Mauritania, Guitars Of The Sands

Chinguetti is a historic city in the Mauritanian Sahara. Accompanied by a group of young women on vocals, drums and handclapping, electric guitarist Moudou ould Mattala takes us on a tour of Moorish music between guitar arabesques, rhythmic improvisations and palm grove women songs. Between country and city, between acoustic and electric, the music by Moudou and the El Mouna singers recounts the thread on which Chinguetti tries to find its balance: oscillating between urban camp and desert city, blending local collective practices and personal innovations where individual creativity draws from both the local and global cultural heritage, and finally managing to give a strong coherence to the most heteroclite assemblages. This is somewhat like the effect that the desert has on things: the wind and the sand quickly give them a Sahara patina that tends to unify everything under the same monochrome colour tone. This patina also affects men and, inevitably, music.