Tishoumaren, the desert rock of the northwestern Sahara – music that blends Tuareg, blues and rock traditions – carries a heavy legacy. It emerged from the crises of the nomadic lifestyle caused by the droughts of the 1970s, collaged by young, hopeless men: the word derives from the French expression for “unemployed”, and these were exactly the musicians who formed the band Tinariwen in 1979 came together, who founded the genre and made it internationally accessible 30 years later. Boys who had to watch their parents’ execution, refugees. They found work in the desert, in military training camps sponsored by the Libyan dictator Gaddafi.
While members of Tinariwen were still fighters in the Tuareg uprising in Mali in 1990, the younger generation knows chaos and tumult, but they are not soldiers. Imarhan, from the Algerian oasis town of Tamanrasset, emerged with verve in 2016 in an attempt to give this generation a voice of their own in the desert rock tradition. In the meantime, these attempts have turned into direct action: the group has been building the first professional recording studio in their hometown since 2019, thus connecting many local musicians to a real scene.
ABOOGI is evidence of this new community, but also expands it beyond genre and language borders into the global: songwriter Gruff Rhys sings in Welsh, the Sudanese oud player Sulafa Elyas contributes Arabic verses. The themes on this record remain politically ablaze, but the sound that this group finds is almost sacral and surprisingly relaxed in its gentle groove.
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