Born and raised in the grasslands of Xinjiang, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mamer first gained some degree of renown as a dombra player who could summon up and reconfigure the traditions of his native Kazakh folk music.
As an aspiring artist he moved to the Xinjiang capital of Ürümqi, where he took up the guitar and some of the conventions of rock and roll, performing with an eighties cover act before establishing Jonggar, his first band which was named after the Junggar Basin, an area of semi-desert bounded by the Tarbagatai Mountains of Kazakhstan, the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, the Tian Shan or Heavenly Mountains to the south and the Irtysh river.
Setting up camp in Beijing, he became a key figure in the city’s burgeoning alternative scene, with his band IZ coming to specialise in an idiosyncratic brand of country-flecked Kazakh music, using traditional instrumentation such as the dombra alongside the kobyz and Jew’s harp. This phase of his career culminated in the release of the album Eagle on Real World Records in 2009, which brought Mamer to international acclaim, yet he baulked at the sterility of the studio sound and chafed under the encompassing label of ‘world music’.
Mamer made his way to Shenzhen and the bookstore and record label Old Heaven Books, which has released the bulk of his music over the past decade. Wildly experimental while still boasting a deft touch, Mamer is equally comfortable reinterpreting Kazakh folk songs or deconstructing Han Chinese musical scales, while from the outset his style has been permeated by American forms, as he consumed dakou cassettes starring everyone from Television, King Crimson and Pink Floyd to the scuzzier guitar shreds of Sonic Youth and the industrial noise of Einstürzende Neubauten.
In turn Mamer has picked up everything from the classical guitar and electric bass to the Jew’s harp, bouzouki and Dolan rawap, dabbling in preparations and open tunings, fashioning ramshackle noise out of barbed wire and other makeshift percussion, while at the end of 2021 ahead of a live performance by his psychedelic folk band Mask, he cut what is probably the first album for solo sherter, an ancient Kazakh instrument which is typically used as a tenor dombra, featuring three strings, a shorter fretboard and fewer frets.
His new album Desert, billed as an extended guitar solo for a series of reel-to-reel tape recordings, immediately conjures two vistas. The first is that of the Dolan, who inhabit the banks of the Yarkand and Tarim rivers, and refer to their own dizzying style of muqam – the name for a set of melodic formulas which are used to guide improvisation in Uyghur music, which often take the form of sprawling epic suites – as ‘Bayawan’, which translates to ‘the desert and the wildland’. Old Heaven Books released an album by the Mekit Dolan Muqam Group at the beginning of the year, while Mamer paid tribute to Tursun Matia, his longtime friend and the late master of the group, a few months later on Uyⱪesez (Sleepless).
The other vista belongs to the Sahel and the desert blues pioneered by Ali Farka Touré and popularised more recently by the likes of Mdou Moctar and Etran de L’Äir. On his own desert collection, Mamer certainly embodies the same rollicking sound on his electric guitar, at first hewing to these and other familiar forms including the angular post-hardcore or minimalist rock of Shellac and the primitive guitar of Robbie Basho and John Fahey.
What distinguishes his playing as Desert progresses is his capacity to weave all of these influences into something truly his own, plus the sheer ferocity and extremity of his instrument, which breaks apart over the course of fifteen tracks into so many splinters and shards, scurrying between the punkish thrashings and caterwaulings of early Boredoms shows and the outer margins of free jazz, both punctured and interlaced throughout by the strains of ear-piercing feedback.
It is difficult to imagine a rowdier or harsher record being released this year, even as rippling distortions bury his harmonies and swirling raga motifs are discernible particularly on the long tenth track, before after all of this white light and white heat, after scampering over so much hot sand, Mamer rests his singed feet as Desert closes with one lengthy burnout.
