H

Oud player Grégory Dargent is best known for his collaborations with Algerian singer Houria Aïchi and French pianist-singer Babx. He is also highly regarded for his photography, improvisational skills and work in dance, cinema and theatre. This, his first solo album, is more of a crusade than your typical release. Dargent has been haunted by the French nuclear tests in Algeria's Sahara desert since he chanced on the story in 2013. They invade his seven compositions as ‘one of the possible directions these musics would have taken if art itself had been irradiated [by] a cloud of fine particles of Cesium 137.’ As a result, the interplay between his oud, the cello of Anil Eraslan and the percussions of Wassim Halal is violent and abrasive. Dargent delivers an emotional roller-coaster far from his previous reworkings of traditional Touareg and Aurès music.

Having visited the ground zero of the nuclear tests in Reggane and Tamanrasset three times, he accompanies his music with a powerful photographic essay (out on Saturne Éditions) to drive home the devastation that the tests wreaked on the nomadic communities peopling this region. If anything, Dargent underestimated the tests' impact, confining it to 1960-1966, when the French exploded 364 kilotons of nuclear devices, or the equivalent of 37 Hiroshimas (one of the 14 ‘H's the musician refers to in the album title). Between 1966 and the last French test in 1996, they exploded more than 13,202 kilotons; that's 1,258 Hiroshimas. Lord knows what ‘intimate metamorphoses’ to Dargent's music this further irradiation would have provoked. Not for the faint-hearted.