Tassili (album)
| Tassili | ||||
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| Studio album by Tinariwen | ||||
| Released | 29 August 2011 | |||
| Recorded | 1–20 November 2010, Tassili n'Ajjer, south-east Algeria | |||
| Genre | African blues, world | |||
| Label | Anti | |||
| Producer | Ian Brennan, Jean Paul Romann | |||
| Tinariwen chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | (80/100) |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Antiquiet | (5/5) |
| Pitchfork | (7.8/10) |
| The Guardian |
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| The Observer |
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| Rolling Stone |
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| Paste Magazine | (8.2/10) |
| Allmusic |
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| Spin Magazine |
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| Pop Matters |
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Tassili is the fifth album by the Tuareg-Berber band Tinariwen, recorded in Tassili n'Ajjer, an Algerian national park. The album marked a major departure from previous recordings. The producer, Ian Brennan, stated that it "was the least overdubbed, most live, band-centric and song-oriented record they have done.”
The album was recorded during a three-week session in the rocky desert near Djanet, a town on the southern rim of the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau located in south-eastern Algeria. It was this protected region from which the group derived the album's name. The plateau served as an alternate location to record the album after Tessalit, the band's home town in northern Mali, proved to be too precarious due to renewed conflict.
The region's close proximity to Libya made it a place of relative safe passage for Kel Tamashek fighters who traveled from the refugee camps in Libya to the battlefront of northern Mali during the 1980s and the Tuareg Rebellion during the early 1990s. It was during this time that the group's founding members first came to play together as political exiles in tents and around campfires of refugee settlements.
The rehearsals for and recording of the album was conducted in similar way to those original performances.
"We wanted to go back to our origins, to the experience of [being exiled]… Those were times when we would sit around a campfire, singing songs and passing around a guitar. Tinariwen was born in that movement, in that atmosphere, so what you hear on ‘Tassili’ is the feeling of ishumar."
Tinariwen, in addition to largely substituting both acoustic guitars and unamplified percussion for their usual electric guitars (reflecting their return to an older way of life), also had hundreds of pounds of recording equipment and other gear transported to a canyon deep in the desert (running off a generator placed far enough from the microphones in the main tent to prevent noise pollution).
The album was compiled and mixed by David Odlum at Studio Soyuz in Paris during February, 2011 and at Studio Black Box in Angers during March 2011. It was mastered by John Golden at the Golden Mastering recording studio in Ventura, California during April 2011.
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Wikipedia