Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile

Here at Studio 360, we get a lot of music sent our way. We found the new record Music in Exileby the band Songhoy Blues particularly striking. The group is from Mali, in Northern Africa.

What’s incredible — besides the amazing, Jimi Hendrix-like guitar riffs and the sheer energy of the songs — is the fact that, in 2012, Islamic extremists took control of Northern Mali and banned all forms of music. The extremists destroyed radio stations and burned instruments. Malian musicians faced the threat of torture and even death.

Oumar Toure fled the region with some fellow musicians, and they formed Songhoy Blues. “We decided to create something to lift ourselves out of the pain,” Toure explains in the new documentary They Will Have to Kill Us First. “And now we are here. As we can’t go on being afraid, we have to resist. And our way of resisting is our instruments.”