Les Filles de Illighadad — Eghass Malan (Sahel Sounds)
Eghass Malan by Les Filles de Illighadad
Music put Illighadad on the map. Before Sahel Sounds released the LP Les Filles de Illighadad in 2016, the central Nigerien village was just a place way out in the country with a well and a few buildings. Now it’s a town with a well, a few buildings, and a search engine presence defined entirely by the fact that it is the home of a musical group that is quite unique within the Tuareg music scene.
Tuareg society has its gender prescriptions, and one of them is that guys play guitars. So when a video of a young woman playing electric guitar at a wedding went viral among his African friends in 2014, Sahel Sounds’ Christopher Kirkley got interested. He tracked her to Illighadad, where she and her extended family tended livestock, and recorded her. One side of Les Filles de Illighadad consisted of that guitarist, Fatou Seidi Ghali and a cousin, vocalist Talamnou Akrouni, playing propulsive songs sunk in their native Tamashek language. The other is a side-long example of tende, the musical style from which those songs sprang.
Tende shares its name with a drum made from pestles and goat skin; that drum, handclaps and voices sling rhythms and chants back and forth in the open-ended way that you might expect in a place where the music people make together is the town’s main entertainment. Tende is women’s music, and Ghali’s innovation is to play a form of it on what has been identified as a man’s instrument. In her capable hands, it’s anything but. The melodic ornamentation and hypnotic drone that arises from her insistent picking will sound familiar to anyone who has spent much time with the music of Tinariwen, Amanar or Mdou Moctar (amongst others), but her loping rhythms are tende-derived.
Eghass Malan documents what happened next. Ghali and Akrouni hit the road with another cousin, Mariama Assouan, and Ghali’s brother on second guitar. While on tour they checked into a German studio and recorded the music that had brought to European audiences. The open-air atmosphere and acoustic picking of the first LP has been replaced by the robust buzz of electric guitars driven by a calabash (gourd drum) and handclaps. On the title song, which opens the record, Ghali’s lead guitar unfurls almost lazily before the groove kicks in and two voices either ululate or harmonize with the lead. The songs reveal their tende roots in two ways; through their quick, hand-played grooves, which sound like they could stretch on all night, and in the interplay of the women’s voices.
Just who sings what isn’t credited, but it sounds like some of the leads get passed around. Other songs sport striking harmonies whose discordance allows you to perceive that several different voices are present even when they move in unison. The music is almost machine-like in its repetition, hypnotic and exciting but not too exciting; it sounds like it’s meant to keep people moving for a while, so there’s no point in wearing anyone out too soon. The spring in Eghass Malan’s stride is quite sustainable, and one hopes that Les Filles de Illighadad’s adventure is too. This is fantastic stuff, sturdy, gorgeous and indelible.
Shakespeare, (1597), Romeo and Juliet, Translated into Amazigh by Ahmed Adghirni, cover titling in Tifinagh script, Matabia Takatoul Al Watani, Rabat, 1995
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (1943), Le Petit Prince, Tamasheq translation, printed in the Tifinagh script, Translated by Abdelkader ben el Hadj Ahmed, Transcribed by Micheline Monchau, Printed by the Imprimerie Nationale, 1958, mainly distributed in Niger and Mali
