Music From Saharan Cellphones

Apparently there’s a map somewhere within the web that depicts continental Africa, its terrain cut up and divided amongst various music labels, the likes of Awesome Tape From Africa and Sublime Frequencies are apparently the large shareholders of this topographical sound carve up. Said labels and others, trawl Africa’s regions and cultures for fresh and untapped sounds for hip Western ears: sounds that come from the source, with notions of authenticity and without musicians that have been transplanted into some state of the art Western recording studio. These are sounds for Africans that intrepid Western musicologists with passion have unearthed. To the list of labels Sahelsounds can be added.

This carve up has the potential to be haunted by the ghosts of colonialism and imperialism. We now have cultures as commodity resources being exploited and mined for Western cultural capital ends. Of course the above mentioned map may very well only be myth.

But then, myth or not, there are music labels and compilers traveling Africa to sauce some of Africa’s rich musical resources, along with nation states and multi national companies. What lies on the African continent is heavily sought after. There are now more international players looking to get some of the African action with the emergence of China, India and Brazil as major economies to compete with the old imperial economies of the West.

But cultural capital and the consumption of it is a Western plaything. A new music pusher is Sahelsounds, which set up in 2009 with the intent of exploring the “musical phenomena of the Sahel region of West Africa”. The labels first release was Music from Saharan Cellphones vol. 1, which is essentially a collection of music that caught the compilers ear whilst they travelled the West Sahel region.

The title derives from the utilised means of information sharing in many parts of West Africa; as Africa’s landline internet perpetration is so poor and the no-fixed-abode lifestyle of many inhabitants, many people use cellphones for information transfer. Initially a tape release it’s now available as a digital download.

Contained between the spools of Music from Saharan Cellphones vol, 1 is an assortment of the musical delights of the Western Sahel belt. Touareg desert blues with its spidery guitar, Moroccan chaabi festive sounds along with D.I.Y. beats and hip-hop lauding rags to riches are amongst some of the styles that Music for offers up. It’s a scintillating collection that grasp many regional sound and lays them down together, like regions lying next to each other in the sand: often it’s only that tracks are laced with lo-fi distortion that ties them together.

Must of the music sounds like it has been recorded in rough n’ ready studios with feeling and excitement of low budget, lo-fi commitment to the moment. And amongst other things its this spontaneity that makes this music so appealing, many of the tracks here are classifiable as African pop/chart songs, but they lack the glossy production prerequisites required for chart success in the West.

Music from Saharan Cellphones vol, 1 has musical styles as old as sand dunes whilst others are new mutant urban genres adapted from exposure to hip-hop and recent Western technologies. Either way, a unique musical palate and peek into another culture is offered up: music for African ears brought to the West by intrepid cartography. The only thing missing from this compilation is an alert from the compiler: people of the Western Sahel region are getting fucked over by hunger, desertification and the prying interests of major state and corporation looking to carve the place up.