The album was recorded outdoors, in a yard with a broken-down bar and disused concrete dancefloor, at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of Bamako. The venue had once been an open-air club called the Ma Kele Kele, where Lobi often performed, but had long since been closed down by the police. (Now getting shut down takes some doing in Bamako, where once it's dark, pretty much anything goes. But the Ma Kele Kele had managed it scandalously, after a couple having sex in the branches of a mango tree had fallen onto a dancer below.)

Lobi’s young band arrived with a drum kit strapped to the roof of a battered old car and over the next week — a day was lost when a huge thunderstorm knocked the electricity out — both band and engineers powered up with a single skinned cable running across the red mud from the bar, as turkeys and geese pecked at the microphones.

As you can hear, what the sessions disdained in terms of sophistication, they make up for in pure, spontaneous energy. There were no overdubs, no second takes. Just Lobi and his band conjuring their feral Malian magic under African skies.