Toumast

World music fans have already been exposed to the contemporary music of the Tuareg, the displaced nomads of the southern Sahara, through the band Tinariwen. Toumast offers a similar approach with desert dry, bluesy electric guitar riffs accompanying hand-slapped percussion and call-and-response vocals that zigzag across the trance grooves. The sound is obviously derived from exposure to Western rock and the legacy of ancestral traditions, converging in something that suggests Mississippi Delta blues from a parallel universe.