General Admission Standing Room Only

ETRAN DE L'AÏR

Etran de L’Aïr (or “stars of the Aïr region”) welcomes you to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock. Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Playing a sound that invokes the desert metropolis, “Agadez” celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.

Etran is a family band composed of brothers and cousins, all born and raised in the small neighborhood of Abalane, just in the shadow of the grand mosque. Sons of nomadic families that settled here in the 1970s fleeing the droughts, they all grew up in Agadez. The band was formed in 1995 when current band leader Moussa “Abindi” Ibra was only 9 years old. “We only had one acoustic guitar,” he explains, “and for percussion, we hit a calabash with a sandal.” Over the decades, the band painstakingly pieced together gear to form their band and built an audience by playing everywhere, for everyone. “It was difficult. We would walk to gigs by foot, lugging all our equipment, carrying a small PA and guitars on our backs, 25 kilometers into the bush, to play for free…there’s nowhere in Agadez we haven’t played.”

From the days of the Trans-Saharan caravan in the 14th century to a modern-day stopover for Europe-bound migrants, Agadez is a city that stands at the crossroads, where people and ideas come together. Understandably, it’s here where one of the most ambitious Tuareg guitar has taken hold. Agadez’s style is the fastest, with frenetic electric guitar solos, staccato crash of full drum kits, and flamboyant dancing guitarists. Agadez is the place where artists come to cut their teeth in a lucrative and competitive winner-take-all scene. Guitar bands are an integral part of the social fabric, playing in weddings, baptisms, and political rallies, as well as the occasional concert.

Whereas other Tuareg guitarists look to Western rock, Etran de L’Aïr play in a pan-African style that is emblematic of their hometown, citing a myriad of cultural influences, from Northern Malian blues, Hausa bar bands, to Congolese Soukous. It’s perhaps this quality that makes them so beloved in Agadez. “We play for the Tuareg, the Toubou, the Zarma, the Hausa,” Abindi explains. “When you invite us, we come and play.” Their music is rooted in celebration, and invokes the exuberance of an Agadez wedding, with an overwhelming abundance of guitars, as simultaneous solos playfully pass over one another with a restrained precision, forceful yet never overindulgent.

Recorded at home in Agadez with a mobile studio, their eponymous album stays close to the band’s roots. Over a handful of takes, in a rapid-fire recording session, “Agadez” retains all the energy of a party. Their message too is always close to home. Tchingolene (“Tradition”) recalls the nomad camps, with a modern take on traditional takamba rhythms transposed to guitars. The dreamy ballad Toubouk Ine Chihoussay (“The Flower of Beauty”) dives into call and response lyrics, and solos that dance effortlessly over the frets. On other tracks like Imouwizla (“Migrants”), Etran addresses immigration with the driving march parallels the nomads’ plight with travelers crossing the desert for Europe. Yet even at its most serious, Etran’s music is engaged and dynamic, reminding us that music can transmit a message while lighting up a celebration. This is music for dancing, after all.

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MOUNTAIN MOVERS

Though they started in the mid-2000s as a folky, very intimate outlet for the songs of Daniel Greene of long-running indie pop group the Butterflies of Love, Mountain Movers evolved over the years into a guitar-heavy mix of psychedelic exploration and melodic indie rock, especially once guitarist Kryssi Battalene joined the band in the early 2010s. They released a series of singles that featured her fiery guitar work and Greene's searching melodies, taking their ragged sound to new realms with 2015's powerful album Death Magic. After pairing with Trouble in Mind records, the band went even deeper into distortion and drifting jams on albums like 2021's World What World.

Mountain Movers formed in New Haven, Connecticut by singer, songwriter, and guitarist Daniel Greene. Previously, Greene and longtime collaborator Jeff Greene (no relation) had found success, particularly in the U.K., with their indie pop band the Butterflies of Love, who released several albums for the London-based Fortuna POP! label. By the mid-2000s, Greene had amassed a lengthy catalog of solo songs and enlisted a rotating cast of New Haven musicians to record We've Walked in Hell and There Is Life After Death, an introspective yet spirited collection that melded streamlined indie rock and elements of soul and alt-country. Released in 2006 on regional label Safety Meeting Records, it would serve as Mountain Movers' debut and was followed up a year later by the slightly heavier Let's Open Up the Chest. More disparate and psychedelic influences crept into Greene's sound with 2009's The Day Calls Out for You and 2010's home-recorded Apple Mountain. After that release, the band solidified into a steady lineup featuring bassist Rick Omonte, drummer Ross Menze, and lead guitarist Kryssi Battalene, who was also in the bands Colorguard, Medication, and Headroom. With a newly heavy guitar sound, the group began a series of experimental small releases including a number of cassettes, 7" singles, and a lathe-cut record. Following 2015's sprawling Death Magic LP, Mountain Movers signed with Chicago indie Trouble in Mind Records and began recording their eponymous sixth album, which was more improvised and experimental in nature. It was released in early 2017, after which the band toured and continued to expand their sound into looser and freer reaches, finding the midway point between the rootsy guitar-driven rock of Crazy Horse-aided Neil Young and far noisier acts like La Rallizes Denudes. In 2018, they toured with Howlin' Rain, released an August EP titled New Jam, and in October issued their seventh album, Pink Skies. It would be three years before Mountain Movers returned in 2021 with eighth album World What World. This collection of songs was cut from a similarly noisy sonic cloth as the albums leading up to it, but leaned more into subtle dynamics as the lyrics took on a somewhat introspective and world-weary tone. ~ Timothy Monger, Rovi

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