RADIO MAURITANIE SF137

RADIO MAURITANIE

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania is where West Africa and the Maghreb meet, a huge sparsely populated country where bedouin and pastoral traditions continue to shape contemporary lives and imaginations. And although the scarce global media attention paid to Mauritania tends to portray it as a land of Arabo-berber nomads, as the land of ‘the Moors’—or as they call themselves, the beydane—it is an ethnically diverse country. If you were to listen to all the commercially distributed recordings of Mauritanian music, you would also conclude that Mauritanian music is limited to beydane music.  This release is the first to feature all of Mauritania’s musical genres, from religious praise poetry in Hassania and Halpulaar to the Soninké griots of the Guidimakha region near the Malian border, from the folk songs of the Hartani to several of the revered masters of the unique art music of the beydane iggawen (griots).


Mauritania has never had a recording industry.  There have been a few daring and enterprising artists who have cobbled together home studio recordings and tried to commercially release them, but there have never been Mauritanian record or cassette labels, copyright laws, or producers investing money in music production and distribution. The National Radio of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, for almost fifty years, was the only source of decent quality recordings of Mauritanian music.


This release is not a compilation of Radio Mauritania broadcasts; it is an audio montage intended to condense a week of broadcasts into one easily digested listening experience. It distills the spirit and sound world of Mauritania’s national radio into a coherent sonic journey. The raw materials for this montage are 30 hours of cassette recordings of national radio broadcasts, made in 2002 and 2003. These years were the last golden age of the national broadcaster, a time when the station was the heart of the national musical imagination, before cell phones and internet became widely available, before there were competing radio stations and before televisions became ubiquitous. 

- Matthew Lavoie, September 2026


(Limited edition CD release contains 8-page photo booklet with detailed notes by Matthew Lavoie)

TRACK LIST:
1. Radio Mauritanie 46:39

HIGHLIGHTS:
1. A journey into the heart of Nouakchott's Radio Mauritanie
2. Recorded in 2003 by Matthew Lavoie on location in Mauritania
3. Features 8-page booklet with detailed track list and photos
4. Limited Edition CD release