ساحل

This story is taken from the Freedom issue of LOVE magazine. Order a copy here.

Sahel. This word comes from the Arabic Sāḥil: لحاس. It means a shore—not of water, but of sand, the edge of the desert. It holds the quality of silence, infinite landscapes stretching one into the other, the stillness of what it means to live unbound.

This land, encompassing multiple latitudes extending from East to West across the African continent, south of the Sahara, is home to the Touareg people. Historically, a confederation of semi-nomadic clans and tribes, they speak dialects of a common language known as Tamasheq. Among the many elements that bind them together, music is a foundational one, and a tool of cultural resistance.

Tishoumaren or assouf in Tamasheq, also known as Touareg blues in the West, travels from one end of the Sub-Saharan desert to the other with different reiterations, drawing an imaginary line from the shores of Mauritania to the southern parts of Morocco and Sahrawi territories, passing through Libya, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and parts of Algeria.

The genre has become one of the most popular folk musical styles in the contemporary Sahara. Originally political ballads from Libyan exiles, today the sound has expanded to encompass introspective love songs and blistering psychedelic rock, often incorporating synthesizers and drum machines. At its core, the music still relies on poetry to transmit a message, carried by pentatonic guitar solos in the ishumar style—a label given to young Tuareg men in the 1970s–80s who were displaced after droughts, forced migrations, and political marginalisation. The term ishumar comes from the French derivation of chômeur, or unemployed. Many Tuareg youth who lived in exile in Libya and Algeria, were often unemployed, sometimes recruited as fighters, but also forming a kind of cultural underground.

Its poetic sound often features guitar riffs soaring across pentatonic scales, paired with voices that shift from mournful, trance-like states to ecstatic peaks. Sometimes sung aloud, other times hypnotically whispered, the lyrics are accompanied by mellow acoustic guitars or fiery electric ones powered by small portable amps in the open desert. The sound is filled out with portable drum kits, electric bass, clapping, tende drums, and other regional percussion.

These songs, often played on cell phones in the desert and passed via WhatsApp, fuse Touareg music with Western influences ranging from John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix to Prince and Pink Floyd—and yes, even Mark Knopfler (there is proof: Christopher Kirkley from the legendary label Sahel Sounds has documented this through memory cards, cassettes, and cover bands found throughout the region).

Touareg identity, exile, rebellion, resistance, freedom, and nomadic life, longing for absent family, lovers, fellow clan members and peace, together with the desert itself, are at the core of these blues. While deeply rooted in Touareg poetry, the genre’s emotion transcends language—these chords touch soul depths without needing explanation. Beyond the desert region, groups such as Tinariwen—formed in Libyan exile camps in the 1970s—Etran de L’Aïr—born in 1995 as a family band in Agadez, Niger—and Les Filles d’Illigha-dad—founded in Niger by Fatou Seidi Ghali, one of the few female Tuareg guitarists—are just a few of the ones raging in the West.

One rising figure in this tradition is Khily Ag Osman, featured in this story, and founder of the group Tamodre. In the Touareg naming tradition, “ag Osman” means “son of Osman,” honoring his father’s name. Khily was born just before the millennium turn-over in Djanet, a small oasis city in south-eastern Algeria, known as “the door to the desert.” Djanet lies in a valley carved by the intermittent river Oued Idjeriou, east of the Erg Admer towering dunes, on the edge of the Tassili n’Ajjer mountain range, a vast plateau crowned with sandstone pillars and arches shaped by millions of years of wind erosion, their otherworldly forms rising like sculptures from another time, from another world. And yet, they are very much from this one

The Touareg guitar scene in Djanet is bursting with a new wave of Gen Z from the desert: along with Tamodre, there is a Metallica-inspired group called Tihay band, and another one, called Assof, which channels in a more traditional way the hypnotic rhythms of the desert blues. Khily (Tamodre), Mehdi and Ahmed (Tihay Band), Hassan and Mokhtar (Assof), all pictured in this story, are friends and often set up for long jam sessions in Djanet or at night in the desert. As a child, Khily found a broken guitar without strings—salvaged from a friend of his brother—and restrung it with his bicycle wires. He learned how to play and started his band. Today, together with Tamodre, Tihay, and Assouf, they are starting to reach the other side of the desert—and the world is listening. When asked about freedom, Khily told me that freedom is for him to be in the heart of the desert, where his grandfather lives, without a cell phone or technology. “Only afre, the stars, and the desert’s vastness.

Talent BILAL MACHAR KHILY, MACHAR MAKHTAR, HAMID LAHSSAN, MAHDI AMBAREK, and MEBARKI AHMED, Hair & Makeup SID MANEL, Photography Assistant SKANDER MAAMERI, Production 2HORLOGES, Post Production PURPLE MARTIN, Film Processing Lan HAMMER LAB LTD