A Very Loud Afternoon at Guitar Center With Mdou Moctar – Warungku Terkini

Moctar, Coltun, and I left Guitar Center and found a bench at nearby Union Square Park. Moctar seemed genuinely stunned that an area across the path from us was cordoned off specifically for the enjoyment of dogs. Coltun told him about dog salons and dog hotels. When he reports back to people in Niger things like this about America, he said, they don’t often believe him, asking “Why does that stuff exist when people sleep outside?”

Earlier, I’d learned that Madassane, the rhythm guitarist, keeps his favorite instrument—a Squier Stratocaster from the 1980s that would fetch no more than a few hundred dollars in the States—at Coltun’s apartment in New York, because when he had it with him in Niger, friends would keep borrowing it and refusing to give it back. Moctar has used some of the money he’s earned as a musician to build wells in his home village, where access to fresh water is precarious. And though he has deep and obvious love for his home, he hasn’t performed live there in years because the threat of an attack from Islamist extremists who condemn Western influence is too great. This too helps explain the intensity of the music they make: playing, for them, could be a literal matter of life and death.

Even for a listener with some knowledge of both Tuareg guitar music and the Western rock canon, it can be difficult to tease apart which parts of Moctar’s sound come from which strain of influence. You might be tempted to assume that the sometimes overwhelming volume of their live performances is purely an American thing, but you’d be wrong. Coltun was in punk bands before hooking up with Moctar, but he’s also been playing with African musicians since he was a teenager, thanks to a guitarist father who worked as a sideman for a Malian griot, and has spent extensive time in the Sahara region. Attending a performance of Tuareg takamba, which looms large as an influence on Moctar, featuring a guitar-like instrument called a tehardent and a calabash gourd for percussion, was revelatory for him. “​​That is the loudest concert I have ever been to,” he said. “Louder than a Sunn O))) show. It’s a blown-out car speaker, and these two calabash pounding away at this rhythm, and it’s so trancey, and it’s hours and hours of this thing. It’s like ‘OK, that’s a cranked guitar sound. That’s what you guys do.’”

Still, it’s true that Moctar has a clearer relationship to heavy rock’n’roll than many of his Tuareg contemporaries. I asked my friend Matt Sweeney, a session guitarist who has worked on records by everyone from Adele to Johnny Cash and collaborated on a few songs with Moctar and his band, what sets Moctar apart. He used Tinariwen, the band whose hypnotically cyclical music is often credited with popularizing Tuareg guitar playing in the United States, as a point of comparison. “Tinariwen’s music is all about drawing you in. It’s meant for you to lean into, like, this magnetic force that’s sucking you in,” he said. “Whereas, the way that the Moctar dudes play, and where they’re from, it’s this blowing, crazy, wild, super-aggressive, outward thing.”