Page 100 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

pay my bills.” But for what? “I wanted fan was Karen Antunes, who worked at a mysterious Mdou, the centerpiece of the
something bigger,” he says. “I wanted to local vinyl haven, Mississippi Records. record. As Antunes slept, Kirkley spent
see the world.” “Most people were bringing their versions nights scouring the Internet, trying to find
After quitting his job and selling every- of Woody Guthrie covers, but this was just Mdou to no avail. “He got a little obses-
thing but the clothes in his backpack, he super different,” she recalls. “The next sive,” says Antunes. “Having this mystery
hitchhiked across the U. S., combed the time Christopher came into the store, I became kind of a delicious thing.” If he
beaches of Brazil, trekked through the was like, ‘Hey, you’re the guy who dropped was going to succeed, Kirkley realized,
Amazon rain forest. An itinerant musician, off the CD!’” he’d have to return to Africa and track him
he did some subway busking but wanted to Sharing a passion for music, they fell in down himself. In 2011, two years after first
immerse himself in the sort of Sahel music love just as Kirkley’s desert-blues compi- hearing Mdou, Kirkley finally got some
from Mali and Niger that populated his lation spread wide after someone posted insight when he met a local who told him
playlists. His inspiration was Alan Lomax, it online. “Listening to the mixtape is like the accent of the singer seemed to be from
the legendary ethnomusicologist known sitting beside a desert radio controlled the Tahoua region, a Tuareg area in Niger
for his international field recordings. by a restless herdsman,” The Guardian where Moctar’s family is from. “Okay,”
Kirkley’s ear eventually led him to West wrote, and it gave an extra shout-out to Kirkley said, “that’s a fucking clue!”
Africa, where he hit the road with an audio the “unidentified Tuareg musician noo- Kirkley went on the Facebook page for
recorder and, later, a cheap motorcy- dling on an 80s synth”—Moctar. Tahoua and posted a message in broken
cle. He had no plan or purpose other than With this boost of interest, Kirkley told French. “I’m looking for this artist,
to learn, live, and discover music. He’d Antunes he wanted to put the songs out on Mdou,” he wrote. “Please write me back
spend his days crisscrossing the desert vinyl so they could sell them at Mississippi or call me.” He included a clip of the song.
on his bike, drinking tea with the locals, Records and elsewhere. But he didn’t want Soon after, he got a message from a Tuareg
playing guitar, and listening to artists. to do this without the rights. He wanted man in Niger with the phone number for
He became fascinated by the area’s grass- to compensate the artists, including the Mdou Moctar.
roots music-distribution system over cell
phones and Bluetooth. “It was this net-
work of material that wasn’t online,” he
says. “It didn’t exist anywhere else.”
There was one mysterious song he kept
hearing over and over again. It was unlike
anything else he’d come across—African-
roots rock with auto-tuned vocals and a
driving drum machine. “It sounded so
wacky and bizarre and different from a
lot of what was happening,” Kirkley says.
But because many of the MP3 songs were
transferred without identifying details,
Kirkley had little to go on other than a
single name on the file: Mdou. For weeks,
he’d keep hearing the song playing from
cell phones, but no one could tell him who
was behind it. “It’s this Mdou again,” he
sighed. “Who the fuck is this guy?”

BY 2010, KIRKLEY had befriended and
recorded dozens of African rockers, but
at increasing risk. While in Kidal, Mali,
a hotbed of terrorism in the eastern part
of the country, he was urged by the U. S.
embassy to leave. Rather than heed its
warning, Kirkley went even deeper into
danger, sneaking across the border with a
gang of young musicians who taught him
to fake some of the necessary papers for
entry. On their advice, he traveled with a
large knife on the back of his motorcycle.
“I kind of went off the deep end,” he says.
Missing his family and friends, Kirk-
ley decided to return to the States. Back
home in Portland, he worked on a blog he
had started called Sahel Sounds, devoted
to the music of the region. He made promo
CDs of some songs he collected, includ-
ing Mdou’s, calling it Music from Saharan
Cellphones, and distributed them for free
at record stores to spread the word. One

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