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Reviews

Sidi Touré & Friends, ‘Sahel Folk’ (Thrill Jockey)

Recorded leisurely over tea at his sister’s place on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, Sidi Touré’s second album is an intimate gem of bone-dry acoustic Afro-minimalism. Each track features Sidi and one of five collaborators who lay down profoundly spare, repeating lines on a variety of Western and African guitars while harmonizing about greed, national independence, modernization, farming, female fatigue, and other Bambara-language topics of import. Sidi dedicated the album to the late Jiba Touré, whose high, urgent voice graces three of Sahel Folk‘s nine trance-triggering tracks.