Tassili (album)

Recording sessions

The album was recorded during a three-week session in the rocky desert near Djanet, a town on the southern rim of the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau located in south-eastern Algeria. It was this protected region from which the group derived the album's name. The plateau served as an alternate location to record the album after Tessalit, the band's home town in northern Mali, proved to be too precarious due to renewed conflict.

The region's close proximity to Libya made it a place of relative safe passage for Kel Tamashek fighters who traveled from the refugee camps in Libya to the battlefront of northern Mali during the 1980s and the Tuareg Rebellion during the early 1990s. It was during this time that the group's founding members first came to play together as political exiles in tents and around campfires of refugee settlements.

The rehearsals for and recording of the album was conducted in similar way to those original performances.

"We wanted to go back to our origins, to the experience of [being exiled]… Those were times when we would sit around a campfire, singing songs and passing around a guitar. Tinariwen was born in that movement, in that atmosphere, so what you hear on ‘Tassili’ is the feeling of ishumar."

Tinariwen, in addition to largely substituting both acoustic guitars and unamplified percussion for their usual electric guitars (reflecting their return to an older way of life), also had hundreds of pounds of recording equipment and other gear transported to a canyon deep in the desert (running off a generator placed far enough from the microphones in the main tent to prevent noise pollution).

Post-production

The album was compiled and mixed by David Odlum at Studio Soyuz in Paris during February, 2011 and at Studio Black Box in Angers during March 2011. It was mastered by John Golden at the Golden Mastering recording studio in Ventura, California during April 2011.

Track listing

A two-disc special edition includes a bonus disc with the tracks "Djegh Ishilan", "El Huria Telitwar", "Kud Edazamin", and "Nak Ezzaragh Tinariwen".

Personnel

Gregory Davis and Roger Lewis of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band performed arrangements by Ian Brennan, which contributed to the fourth track, Ya Messinagh. Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe from the American art rock band, TV on the Radio, traveled to the isolated recording site to contribute backing harmonies on five tracks and lead vocals one track. Malone and Adebimpe spent eight days with Tinariwen in Mali to record the album. They first met Tinariwen two years ago at the Coachella festival in California when the two bands were on the same bill. Nels Cline, the guitarist from the American alternative rock band Wilco, played on the first track, Imidiwan Ma Tenam.

Reception

Bob Boilen stated in a review of Tassili for NPR Music that "Tinariwen is just about the best guitar-based rock band of the 21st century."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today gave the album 2.5 stars out of 4. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received a score of 80, based on 37 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Uncut placed the album at number 18 on its list of the top 50 albums of 2011.

Mojo placed the album at number 35 on its list of "Top 50 albums of 2011."

On 12 February 2012, the album won a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category.