In a fraught time, TAKAAT fearlessly pushes toward the edges

Over the course of a trio of Is Noise EPs released since April, TAKAAT has undergone a sonic transformation, the trio’s sound shifting from a grittier take on Tuareg blues-rock with Vol. 1 to the more exploratory sonic world of Vol. 3, a dense, buzzing, deeply hypnotic recording that presses toward those noisier outer realms.

“And I recognize that [same trait] in the music I grew up listening to as part of the noise and experimental scenes [in Washington, D.C.], so there was a connection there,” bassist Mikey Coltun said in a late February interview, tracing aspects of this interest to the band’s continued fascination with modern Takamba music, which utilizes a tehardent, or lute, that is frequently plugged into a blown-out radio to produce a crackling tone layered thick with distortion. “And that’s a thing we talk about a lot, is drone and feedback, and then using that to create melodies. … I see TAKAAT as this DIY, experimental thing. Let’s push it in that direction. Let’s go to that kind of world.”

This rapid musical evolution has been aided by the reality that the players – Coltun is joined in TAKAAT by singer/guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim – entered into the project with a fully developed musical chemistry, the three having long played together in the celebrated Nigerian band Mdou Moctar, led by singer and guitarist Mahamadou “Mdou” Souleymane.

“We’ve been playing together for eight years, so we have this trust and this common language,” said Coltun, who will join Madassane in performing as a duo at Cafe Bourbon Street on Sunday, March 8, supported by Idioms and Winston Hightower’s Perfect Harmony. “And I think there are more risks we can take [with TAKAAT], and a little more experimentation. And that’s mostly given the nature of the musicians we are. But also, with the level that we’re at, there’s less pressure to perform it in certain ways and put on a particular kind of show. And it’s really fun just to take those risks and know that we have each other’s backs.”

While the band’s earliest jam sessions took place during soundchecks on international tours with Mdou Moctar, it wasn’t until the three got together in a room with a microphone and a tape recorder that the reality of what this project could be began to take loose shape. “And at that point, it was like, ‘Go do whatever.’ And we didn’t know what that ‘whatever’ was. And it turned into just listening to each other and reacting to chaos,” Coltun said. “And what we were hearing, it was noise, it was improv, it was freedom.”

Coltun traced his interest in these more experimental sounds to having grown up with a father who at an early age introduced him to a rich spectrum of music, recalling the time when his dad played John Zorn’s Naked City in the car while driving him to karate practice around the age of 5 or 6. “And at first it was like, ‘What the fuck? Turn this off.’ And then it was like, ‘Wait, this is incredible,’” said Coltun, who went on to draw a direct line between that experience and the time he talked his way past a doorman as a teenager to get access to the early bird performances at Sonic Circuits, an experimental music festival formerly held in Washington, D.C. “And I saw this dude play a vacuum cleaner hooked up to a contact mic, which was the most mind-blowing thing. I’m just so interested in sound and field recordings and noise. It just hits me super hard.”

For Coltun, TAKAAT offers a space in which to explore these interests, with Mdou Moctar having graduated to larger stages (the band played the Athenaeum Theatre when it visited Columbus in October 2024), which carry for the bassist a greater sense of expectation. “And it’s nobody explicitly saying these things. It’s more the pressure I put on myself knowing this thing has grown to a certain level,” said Coltun, who has embraced this coming swing of shows with TAKAAT as an opportunity to reconnect with his early DIY roots. “We’re crashing on floors and doing what we can to push into these different worlds, allowing it to become accessible to these communities that haven’t experienced this kind of music before.”

Touring by minivan as a duo rather than by bus with a full support team certainly has its challenges, however, particularly given the cultural makeup of the band and the reality that the Trump administration is in this moment violently cracking down on anyone even perceived to be in the country from elsewhere.

“I mean, there’s this new travel ban, which Niger is on the list,” Coltun said, making note of the West African nation his bandmates call home. “And luckily, we have visas right now, but who knows how long that’s going to last? And then we’re also asking ourselves, what does it mean to travel when there are political organizations trying to stop immigrants? … I don’t know a lot of bands that are touring [the United States] from that part of the world right now, so we have no real reference for how it’s going to be. And we know it’s a risk. But in talking to Ahmoudou and asking, do we still want to do this? The answer is yeah. It’s part of our life. We need to do this.”