Mdou Moctar is a prodigious Tuareg guitarist and songwriter. Mdou Moctar boldly reforges contemporary Saharan music and "rock music "by melding Eddie Van Halen pyrotechnics, full-blast noise and guitar shredding, field recordings, drum rhythms, poetic meditations on love, religion, women's rights, inequality, and Western Africa's exploitation at the hands of colonial powers to rip a new hole in the sky with the Afrique Victime album.

Mdou Moctar's home is Agadez, a desert village in rural Niger. Inspired by YouTube videos of Eddie Van Halen's six-string techniques and traditional Tuareg melodies, he mastered the guitar, which he himself built, and created his own burning style. A born charismatic, Mdou went on to tell his story as an aspiring artist by writing, producing & starring in the first Tuareg language film: a remake of Purple Rain called Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai - which translates to "Rain The Color Of Blue With A Little Red In It", winning the approval of his family and his community. The word and the sound traveled across West Africa via mobile phone data cards, a popular form of local music distribution. Grueling DIY world tours and albums on the independent US label Sahel Sounds followed, including 2019's landmark Ilana: The Creator album that earned Mdou Moctar an ecstatic international audience.

Setting 

with Wednesday Knudsen & Andris Ballins

Setting is Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, tapes, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on synthesizers and harmonium; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, metallophones, and zither. After the release of their acclaimed 2023 debut L" Shone a Rainbow Light On' (Paradise of Bachelors), a record borne of performances in private rather than in public, Setting honed their group approach to improvisation and arrangement via a string of dates up and down both U.S. coasts. These developments were documented via a couple of live reports, both from Asheville, NC: " at Black Mountain College Mus" and " atttt Eul"") but recorded 9 months apart, each indicating a continued honing of methods and direction. Further rehearsals to develop these ideas, including Fennelly's incorporation of more programmed synthesizer material into the Bowles/Westerlund octopus polyrhythm, took that direction and paved the way for the sessions that produced their recently released second studio album and debut release with Thrill Jockey. Setting's self-titled album is a definitive statement of their improvisational acumen meeting compositional rigor, a robust wellspring of hypnagogic grooves and mosaiced textures—Setting harnesses the euphoria of communal creation.

The setting has been presented by Big Ears, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Black Mountain College Museum, The Lab, Public Records, and Solar Myth, among others. In 2026, they will be performing at many of the great open-earedUSS festivals, including Sound & Gravity, Solid Sound @ MASS MoCA, Pickathon, and Suoni Per Il Popolo.

Wednesday Knudsen is a multi-instrumentalist experimental musician living in upstate New York. Her work engages in an interplay between compositional and improvisational approaches, exploring the interactions between environmental context and notions of occasion and given sets of dynamic parameters. She has performed and recorded both as a solo artist and with many groups including Pigeons, Weeping Bong Band, Willie Lane, Stella Kola, Kryssi Battalene, P.G. Six and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Her most recent solo album, "Atr", was released in the Fall of 2025—a double LP of true 21st-century ECM, co-produced by Larry Dolman, BLASTITUDE #46.