Kader Tarhanine is the musician that you don’t know about, but should. The “you” in question is the presumed readership of the blog, which with the wide reach and randomness of the internet could be really anyone, but would assume to exclude most Tuareg’s themselves – one of the contradictions in working across cultures, but alas.
Group Afous D’Afous is a six person guitar group from Tamanrasset, Algeria. The group is led by Kader Tarhanine, perhaps the most famous and preferred guitarist throughout the Tuareg diaspora over the past 5 years. His song “Tarhanine Tegla” (en: “My Love is Gone”) was one of those “viral” successes of the Bluetooth/Cellphone/Mp3 network of music trading (even Youtube, where the video has over one million views). The song, where he got his name, has a programed drum with a heavy bass kick that loops throughout, with a call and response lyrics dancing with an infectious electric guitar riff. The lyrics owe much to it’s popularity: Kader is heralded as a both a musician and a poet amongst Tuareg fans, where the past years have seen a blight of covers and embarrassingly poorly written songs (infuriating older guitarists, one who recently told me “our music was meant to convey a message, today the musicians barely know Tamashek, just know a few words like “tenere,” and make a song out of it”).
Kader Tarhanine and Afous D’Afous have become stars at home, and are by far the most famous Tuareg band in Algeria. They’ve recorded an album in 2015 that went on to fill all the cellphones from Sebha to Timbouctou, and have recorded several videos with quite high production value.
Which is all the more curious that in the current Western fascination of Tuareg music, where new albums seem to come out every week on record labels, the band seems to have been passed over – missed by (Western) labels*, curators, and just about every music journalist. On a personal note, we (being the larger “Sahel Sounds family that includes just about every musician we work with) kept waiting for this to be picked up by a Western label, and it wasn’t, so we contacted the band. Hopefully this release will help rectify this glossing oversite and set the record straight, as it were.
The single “Tarhanine Tegla” is now available on limited 7″. On the flip is the autotuned Maghrebi influenced “Tarhanam Toussasi.” The records are special old school offset printed fold over. The 7″ is available through the shop, through bandcamp, and just about every other digital platform.
*update: the band was produced in 2015 by the Algerian project Imzad, further identifying the group previously known as Kader Tarhanine as “Group Afous D’Afous”
