I ran across a music publisher called Sahel Sounds which remasters and re-releases music from West Africa like Mauritanian wedding songs and Polisario freedom anthems and helped to define now super popular Tuareg guitar music for western audiences. Their website’s sales page offers a one-off collection of field recordings on a pay what you wish basis.
Its track list includes sounds of Wolof grief, Niafunke clapping games, pinasse stevedores’ shouts from Mopti, murmurs while getting off a night bus at a rest stop in Douentza, karate practice and shortwave radio emissions from Gao, women’s mortar and pestle beats from Timbouctou, well singing from Chinguetti, and the chatter of phone card sellers in Nouakchott’s Cinquieme slum district. You can stream them all for free.
One buyer recommends it…”Alright, this is epic. If you want to drift over the edges of space and time, to hear voices from the liminal zone, to feel connected with the elemental, then this bizarre piece of work is the place to be. It's hypnotic and transcendent, and it's the perfect antidote to modern life. Dig deep. Enjoy.” I bet this guy never stepped foot in West Africa, for him to call street vendors’ cries and video game chimes “liminal”, “elemental”, “bizarre”, and “hypnotic”.
But even so, I know what he means. I came back from a camel drive from Sudan to Egypt with cassette recordings of the drovers’ tea time banter, the sounds (recorded with much difficulty and patience) of two different kinds of dromedary flatulence- “afeet”, a sharp report, and “fuswaa”, a slow hiss- and snatches of conversation and complaint around the camp fire. I thought they were gold and I played the well working songs for Alan Lomax. He said they sounded like Inuit throat singing. Boy was he wrong.
