Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez (Music of Nige

"Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blues, and folk in the local Tuareg styles, at times entering into full-on electric guitar psychedelia. This music is performed with two electric guitars, a drum kit and a chorus of vocalists, and has been captured live in the city of Agadez in the Republic of Niger." (Sublime Frequencies)
Released by SF as a limited vinyl edition which quickly sold out, the raw sound here is thankfully light years away from the usually rather polished World Music productions. Play loud, please...

Group Inerane
"Guitars From Agadez (Music of Niger)" (2007)
Sublime Frequencies, SF034. LP.

01. Kuni Majagani
02. Awal September
03. Ano Nagarus
04. Tenerte
05. Nadan Al Kazawnin
06. Telilite
07. Tenere Etran
08. Ikab Kabau
09. Ashal Wali Tigeli
10. Kamu Talyat

Total time: 37:10 min

Re-upload. Thanks to the kind soul who originally ripped this album from vinyl and uploaded it!

Another winner from Sublime Frequencies! We're beginning to think with all this hidden music to be discovered and lost classics to be recovered, there's definitely no point in having so many new bands, we oughta just have some of them swap their gear in and just join the hunt for all this amazing music we miss out on...

But until then we've got the Sublime Frequencies fellas on the case, and this latest discovery has definitely got to be one of the best yet. Group Inerane are spearheading the Tuareg Guitar movement, inspired by the musicians who used this music as a political weapon in the Libyan refugee camps in the late eighties, early nineties. This is how the blues should sound. Groovy, intense, funky, emotional, dark, gorgeous, the guitars grinding and crunching and wailing, slithering and soaring, accompanied by chanted and sung vocals, that are perfectly woven into the lush fabric of the various guitar parts. The riffing is fluid, but also bit jagged and rough. The opening track is a killer. One of the most amazing and intense songs we've ever heard, worth the price of admission alone. Just guitar and vocals, chunky and propulsive, but also weirdly slippery and sinewy, the melody swaying back and forth from major key to minor key, an incredible hook and the riff, well, one of THE best riffs ever.

Most of the rest of the record is more a sort of African surf rock, fuzzy and twangy, with surfy guitar, soaring vocals, the whole thing wild and festive, jubilant and celebratory, but hold up, the final track on side one, "Nadan Al Kazawnin", is something else entirely, with its super distorted grimy guitars, a totally blown out in the red production, the riff looped and hypnotic, the vocals intense and heartfelt, the whole song howling and buzzing, sounding as gorgeously fucked up and raw as some experimental indie avant noise group, the guitar is indescribable, incendiary and white hot, all tangled up with the vocals, and bathed in distortion, wouldn't be out of place on some super limited CD-R... Totally amazing.

Aquarius Records

"Guitars from Agadez" is the second of two recordings of extraordinary electrified guitar music from various parts of the Saharan diaspora recently issued by Sublime Frequencies. Like Group Doueh's startling Western Saharan fusions of Hendrix and Sahrawi music, Group Inerane will be filed under 'ethnic' music, and indeed they are strongly related to traditional musics, in this case Tuareg music from Agadez in northern Niger. But setting aside the trademark feminine North African ululations which explode whenever things really get going, these discs sound not unlike vintage Sun City Girls: amplified, turbulent, complex and abstract, while at the same time hard and funky. In other words. as 'modern' as anything made in Europe or America today.

Tuareg guitar music was born when these nomads of the Sahara, inhabiting a vast desert area spanning parts of Mali, Niger and Algeria, were exiled to refugee camps in Libya during political unrest in the early 1980s. Amplified guitars, songs containing banned political commentary and bootleg tapes all became a cultural and political rallying point for performers like Abdallah Oumbadougou, who also hails from Niger, and the better known Tinariwen, from north eastern Mali.

Those familiar with Tinariwen will recognize the sound here, but Hisham Mayet, who also made the terrific DVD of music from Niger released by Sublime Frequencies (featuring a performance by Group Inerane [watch a clip here at Youtube]), gives a rougher, more lo-fi sound to the group, which threatens to distort and at times disappear entirely in a manner refreshing after the slickness that still dominates so-called World Music recording.

Marcus Boon, The Wire