Tamikrest Saturday, January 14th 8PM Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity 130 Pine Street Florence Mass. BOMBYX.live “Hypnotic nomad rock, best at its most subtle.” -Timeout London, UK Tamikrest started out in 2006 playing traditional music along with the songs of well known fellow Tuareg band Tinariwen. Now they have more than twenty-five original compositions. Though their music takes root in Ishumar Rock or Tuareg Blues, commonly referred to as desert blues, a style of music from the Sahara region of northern and west Africa, it borrows from various international influences and neighboring cultures. Their name, Tamikrest in Tamasheq language, means junction, connection, knot, coalition. The group members come from different horizons (Mali, Niger, Algeria and France) and their band and its music unifies them. “A desert hosts us, a language unites us, a culture binds us.” But Tamikrest are a band in exile. For most of the last ten years, they have been unable to live in their Kidal, Mali homes because of regional conflicts. Instead, they live in Tamanrasset, Algeria; Paris and from time to time, along the desolate borderlands of Algeria and Mali. Any band that has been forced from their homeland must be political, but rather than being fully defined by what is by definition a kind of protest music, Tamikrest is a band that expands those vocabularies illustrating a path to what music can become, regardless of the worldly conflicts from which it rises. They play with gentleness and restraint and then release into an unbridled abandon, rocking with a conviction and fury that reminds us what purposeful and genuine music can be and what it can do to us when we are in its presence.