Source Material

If you’ll forgive me, I’ll not be putting much of substance here this week. My brain has been royally battered over the last week or two, but that’s what you get when you pay close attention to political coverage in the run up to a General Election whilst occasionally facing resurgent bouts of mild depression you once thought you’d gotten past. It probably doesn’t help that I recently started binge watching Twin Peaks either.

I don’t so much find it difficult to write – it’s pretty much my day job supplying bits of original content for a variety of businesses. That helps me to stay confined to certain topics and largely consists of me finding decent amounts of source material (because I’m not an expert in various fields of business), reading and educating myself in short bursts, and rewriting that information in a way that sounds like I haven’t just lifted it from some unknown corner of the Internet. Less “hack plagiarism”, more “repurposed information”.

As a result, when it comes to my own things (like what I done here), I find it difficult to hone in on a topic. And considering the only source material I tend to rely on comes from my brain, putting too much of a strain on it makes me just not want to do it at all. Or whenever I do actually get to it, it usually consists of me just moaning about how I don’t really want to do it.

Still, it manages to generate a few paragraphs here and there so it keeps me going I suppose.

---

These guys have had a couple of decent songs in the past that I haven’t included in this extra section before for reasons unknown. With each one as good as the last, I have no qualms about chucking this one into the mix, but if you ever wanted to explore further off the back of this, I’d probably point at tracks “Al Hassidi Terei” and “Soubour”, although they don’t come with a sudden key change at the end.

While it may not make much sense to English ears, the mix of African and Western sounds along with their enthusiasm for playing live has made them a must-see band, even if only on video. With all-round smiles and guitar solos that’ll make you dizzy just by looking at the fretboard, they can put across a spectacular performance that you really just don’t get from a static slide filled with silhouettes and an arbitrary leopard.

Songhoy Blues – Bamako