Villagers in the Sahara usually find it convenient to bypass computers and iPods and just keep all their music on their phones. American blogger Christopher Kirkley found this out when he traveled to Mali with the intention of making field recordings of traditional music.

He ended up also spending a lot of time swapping digital music files with Malians, trading the Elliott Smith on his netbook’s hard drive for the somewhat more obscure goodies on their cell phone memory cards.

When Kirkley got back to the States, he made (What else?) a mixtape! You can download it for free from his site, Sahelsounds.com.

Not everything on Music From Saharan Cell Phones is hard to get your hands on. The first two tracks are by Malian rock legends Tinariwen and their band leader Abdallah. Some of the music, however, Kirkley couldn’t even identify right away. At first he just labeled the third track Niger – “Autotune.” Since then, he’s learned the track is by a group called Emsitka.

Emsitka uses autotune in a way that you really want to hear. Actually, unless you live in Mali and you already have all these songs on your phone, you really want to hear the whole mix, like, now.

Oh, and Kirkley did release his field recordings too, but the sound card music is what everyone is talking about. Pitchfork even went and got all deep about it at length.

 Photo Credit: sahelsounds.com