Music from the country of Senegal, with a particular focus on recordings from Fouta Toro – the Sahelian region sitting on the border with Mauritania.
Starting off this new year with two new releases: Waande Kadde, dreamy acoustic Pulaar music from the villages of Fouta Toro, and Top WZN, synth, drum machines, and electric tidnit from the capital city of Mauritania. While they are immediately sonically different, they bear more similarities than one may suspect.…
On the last visit, in the fall, we spent a few days in Podor, a small colonial town that sits in the interior of Senegal on the banks of the river. It had been about two years and everyone was a bit older. A few people had passed, and a…
Yonta Hande - Njellu I take a taxi to "Seizieme" -- the sixth district. Nouakchott is divided up into neighborhoods, and this is one of the earlier nomenclatures before things got weird. The new suburbs have names like Basra and Falluja, inspired by the affinity for Arabic satellite TV channels.…
The cyber cafe is a fixture in the past years, as the internet boom has sounded across W. Africa. Memory cards, USB sticks, and cellphones -- the portable data kits to carry the digital identity -- demand spurious tweaking. The cyber is not just a port for internet connectivity, but…