New video: Tinariwen

TINARIWEN ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM ELWAN OUT FEBRUARY 10th

Watch a Video For “Tenere Taqqal” here.

The new album Elwan by Tinariwen could well have been called Exile on Main Street.  Others have already thought of that, but the idea is apt. As is the painful paradox, if you consider that while Tinariwen were criss-crossing the globe on their recent triumphant tours, the frontiers that encircle their desert home were closing and forcing them into exile to record their new album Elwan.

Released on February 10th on Wedge, the band have recently unveiled a dazzling animated video for the track Tenere Taqqal. The word Ténéré means empty land or desert in Tamashek. The clip, directed by Axel Digoix, vividly depicts the contrast between the desert's lack of hospitality and the love its inhabitants feel towards it, the Tuareg spiritual world and the tenacity this ethnic group needs to survive and keep moving forward, upstream.

In recent years, Tinariwen’s homeland, a Saharan mountain range between north-eastern Mali and southern Algeria, has been transformed into a conflict zone. While the songs on the new record evoke those cherished deserts of home, they were recorded a long way away in two distinctive bursts.  

In 2014 the band stopped at Rancho de la Luna studios in the desert of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.  While location proved particularly propitious in terms of creativity, the human climate was just as favorable, as musicians dropped by to add their own touch. Guitarist Matt Sweeny (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Prince Billy and Cat Power), Kurt Vile, musician Alan Johannes, who produced Queens of the Stone Age, a band with whom Mark Lanegan, the other guest has been a singer. All of it honed by engineer Andrew Schepps, who has worked with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Johny Cash, and Jay Z. Two years later in M’Hamid El Ghizlane, an oasis in southern Morocco, near the Algerian frontier, the band set up their tents to record, accompanied by the local musical youth and a Ganga outfit (a group of Berber ‘gnawa’ trance musicians). 

The resulting album is called Elwan (‘The Elephants’), not Exile On Main Street, though it fits nicely into that ‘road record’ category. In American cinema, a road movie always unfolds the same way. Characters travel in search of some truth or revelation. But they always end up reconnecting with their own past. Of course, it’s an impossible return, because that past has been erased. It’s the same for this record, so musically powerful and yet poignant: every song evokes a land that can no longer be found, with all that this implies in terms of emotional range, from nostalgia for a joyous past to the tragic recent loss of a territory, and of the dream that it nourished. 

Additionally, the band return to Europe in the autumn of 2016. The full list of dates is as follows:

19 OCTOBER 2016 - AURILLLAC, FRANCE: AURILLAC THEATRE

29 OCTOBER 2016 - M'HAMID, MOROCCO: TARAGALTE FESTIVAL

04 NOVEMBER 2016 -  LEEDS, UNITED KINGDOW: BELGRAVE MUSIC HALL

05 NOVEMBER 2016 - KENDAL, UNITED KINGDOM: BREWERY ARTS CENTRE

06 NOVEMBER 2016 - MANCHESTER, UNITED KINGDOM: BAND ON THE WALL

09 NOVEMBER 2016 - LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM: ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

11 NOVEMBER 2016 - BERLIN, GERMANY: VOLKSBÜHNE

17 NOVEMBER 2016 - BASEL, SWITZERLAND: KASERNE

18 NOVEMBER 2016 - BOLOGNA, ITALY: LOCOMOTIV CLUB

21 NOVEMBER 2016 - PARIS, FRANCE: LE BATACLAN

22 NOVEMBER 2016 - GRENOBLE, FRANCE: LA BELLE ELECTRIQUE

23 NOVEMBER 2016 - LYON, FRANCE: L'EPICERIE MODERNE

24 NOVEMBER 2016 - ARLES, FRANCE: CARGO DE NUIT

26 NOVEMBER 2016 - MOURENX, FRANCE: FESTIVAL MOURENX