Anewal: OSAS – It's Time

Founder member of Niger's desert blues champions Etran Finatawa, Alhousseini Anivolla has given us a second solo set that is a predominantly acoustic affair, his guitar and voice augmented only by simple hand-held percussion and the propulsive bass playing of Colin Bass (once of prog-rockers Camel), who produced the album at his studio in North Wales. Anivolla sings in Tamasheq in the now familiar half-chanted Touareg style. Using only his native tongue is a political statement – ‘when we agreed to learn the language of the colonisers we lost ourselves,’ he sternly rebukes on ‘Aratan N'Afrekea’. Fortunately translations are provided in a well-presented booklet and reveal thoughtful lyrics reflecting on his nomadic experience and a life spent travelling between Niger and Europe. At the heart of the songs remains a sense of assouf (longing) and in particular the struggles for survival of the Touareg way of life. In his liner notes he tells us that the 1.5 million Touaregs resident in the Sahara and the Sahel are spread over two million square kilometres. It's an extraordinary statistic and it somehow seems to explain not only the sense of space in Anivolla's music but the expansiveness that defines the entire desert blues genre.