SOUNDTRACK: TINARIWEN-Tiny Desk Concert #184 (January 5, 2012).
Tinariwen are a band from northern Mali, whose members met in the training camps of Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Much has been written about them and their story, which is pretty amazing. I’m only going to talk about this Tint Desk Concert.
Typically, they play an interesting electric guitar kind of trance music. But for this one they were all acoustic. As Bob Boilen notes, they are his “favorite electric-guitar-based band on the planet.” But he says he was:
“initially worried and disappointed when I learned that it was coming to play the Tiny Desk as a trio carrying acoustic guitars. My heart sank a bit more when the three Tuareg musicians from the Sahara arrived in jeans and polo shirts instead of the beautiful, flowing robes I’d seen them wear on stage so many times.
But they switched clothes and they do not disappoint on acoustic guitar.
I don’t know their music all that well, but it feels like the acoustic nature of this show is even more soothing and trance inducing. The two acoustic guitars interweave–one playing lead (which is mostly hammered notes–not a “solo” per se) and the other strumming. The percussion is the sound of two hands rubbing, clacking (with a cigarette lighter) and pounding (for bass drum) a large gourd.
The songs tend to be almost looping. Like they could go on forever. There’s no real verse chorus structure that I can tell. It’s more of a meditative sound.
All of the vocals are in Tamashek and I have no idea what the songs are about.
On “Adounia” both guitarists sing and the voices sound very traditional, almost atonal. “Takkest Tamidaret” opens with a more conventional sounding guitar lick, but it’s all so quiet in the mix, that you can’t tell how much his fingers are moving. The lyrics are a bit slower, but still in that droning style. I love the way “Tenhert” has a a cool riff from the lead guitar–one that probably sounds more intense on electric guitar. He sing/speaks incredibly quickly. “Tahlamoyt” is a much slower song with the lyrics pretty much all spoken word.
The “Mali sound” is pretty distinctive and Tinariwen are great proponents of it, spreading it around the world for all to hear.
[READ: June 8, 2016] The Complete Peanuts 1995-1996
I was under the impression that these last few volumes of books would show a serious drop in quality. I had assumed that with the amount of product the Peanuts characters were sponsoring that these strips would be more cute. But that is far from true. I enjoyed this book as much if mot more than some of the other recent volumes.
I was also surprised to discover that I really enjoyed the Sunday cartoons more than the dailies. In the past I haven’t really gotten big laughs form the Sundays–it seemed like the big stories and jokes were in the dailies and the Sundays were unrelated one offs with varying degrees of punch. But I enjoyed a dozen or so in this book.
One of the major additions in this book is the inclusion of a slightly older Rerun. He is now mobile and even heading to kindergarten (I love that he is aging while the others aren’t). But rather than using Rerun for obvious cute child jokes (he’s no longer riding the back of his mom’s bike) Rerun is now making funny “outsider” observations about the world of Peanuts–he is constantly disenchanted with the way things are going and with the belief that people are always lying to him. There are also a ton of strips of him trying to shoot a basketball and failing miserably. Schulz has always tended to take an idea and run and run and run with it, but this one is pretty good for the number that he uses it. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 