Khalab & M'Berra Ensemble - M'berra (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/48]

There are stories here. There are memories and dreams, keepsakes and wishes. There are truths told straight and fashioned into shapes. There is struggle and resilience. There is humanity. Throughout, there is music.

Music as connection, sustenance, hope, joy. Ancient-to-future music fed by the ancestors and sent spinning through space and time. Music that bestows agency on the displaced and traumatised, opening the door of the cosmos and embracing the self-determination, the liberation, on the other side.

M’berra. A visionary trip by an artist searching for a new language of storytelling.

This is the sound, the story, of the M’berra Ensemble, a collective of Malian musicians from the M’berra Refugee Camp in southeast Mauritania, and Italian producer and electro-shaman Khalab. In a sprawling tent city rising out of the desert, out of nothingness, at the border with Mali in West Africa, brought together by spirit and circumstance, the group’s Arab and Tuareg members — some unknown, some who have previously toured Europe — find solace and beauty in music and song.

Their truths are authentic, and diverse: “There is not only one story to be told here,” says Khalab, who with French photographer Jean-Marc Caimi visited the camp in 2017 at the invitation of Intersos, the largest Italian NGO on the frontline of global emergencies.

“The real stories feature musicians, their music, their names.” Among them, Amano Ag Issa and Mohammed Issa Ag Oumar of Tartit, that much-feted group from the Tombouctou region of northern Mali. Variously recalling their past and reclaiming their present with proud, gritty vocals; wielding electric guitars and traditional instruments — the lute-like tehardent, the single-string imzad — across 12 tracks that tell of resistance and freedom, of desert storms and desert moons.

Tracklist:
01. Desert Storm
02. The Western Guys
03. Curfew
04. The Griot Speaks
05. We Are M'Berra
06. Skit in My Heart
07. Reste A L'Ombre
08. Desert Storm Pt. 2
09. Moulan Shakur
10. Docu-Fiction
11. Dancing in the Desert Moon
12. Skit Guit


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