Tinariwen is a Touareg group from the southern Sahara whose music is close to the blues of Ali Farka Toure. The band's name means "empty places" which certainly reflects their desert homeland.

Forced from their nomadic life in the Sahara, they were fighters in the Touareg insurgency against the Malian government. So, the band formed in 1982 in Colonel Ghadaffi's rebel camps.

The Libyan leader recruited this nation-less and disenfranchised people with promises to help them in their cause. Ghadaffi implied that he would train the Kel Tamashek and provide weapons to fight for their independence from the Malian government, but eventually the stateless rebels slowly realized that Ghadaffi's only intention was to use these fierce fighters in his own wars.

Radicalized by war and drought, Tinariwen invented a new style of music known as Tishoumaren, or music of the ishumar. Ishumar, which means unemployed, refers to a generation of young, enraged Tamashek exiles: people who left their stomping grounds for work after much repression and drought in Mali. Tinariwen wanted to carry on traditional music, but in exile they could rarely find the 30 or more musicians necessary to play the style. They have combined traditional musical forms with a modern rebellious and radical rock sensibility -- traditional instruments such as the teherdent lute and shepherd flute were discarded in favor of the electric guitar, electric bass and drums.

Their music is loosely based on traditional Touareg music and the harsh melodies of the one-stringed Touareg violin, but also incorporates influences such as Bob Marley together with the other disparate influences, both western and middle eastern, which managed to penetrate that far into the desert.

With no postal or phone system to carry messages of resistance, Tinriwen's music became the underground telephone for the rebellion. Their sung poetry calls for the political awakening of consciousness and approaches the problems of the exile, of the repression in Mali, of the policy of their people's expulsion to Algeria and of the claims for sovereignty and self-determination.

Their cassettes were banned in Mali and Algeria and anyone carrying a recording risked bodily harm by the authorities.

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