Siftorde

Tidiane Thiam is a photographer, visual artist and guitarist from Podor, the dusty home town of Baaba Maal in northern Senegal, which looks over the river to Mauritania. This reviewer previously knew him only from the album Waande Kadde, which he made with the hoddu player Amadou Binta Konté. Released in 2017, that album was basically a field recording made three years earlier on a trip to Senegal by Christopher Kirkley and Karen Antunes who run the Portland-based label Sahel Sounds. As Thiam's solo album Siftorde also bears a 2014 recording date, one can assume it was taped on the same fruitful trip. Certainly it has the same unmediated and unproduced feel, consisting of ten short guitar instrumentals recorded one night at Thiam's home with a single microphone and the crickets chirping in the background.

Thiam's fingerpicking style owes much to the syncopation of the hoddu and the melodies are light and attractive with none of the deeper tones associated with the desert blues of the region. That all ten pieces are played in the same key leads to a certain sameness but there's a pleasing serenity and an almost lullaby quality to the tunes that is highly addictive.