opposing elements are reconciled by the band leader’s work, elements brought face-to-face by cultural and political developments of the 20th Century’s latter half. Bootleg cassettes of Jimi Hendrix albums made their way down from the Iberian peninsula in the latter days of Spain’s presence in Western Sahara, recordings which left the impressionable young Doueh with the drive to incorporate the guitar playing of his American hero into his own music. The subsequent cross-cultural blend was one that might seem incongruous on paper: effects-laden electric guitars, keyboards, and drum machines intermingling with traditional instruments like the tinidit and the ardin; the hardened secular identity of Western rock and roll grafted upon traditional Muslim ceremony by devout practitioners; a career arc that has taken the band from the wedding tents of Dakhla to the world stage. Much like a fledgling nation crafting a nascent identity, Group Doueh combines their borrowed elements so seamlessly that ideas of “fusion” hardly ever seem relevant.
While even the title of the band’s previous album, Guitar Music From The Western Sahara, placed strong emphasis on both the choice of instruments and a sense of regional cultural identity, the newest treads on distinctly different territory. Most immediately noticeable is the quality of the recording. Whereas Beatte Harab’s predecessor relied on songs selected from self-recorded cassette tapes, conveying upon the music what might politely be referred to as a lo-fi aesthetic, the newest album was recorded in a single session, a choice which helps to refine the sound without smoothing its rough edges--which is not to say the music is quite as unrestrained as the band’s earlier material.
Like Group Inerane’s newest, Beatte Harab is slightly more subdued, with less emphasis on guitar and keyboard. Unlike Group Inerane, who play singularly rhythmic music on widely familiar instruments, Group Doueh layer intricately polyrhythmic passages atop each other, with melodic passages darting around each other, locked in an elaborate dance whose steps might not be immediately recognizable. Additionally, the manner in which Group Doueh utilizes their instrumentation both obscures the methodology of each individual performer and strengthens the core of their interplay. What is most noticeable, though, is not the manner in which rough Western rock and roll aesthetics intermingle with Western Saharan traditional music, but the way that the band internalizes and reconfigures those elements through a filter of tradition rather than simply imitating the former or grafting it upon the latter.
Both albums provide an excellent representation of the struggle of artists in developing nations to establish an aesthetic, unique to their circumstances, which can be afforded a wider appreciation devoid of condescension or segregation into a binding stylistic straight jacket. With access to information blanketing the globe more thoroughly each day, ideas of cultural identity as a fixed, monolithic unit become increasingly outmoded. Though I’m hesitant to turn into some pro-globalization techno-utopian, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that now, more than ever before, individuals worldwide are afforded greater access to the raw conceptual materials upon which an identity can be constructed and honed. Both Group Inerane and Group Doueh demonstrate just this: like vines reaching a tree’s heights by coiling around its trunk, the artists embark on their creative paths through the understanding that the sacred and the profane, the familiar and the foreign, the new and old, are inexorably linked. Like the desert in which each group resides, the creative process is simultaneously ephemeral and immutable, subject to life’s daily machinations but ultimately impervious to them.