African futurism through Sahel Sounds

This story was first published on New Frame.

Sahel Sounds is a portal into alternate realities. The small independent label has made music from the greater West African Sahel region accessible over the past decade, including from remote desert areas in Mali, Niger and Mauritania. 

Founder Christopher Kirkley runs Sahel Sounds from Portland, Oregon, in the United States and the project encompasses writing, archives, research, film and a record label.

Sahel Sounds shines a spotlight on previously obscure artists from northwestern Africa. It has catapulted many careers by introducing their sounds to a global audience, including Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar, all-female guitar band Les Filles de Illighadad, keyboardist Hama and pioneering organist Mamman Sani.

“I want the label to be a way of de-exoticising things, through the process of learning about the music,” Kirkley says. “So, when you hear Hama and you find out he’s a chauffeur who got a keyboard from a friend and he started making music on Fruity Loops [production software] … you start to form an image of what it is to be a person in Niamey growing up in the 2000s … I want the work to be an invitation to learn about something.”

Kirkley’s journey began in 2009, when he travelled to Mauritania in search of guitar music, a type of pentatonic blues in particular, commonly referred to as desert blues. “I had a guitar and a digital field recorder and went there travelling around, meeting musicians and recording, with the intention to share music online.” 

He soon started a blog, documenting what he heard, “because often, I’ve found music is a doorway into learning about a culture”. The project lived as a blog for some years and Kirkley ended up spending two years travelling around the region, recording and learning about the music and culture. He learnt French while in Mauritania and picked up various other languages. 

Content on phones

“While I was doing the recording, it became really apparent that the cellphone was such a prominent actor in that transaction,” says Kirkley. When he sat down with an artist, children nearby would pull out their cellphones and do the same. Contrary to Western notions, music from the region has been digitised at a high rate because of the use of cellphones.

“I became really curious about the content of phones. Like, if you could peer into that network of phones and look at what people were listening to, what type of field recordings could you find?”

Kirkley says these particular cellphones were iPhone knock-offs. “One of the cool features they had was this bluetooth file transfer.” Bluetooth music transfers became a common pastime during his travels because phones in the region were not usually connected to the internet, Kirkley explains, so the only way to get a song was to stand next to someone.

“What emerged from that is a sort of metaphoric internet, this network of file-sharing that wasn’t dictated by the internet, it was dictated by physical people travelling. Someone getting a song in one city, then getting on a bus and travelling to a different city, meeting with friends and sharing that.” 

The most popular songs were metaphorically viral hits, on cellphones in Gao, Bamako or even Lagos. “They were the same songs, often unattributed, and no one knew who they were by. They were these mystery mp3s that had spread through this network,” he says.

“In Africa in general, the cellphone was the first digital device. And in the US, it was desktop computers and laptops, and then it was the miniaturisation of a laptop into a cellphone. I think that people in Africa embrace the cellphone in this variety of ways, with a lot more openness than people in the US have been able to. So the way that people are using technology in Africa has always been more futuristic. Really, anywhere in the world that’s not Europe or the US.”

A natural archivist, Kirkley collected everything from mp3 files to video and graphics, trading with people along the way.

The Sahel Sounds story 

Back in Portland, Kirkley created a mixtape compilation of some of the music he’d discovered. It got significant attention online and he realised he could do more with it, if he could identify the tracks and artists to license their songs.

“It was hugely difficult at the time to track down the artists. Part of the process was using online resources, and travelling back to the region, playing the song for people and seeing if they could identify something.” 

Kirkley tells the story of how he tracked down Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar via a taxi driver from Niger, who identified the dialect of Tamasheq on the song.