Don’t be fooled by the title, Touristes. The famed Malian singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Tour?, and the rising American singer and performance artist Julia Easterlin, both sound completely at home in this unexpected musical meeting. Tour? is a genuinely global star, “the Hendrix of the Sahara,” whose music embraces the ancient desert blues of West Africa and the sounds of modern rock. Easterlin is Georgia-born and Brooklyn-based, and lives at the intersection of pop music and experimental songwriting. The two met in New York in 2014 and as Vieux recalls, “within about one or two hours we had created four songs together.” Written in a white-hot burst of inspiration, Touristes would ultimately feature six original songs, three startling covers – of songs from Bob Dylan, Fever Ray, and the Appalachian folk tradition – and one case of a new song built upon an old one.
