The prodigious Tuareg guitarist and songwriter Mdou Moctar, who has been revitalising contemporary Saharan music since 2008, arrives in Italy with the band that bears his name for a unique date Thursday 22 August 2024 at Circolo Magnolia, Milan. I tickets for the concert will be available on Ticketone e Ticketmaster from 10am on Friday 1 March.
Funeral For Justice is the new album by Mdou Moctar, due out on 3 May. Recorded at the end of two years on tour following the release of Afrique Victime, catches the Niger quartet in a state of grace. The music is even louder, faster and wilder. The guitar solos are red-hot with feedback and the lyrics are passionately political. Nothing is held back or softened. The tracks on the album speak harshly about the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people. "This album is really different for me," explains Moctarthe band's iconic frontman and guitarist. "Now the problems of terrorist violence are even more serious in Africa. When the US and Europe came here they said they would help us, but what we see is very different. They have never helped us find a solution." "The Mdou Moctar have been a strongly anti-colonialist band since I have been a member,' adds the producer and bassist Mikey Coltun, who joined the band in 2017. "France came, destroyed the country and said 'now you are free', but it's not true."
Mdou Moctar started performing with the band at traditional weddings in his home country of Niger, which consist of really big and loud events, with amplifiers cranked up to maximum and the whole town in attendance. Bringing this kind of energy and sense of community to a new audience was an important goal for the band. Early concerts in the US were sometimes organised with seating, but this is no longer the case. With over a hundred shows behind them, the line-up has emerged as one of the most vital rock bands in the world, well rooted in the Tuareg tradition but undeniably a thing of its own. A concert of Mdou Moctar it's all to dance to, if not to mosh. "Ilana was a presentation album, to make us recognise ourselves as a wild rock band. Afrique Victime was a summary of that kind of vision," says Coltun, which compiled the result of more than five days of recording in an empty house in upstate New York. "With Funeral For Justice We wanted the political message to have some prominence, given everything that is going on. As the band got tighter and heavier live, it made sense to capture this urgency and aggression: it wasn't forced, but very natural.
MDOU MOCTAR
Thursday 22 August 2024
Segrate (MI), Circolo Magnolia - via Circonvallazione Idroscalo, 41
Concerts start at 21:00
Tickets available on Ticketone e Ticketmaster.
Standing room only: € 25,00 + prev.
