The room › Artists › Ali Farka Touré

Where to start with Ali Farka Touré

Start with Banga — Savane, 2006. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 35 Ali Farka Touré tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 35 Ali Farka Touré tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 35 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

It is deep rather than broad: 35 tracks drawn from only 3 records.

Every track is filed under desert blues; nothing here crosses into another genre.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Banga — Savane, 2006. Of the 35 Ali Farka Touré tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the ambient end

Diaraby (with Ry Cooder) — Talking Timbuktu (with Ry Cooder). The lowest energy reading of any Ali Farka Touré track in the room (33 out of 100). This is as far towards ambient as the collection goes.

If you want the driving end

Soukora - with Ry Cooder. The highest energy reading here, at 60 out of 100 — a 27-point swing across the collection towards driving.

Where Ali Farka Touré sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Ali Farka Touré's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Ali Farka Touré track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Ali Farka Touré's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with Tamikrest — desert blues, 30 tracks
• Where to start with Tinariwen — desert blues, 46 tracks
• Where to start with Bombino — desert blues, 22 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Ali Farka Touré as a solo artist, from Tombouctou, Mali and born in 1939. Its contributors tag the artist blues, world, african blues, talking timbuktu and desert blues. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Ali Farka Touré tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 35, across 3 albums. 23 of them carry a date, running from 1992 to 2006. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 35 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 35 of these 35 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.