SIM Cards from Northern Mali

Podcast
by Thomas Burkhalter

Christopher Kirkley offers on his MP3-blog Sahelsounds a great variety of music from Northern Mali. He frequently visited the city of Kidal where today French, Malian and African troops are trying to push back Islamist rebels, and where musicians recently were forbidden to perform music. Kirkley collected music that people in this region listen to and share on their mobile phones, and he recorded singers and musicians. He challenges outdated concepts of ethnographic fieldrecording and documentation. And he offers a wild mix of autotuned DIY-pop and unplugged music. Enjoy our first podcast in the new norient series on MP3-blogging.


Film

Trailer for I Sing the Desert Electric, a short film of electronic based musical phenomena occurring from Mauritania to Northern Nigeria. A film by Christopher Kirkley.


Albums

«From dreamy Niger guitar ballads, Bamako club juke, to hi energy Moroccan child Raï – with a focus on the Autotuned DIY creations circulating the desert.» Sahelsounds produced severall albums. Buy downloads online, and/or order vinly. Support the musicians of Northern Mali in buying the album Songs for the North Country!

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Cover-Art

Mdou Moctar - Anar
LAILA JE T'AIME
Music from Saharan Cellphones
Music from Saharan Cellphones Vol. 2

Art

The Portland Museum of Modern Art showed Christopher Kirkley‘s exhibition «Azawad Libre! New Media and Imagined Geographies in the Sahel», from November 18th to December 15th 2012. Kirkley exhibits his travels in this multimedia showcase, exploring a flourishing intersection of folk art, computers, and cell phones through the Sahel, and the political implications of these new forms of expression. Kirkley uses these words to describe the exhibition: «Examining the rich content of the digital artifacts which circulate through the networks of the Sahel, Azwad Libre! considers not only the roles of new media and democratization of creative tools, but the beauty of uninhibited inspiration.»

 «Azawad Libre! New Media and Imagined Geographies in the Sahel»
 «Azawad Libre! New Media and Imagined Geographies in the Sahel»

Biography

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern (Switzerland). He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (NF), co-directed AV-performances and documentary films (e.g. «Contradict», Berner Filmpreis 2020 + Al-Jazeera Witness), and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., «Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut», Routledge, «The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East», Wesleyan University Press). He teaches regularly at universities, and runs workshops for arts institutions. Since 2022 he produces the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, he is working on his new music project «Melodies In My Head», and on the podcast series «South Asian Sound Stories» with musicians from the UK, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

Published on February 12, 2013

Last updated on October 20, 2020

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