Along with his cousin, Aminatou Goumar, Moussa formed Toumast. While he is the lead vocalist and guitar player, she supplies guitar, vocals and spine chilling vocal ululation that can only be experienced and not described. Already they have had success playing in festivals and clubs around Europe and their first CD is being released in North America March 14, 2008 on Real World Records.
The CD's title, Ishumar, is the name that was given to the displaced young men of the Tuareg who had to leave in order to search for work during the droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s that plagued the Sahara. Unable to travel with the freedom of the past, they were left with no other recourse but to go into exile in the cities of Libya and Algeria.
It's not surprising given the title of the album that so much of the music on Ishumar is given over to songs that reflect displacement and loss. While a song entitled "These Countries That Are Not Mine" is an obvious reference to a life in exile, "The Falcon" and "My Camel" may not have you making the same connection without understanding the lyrics, which makes the English translations included very useful.
Both "The Falcon" and "The Camel" express the exile's yearning for home in his desire for the things that defined life among his people. "I know what my soul wants" is the opening line of "The Camel", and it continues to narrate the life of a nomadic herdsman; "To follow the drums in the desert/That echo in the valley." Listening to that lyric and visualizing the open expanses of the Sahara, makes you think about what it must have been like for people to come from that to living within the confines of a city and how trapped that must have made them feel.
Aside from songs about exile, Moussa has also written songs reminding his people of what they fought for and now just because the shooting has stopped they can't let it slip away. "Hey! My brothers/Don't forget/The causes you have defended/Hey! My brothers/Blood has been shed". Peace might have come to the lands of the Tuareg but it will be for naught if they forget about what has happened and the reality of the hardships their people still face.
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