Featuring some intriguing collaborations with TV on the Radio and Nels Cline of Wilco, the album sees them setting the electric guitar to one side and giving pride of place to acoustic sounds, recorded right in the heart of the desert, Forced to record their new album far from their base in Tessalit northern Mali (where many of their previous albums were recorded), which is now deemed too insecure for outsiders to visit, Tinariwen converged in the deserts of southern Algeria, near the town of Djanet, in a protected region called the Tassili N’Ajjer, in late 2010 to begin work on the 11-track record. The place has historical significance for these old rebels. Back in the days of migration and rebellion it served as a refuge on the road to the Libyan training camps. It was in this lunar landscape of white sand, rocky outcrops that musicians and technicians gathered between November and December 2010, under a Mauritanian tent, with 400 kilos of gear to begin recording. In this natural open space it was decided to approach the sessions in an unorthodox manner and, unlike the way it’s done in most studios, let the musicians give their inspiration free rein during seemingly endless sessions around the campfire. It took three weeks to gather all the songs on Tassili. Some are recent. Others have been dug up out of a much older, even traditional, repertoire. During the last week of recordings the singer Tunde Adebimpe and the guitarist Kyp Malone from the New York band TV On The Radio arrived at the camp. The two bands had been forging links ever since they met at the Coachella Festival in California back in 2009, links which were consolidated at both a show at WOMAD in Abu Dhabi in March 2010 and then Tinariwen’s Hollywood Bowl gig in Los Angeles when Kyp and Tunde were invited on stage to jam with the band. Out in the desert, the contributions of the two musicians and later additions by guitarist Nels Cline and the horns of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, recorded in their home-town of New Orleans, give Tassili the character of an album which reaches deep into the essence of Tinariwen’s art whilst simultaneously opening itself out to the wider world. In the past ten years the band have made a significant ascent playing over 800 concerts in Europe and North America as well as releasing four acclaimed albums, The Radio Tisdas Sessions in 2001, Amassakoul in 2004, Aman Iman in 2007 and Imidiwan: Companions in 2009. Along the way they have picked up a number of awards (BBC Award for World Music in 2005, the prestigious Praetorius Music Prize in Germany in 2008) and a raft of ‘legendary’ fans including the likes of Robert Plant, Carlos Santana, Brian Eno, Thom Yorke, TV on the Radio and Bono & the Edge. Imidiwan: Companions also picked up the much-respected Uncut Music Award in November of 2009 beating off stiff competition from the likes of Bob Dylan, Kings of Leon, Animal Collective & Grizzly Bear.