Hama – Houmeissa

Houmeissa by Hama Hama, real name Mouhamadou Moussa, make some undeniably forward thinking music. He first started playing when he was gifted a Yamaha PSR-64, an interesting and now very hard to find keyboard, that had the ability to make programmed beats and play in "Arabic Scales" or quarter tones.…

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Hauka, music for the spirits

Mamoudou Amadou Seini Lingo & Group - Song for Water Djinn Seini Lingo & Group - Captain Salama I come to Niamey looking for the supernatural. Fresh off speaking at a conference for the centennial of Jean Rouch, I'm inspired by this body of work, and I dedicate a week…

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Radio Niger with a little distortion

  Happy 2017, and onto a new year. Stumbled across this beautiful piece of technology in Niamey last month. The masons were busy working on a friends house, and the distorted wail was amplified by the concrete room that was slowly being constructed around it. The mason informed me that…

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Mohamed Barky, synth from Niger

It's been quiet around here lately as we've been doing this and that, but there's still so much to share in the archives! Today's tracks come from a mysterious cassette from Djadje, one of Niamey's last cassette vendors at the Niger's Grande Marche (there are two - the other vendor…

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lost and found

On one of my visits to Niger, Mamman Sani gave me a box of cassette tapes. I digitized a few and promptly forgot about the rest. In the piles of media and recordings collected, they went from one archive to another. I recently had a chance to revisit them and…

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