Bush Taxi Mali: Field Recordings from Mali (review)

Listening, we hear tired footsteps shuffling over sand and gravel amid the chirping, cooing, and crowing of crickets, pigeons, and roosters. Then we notice the sounds of a Mande lute (ngoni) and xylophone (bala) lightly exploring their registers before locking into an accompaniment. Behind them, only the crickets remain. This is how Tucker Martine's evocative collection of West African field recordings, Bush Taxi Mali, begins. The album represents Martine's aural encounter with Mali, a landlocked sub-Saharan country that is home to a wide array of acoustic and electric music traditions, a handful of which are featured on the disc's fourteen tracks. Yet, Bush Taxi Mali is more than a generic compilation of Malian music; it is also an exploration of the sounds that texture everyday life in Mali. In juxtaposing the musical and the nonmusical, Martine produces a rich aural travelogue that is as soulful as it is thoughtful, as artful as it is academic.

The diverse sounds captured on Bush Taxi Mali suggest those modern senses of wanderlust and curiosity that are the hallmarks of romantic travel writing, combining subjective sketches and objective renderings to tell an exotic but strangely familiar tale. Following this tradition, and building on a corresponding history of popular field recording (in the spirit of Alan Lomax and David Lewiston), Martine writes his journey mainly in sound. Key references for this project may be heard on David Lewiston's Explorer Series recordings (None-such), Tchad Blake's Document: Zimbabwe (Real World, 2001), and the acoustic exotica found on Alan Bishop's Sublime Frequencies label (which also released Bush Taxi Mali). Like their textual counterparts, these travel recordings deliberately exploit the tension between artistry and ethnology, using sound to transcend scholarly boundaries between aesthetics and social science. For his part, Martine takes his listeners on an acoustic tour that explores the musical, environmental, and mediated sounds of contemporary Malian life: through urban marketplaces, village courtyards, radio broadcasts, and outdoor celebrations.

Martine left for Mali in the fall of 1998 with an Audio Technica 822 stereo microphone, a Sony TC D-D7 DAT Walkman, and a notebook. He collected nineteen hours of audio during his monthlong visit to cities, towns, and villages throughout the Malian countryside, including Bamako, Kangaba, Kéla, Ségou, Djenné, and Mopti. He returned to the United States without a clear idea of what to do with this panoply of recorded sound. What these handsome, high-fidelity recordings revealed was the dynamic, audible world in which music and the sounds of everyday sociability coexist in Mali. Back in the studio, Martine set about creating aural contexts for his diverse collection of sound.

In "Mopti Niger Walking," we follow Martine on an afternoon stroll through a raucous riverine marketplace, a wandering that gently fades into the contrapuntal string duet, "Segou," a version of the classic Mande hunter's praise song "Kulanjan." (A later track titled "Kaita" is actually the Mande griot standard "Kayira.") Here, Martine suggests the significant role that sound (musical or otherwise) plays in structuring a sense of place. Elsewhere, he evokes sound's equal capacity to displace, momentarily setting the listener adrift in anonymous spaces of auditory possibility. This is most apparent in "Bambaran [sic] Wedding Celebration" where distorted song and amplified feedback mix with a cacophony of drums, only to give way to a full minute of eerie, almost otherworldly sounds (likely rendered in the studio), conveying the raw acoustic shadow of the outdoor festivities Martine observes. As music and soundscape fade into and mix with each other, Bush Taxi Mali reveals itself to be as much about the sounds recorded as it is about the art of recording, mixing, editing, and producing those sounds—a process Martine calls "assembling."

The work of assembly here involves Martine's idiosyncratic practice of storytelling in the studio. First, he lays down the first and last tracks, which consist of a morning and evening walk through Mali's varied acoustic ecology. (The sounds of donkeys...