Fretboard nomad

Songwriter/guitarist Mdou Moctar sings in the language and style of the nomadic Tuareg poets who’ve long traversed North Africa’s eternally shifting desert landscapes. He also adds modern elements to his songs through his boundary-pushing style of playing electric guitar and affinity for drum machines, synthesizers and auto-tuned vocals to craft music that is soothing and hypnotic while also evoking feelings of longing and loneliness. And Moctar has serious guitar chops. When his three-piece band reaches a peak, his fingers sweep across the fretboard as nimbly as any modern rock player.

Moctar is from a small village in Niger, amid the vast, arid expanse of rolling sand dunes, rocky plateaus and ancient river valleys in the west-central Sahara Desert. As a child, he taught himself to build and play his own guitars made from planks of wood. When he was 16 years old, he went to Libya to work and help support his family, met a musician who inspired him, and brought home a real electric guitar—despite living in a place where Western rock instruments are generally frowned upon.

“My family is a religious family,” he said with a heavy accent during a recent phone interview. “It’s no problem now that I’m older, but when I was young, my family did not like the music. [Religious people] there think a lot of musicians are maybe doing the cocaine and a lot things very bad. A lot of musicians do it, and my mother and my father thought it would be something like that.”

With some assistance from a translator, Moctar spoke to the CN&R ahead of his show at Naked Lounge (May 23), one stop in a rigorous tour—30 shows in 40 days—of the U.S.

Moctar went on to explain that he didn’t pick up the guitar to pursue a hedonistic rock star lifestyle—far from it. He’s always viewed music as a means to explore themes of spirituality, religion and the human heart, and to connect with people. “Music is my life,” he said. “I like the music because I send messages to the people. It’s about the education first.”

He plays guitar in the traditional Tuareg style of takamba, and also draws influence from the desert-guitar sound—a mix of traditional North and West African music, blues and world music—popularized by groups like renowned Tuareg/Malian ensemble Tinariwen.

Moctar’s music became popular in Niger through an underground trading network of cellphones and memory cards, and he traveled to Nigeria in 2008 to record his first album, Anar. In 2015, he co-wrote and starred in a Saharan reworking of Prince’s film Purple Rain, titled Akounak tedalat taha tazoughai or “Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red In It.”

His latest album, 2017’s Sousoume Tamachek, was recorded in Portland, Ore., but it sounds a world away. Building circular grooves with quivering guitar lines, Moctar creates a meditative soundtrack that brings to mind desert landscapes.

Moctar’s focus now is bringing his music to America and breaking down the ignorant-yet-pervasive notion that all Muslims are terrorists.

“I send messages on religion and Islam because people think if you are Muslim, you are [a] terrorist,” he said. “That is not true. We are not the terrorists. Muslims don’t like the terrorists, because they make the religion dangerous. Tuaregs don’t like the terrorists, either. They are different.”

Moctar has been encouraged by the responses from American audiences so far, especially since he signed to the record label Sahel Sounds, which features music from West Africa and other artists who are applying new technologies to traditional ideas.

“I love the United States better than every place in Europe because the reception is good for me,” he says. “I don’t have any problems here.”