The Beatles’ trip to India is often, probably rightly, considered a turning point in their career. And a landmark for the Beatles is, let’s face it, a landmark in the history of western pop music. This was a band grown disillusioned with working within the structures of Western music, and taking themselves to an untapped source, immersing themselves in another culture, allowing the spirit of classical Indian music to flow through them. Or some hippy stuff like that.One of the many ways the internet and the way it gives us total access to just about anything, has changed the musical landscape of the last twenty years, is that bands don’t need to travel anywhere to allow themselves to influence by other cultures anymore. You can probably import a whole Kenyan orchestra if you Google furiously enough. We take for granted bands like Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, who wear their “African influence” on their sleeves, to the extent that it’s barely noticeable that they’re working with a non-traditionally western sound. We’ve come a long way from the first audiences for whom ‘Norwegian Wood’’s sitar was a complete revolution.As a side effect of this proliferation of African and Asian influences into western music, some A&R people somewhere have decided that there’s obviously a market for the kind of stuff Yeasayer might, maybe, possibly be listening to in their tour bus. Recent relative successes for BLK JKS and Tinariwen have no doubt prompted this, a reasonably major release for Tamikrest’s debut record, Adagh. They hail from the deserts of north Mali, like Tinariwen, and like their countrymen, they play chilled-out desert rock, in part influenced by 70’ British and American rock music.It’s really quite brilliantly atmospheric, as they conjure up desert vistas and, and camels and stuff, and I don’t really know, but whatever you think of when you think of Saharan landscapes, Adagh will probably make you think of it. It could definitely be the soundtrack to a Malian equivalent of Slumdog Millionaire. And while it’s wonderful mood music, and there’s nothing really to fault any of the tracks individually, as a forty-five minute collection of 11 tracks, I find myself losing interest after about twenty minutes. I have a hard time knowing where one song ends and another begins, because the tempo is largely constant and they’re using the same sonic pallet throughout. It might be more to do with my uncultured ears than the music. I imagine a Malian listening to The Strokes probably suffers from the same problem.