Tamikrest, between heritage and strategy

Toumastin or Saharan rock

Paris 

22/04/2011 - 

In Kidal, at the start of the Mali desert, each musician is to a certain extent a child of the Tinariwen, the engine of the Touareg scene. In Toumastin – their second album – Tamikrest acknowledge their roots and reveal more than a glimpse of their ambitions. RFI Music interviewed Ousmane, the group’s pillar and one of its singers.

RFI Music: How do you see yourself in relation to the indispensable group Tinariwen?
Ousmane: Tinariwen’s musicians have done something huge for our community: they’ve showcased our people just about all over the world, spoken about our problems, about our situation, about losing our land. What they did was important. Now it’s important that another group of young Touaregs borrow the road they took and become the future of this music, so that it can evolve and be kept alive at the same time.

What was your aim in this new album that has a sound that’s different, carefully produced and quite sculptural?
You must always aim at climbing up a step, like a staircase. Make something a little more modern than before. In reality, it’s about the artists’ and producer’s strategy. A way of playing that’s a bit different, mixing the sound a bit differently to produce a different sound. We exchanged a lot of ideas with Chris Eckman, our producer and friend. He gave us suggestions to improve songs: increase the hi-hat cymbals a little, extend the music’s atmosphere, make use of instruments in another way…

What made you decide to become a musician?
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a diplomat even though I loved music a lot. But it was destiny that decided. In Tinzaouaten, the village I come from, on the border of Algeria and Mali, I started studying in a non-government school financed by towns in France. After my first term there, I went to Kidal where I found myself confronted by racism. There was a difference between us and the others, between red and black skins. People should claim their rights even if agreements have been signed. Until 2006 the situation wasn’t stable, and many people left the area because they were afraid that it would be like it was before, that the government would send in the army. It was difficult to do what I wanted to do in such conditions. The aim was to defend the Touareg cause, to make known the kind of oppression we lived under. And with music you can express everything you want to say.

Has the group had any decisive meetings that have enabled you to progress through certain steps?
In 2008 we were invited to the Festival in the Desert in Essakane, Mali’s biggest festival. As usual we didn’t have anything else to do except play music. So after getting up in the morning and drinking tea, we played the guitar. People who were in the tent in front of ours came over to take a look and to play with us. They were musicians from Dirt Music [Australian-American rock group – editor’s note]. We spent three days together and they went on stage with us. A year later, they decided to do an album with us, BKO, in 2009. We knew Kidal’s small studios, but we’d never had the chance to record in a professional studio. We accepted immediately and we went to Bamako to collaborate with them. And six months later, they decided to produce our own album Adagh.

What memory do you have of your first concert in Europe?
Above all it’s the first concert in Stuttgart, Germany that’s engraved in my memory. The public’s welcome impressed me. I often asked myself how people were going to react because we sing in our mother tongue. But I felt that they understood that we had something to say, a message to transmit in our music. Before the tour I already knew that we had to write a booklet to go with the CD where our songs were translated into French and English.

In the booklet as on the album’s cover, everything’s written in Tiffinagh. Do you use Tiffinagh when you’re writing songs?
Each artist has their own way of composing, of writing their songs. For me it doesn’t come little by little. I don’t have the habit of writing down songs on a piece of paper to talk about a topic. It comes to me as a message, directly. Everything’s in my head. Actually I always go to a place that’s completely empty and silent, where there’s nothing to disturb me and where I’m completely alone with my own problems. It’s at that moment that I find my lyrics and I compose right there.

Do you remember the first time you discovered a guitar?
Yes I remember it very well. It was an acoustic guitar and I was very young. The guitar was brought by ex-rebels and it was the only guitar in the village. I wanted to touch it right away. Almost four years later, in about 1998-99 at my school, we were having a little ceremony for the end of the school year. We found a guitar to play some songs about the results of ignorance. From that moment, I played it whenever I could. I got my first guitar in 2000-2001 which my brother bought me in Algeria. I started playing it all the time. Sometimes it even prevented me from sleeping because I had a note in my head that I had to find on the guitar.

Tamikrest Toumastin (Glitterhouse/Differ-Ant) 2011
In concert on 22 June in Paris at the Point Ephémère

Bertrand  Lavaine

Translation : Julie  McKay Gallet