Search - Various Artists :: Ikewan: Tuareg Memories

Roots music from the Sahara

Pink Noodle | Duncanville, TX USA | 07/19/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A marvelous recording of real roots music sung by Tuareg musicians of the Saharan region of north Africa. Most are focused on unadorned solo and ensemble vocals, accompanied by percussion and drums, occasioanally by spike fiddle. No guitars, no electricity. This is the real deal.



The record label says: The desert represents both a concrete and an abstract reality, in the sense that it is a natural barrier surrounding an area where the harshness of daily life can cut one off. But it is also a mythical space untrodden by man, a place for spiritual exploration, and an essential cornerstone in the collective unconscious of the Tuaregs, whose culture is transmitted entirely by words of mouth. Ikewan is the testimony in poetry and music firstly of the ancestral values of a threatened people, but also of the gradually disappearing collective memory of the Tassili n'Ajjer area.



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