Mauritania

Diam

Released 11 June 2004

Iris
Mi Wawa
Dendecuba
Yaw
Kelimanta
Mi Malama
Mansa
Hammadi
Hassina
Wadiur
Bary
I Dagua
Fabe
Diam
Leminakhu

Liner notes

On Daby Touré’s first album for Real World, the songs tell of Daby’s life, of the people around him, and of the world in general. He sings of relationships, his family, freedom, and above all of being positive when times are hard. It is perfectly fitting then that the title, Diam, means peace, something that Daby has looked for throughout his life.

The album took Daby several years to create; locked away in his room, with his own home-studio and equipment, he began to write and arrange songs, controlling every aspect of the creative process from composition to arrangements to performance and mixing. That was important. Daby was in pursuit of a very individual musical vision, and he needed the time, space and solitude to make it a reality.

“The music that I play is based on exploration, on original compositions. It’s like a painter who gets up to paint a painting. I get up in the morning, I pick up my guitar and I start working. I don’t know where I’m going but I go.”

After several years of hard work, Daby teamed up with electronic musician and digital wizard Cyrille Dufay to develop the sound further. The result of all this experimentation, exploration and hard graft is Diam.

Listen

Reviews

A delightfully tuneful album that convincingly blends African and Western folk. The plaintive acoustic guitar riffs and yearning voice recall the "desert blues" of Baaba Maal. There's the same sense of the lone voice calling out amid emmense space, though Touré's delivery is warmer and less starkly Islamic. Traditional motifs have been adapted into well-structured, memorable songs suffused with tenderness and a heart-warming campfire intimacy. Daily Telegraph (UK)
Diam by Daby Touré is a warm and tuneful collection of songs. I knew little about him until I heard his distant, attractive voice at Womad weekend. Touré is a charismatic and likeable performer, accompanied at this festival by his own guitar and an accompanying trio. On the album he multitracks most of the instruments himself - including low derbouka, bass and percussion - but the soundscape is far from monochromatic. Additional studio musicians - ubiquitous Bumcello cellist Vincent Segalé, backing singer Lili and co-producer/keyboard player Cyrille Dufay - are deployed with great care to make an enjoyably mainstream world-pop album in which each track has a distinct character. The Guardian (UK)

Further Listening

Stereo Spirit

Daby Touré

Released 19 March 2007

Stereo Spirit is both a message to the world, to those who are sleeping and who need to wake up, as well as an attempt to offer some kind of musical solace in troubled times. With his rich voice soaring through the songs, sometimes accompanied only by the punctuated tapping of his fingers on the fret board, it is easy to see that this is a work of serious personal expression.
Call My Name

Daby Touré & Skip MacDonald

Released 09 March 2009

A mini-album that captures the magic of this unique creative union, that sees songs - some by Touré, others by McDonald - transformed via imaginative, instinctive collaboration. Crafted at Real World Studios, ‘Call My Name’ is a spellbinding record, the superlative result of focused energy, creative license and a famously pressure-free environment.

Diam

Further reading

GRIT wins Modern Scottish Classic Award

Real World Records to release ‘lost album’ by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Real World Sessions: Owen Spafford & Louis Campbell, 5 December 2023

‘I’m really moved by people’s response to it’ – John Metcalfe discusses the album Tree