Chinese whispers: I’d heard about Sun City Girl and Sublime Frequencies head Alan Bishop crawling on hands and knees across the Sahara with a battered cassette  in his mouth, tape spooling and spewing out behind him, tangling on rocks and being chewed on by lizards.  And not just any part of the Sahara, but the Western Sahara, a place so fractious that its borders are designated in my atlas by angry zigzags, those denoting a local rivalry so intense that the people on opposing sides of the divide can only look at each other in mirrors with their backs to each other.

What would bring him to such a far-out place?  The answer is an unmarked tape he had picked up on his travels, a tape of the most far-out African guitar band.  He went from one bemused villager to another in order to carry out his one-track invisible jukebox (“umm, am I going to be really embarrassed by this?  Did I play a tour of the Western US with them in the late 80’s”, being one of the more common responses), eventually eliciting the answer that the band he was seeking were Group Doueh, and they were sitting over there, no not the ones there sitting drinking coffee, the ones next to them with all the guitars and amps and stuff. 

I probably stopped listening to the story at that point so desparate was I to hear it, so I can’t tell you exactly how it came to be that this ended up as a vinyl-only release on the Sublime Frequencies label.  However I can tell you that the search was very much worth the effort.  Guitar Music From The Western Sahara is so much more than the prosaic title hints at, for it is a blistering, almost psychedelic howl of a record, which moves freely between the battered ragas of “Fagu” to the coruscating riff and chant of “Eid For Dahkla” as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.  As it was released quite a few months ago, you’ll struggle to get your hands on a copy to be honest; but you could do worse than getting on hands and knees and crawling to Sublime Frequencies to beg for it to be issued on CD (or, alternatively hope for a copy of the newer Group Inerane one).