While there are many fine reasons to love Sublime Frequencies, their latest album highlights a personal favorite: their unwavering willingness to release superficially absurd, financially doomed, or utterly uncategorizable projects solely because they are interesting and unique.  Also, the fact that they are an established label means that something like this (a random-seeming collage of radio snippets recorded almost a decade ago) needs to be treated with considerably more critical thought and openness than it normally would be.  It certainly still sounds like a random collage of radio snippets, mind you, but the intent is deeper and more noble than that.
As it happens, the idea of hanging around in a distant country aimlessly spinning a radio dial to hear what sort of unfamiliar things come out actually sounds quite appealing to me.  If I did it, however, I would never in a million years think of releasing those recordings as an album.  The primary reason for that is simple: literally anyone could have done this, as Hisham Mayet's recordings are deliberately artless.  He was not harvesting strange sounds for some planned surrealist collage nor is this any sort of ethnographic sonic travelogue, unless he was trying to replicate a cab ride with an easily bored driver.  Secondly, I would feel like any Nigériens that I told about the project would look at me like I was an utter fool, while Westerners would probably pillory me for shameless cultural voyeurism ("Check it out–I went somewhere foreign and made a tape of all the foreign people talking all foreign!  Aren't they crazy-sounding?").
Fortunately, Mayet's liner notes do an excellent job of explaining the purpose, context, and content of this release.  Essentially, Radio Niger is a snapshot of what radio should and could be: a vibrant, unpredictable medium that gives a meaningful voice to all kinds of disparate communities and facets of the artistic spectrum.  While there are admittedly a handful of similar bastions remaining in the US (such as WFMU), American terrestrial radio has generally been a joyless, soulless, and irrelevant wasteland of homogeneity for a very long time.  Also, American free-form radio is largely the province of the very hip, whereas Radio Niger is a far more broad-reaching and inclusive phenomenon where many different languages, cultures, and socio-economic strata happily collide.  The sheer scope of content covered on this album is staggering–once I had a more complete idea of what I was hearing, anyway.  There are probably not many other places on earth where "avant-collage cutups" coexist with BBC news broadcasts, disposable Auto-Tuned contemporary pop, Taureg blues, drunken storytellers, Koranic transmissions, and animist folk songs.
Unfortunately, I do not speak fluent Hausa, Zarma, Tamajeq, or even French, which leads to one of Radio Niger's few regrettable, but inherent, flaws: few will understand the actual content of this album, so it unavoidably still sounds like someone scanning through a radio.  Some of the snatches of songs are quite good, certainly, but they are always incomplete and there is seemingly no way to find out anything about them.  My other issue is that–contentwise, at least–this seems like it should be a free or inexpensive download rather than a full-priced CD.  However, releasing this as a context-free sound file would completely defeat its purpose.  Also, treating Radio Niger like a "real album" gives it the sense of significance that it deserves.  My sole real caveat then is this: this is not the place to go for anyone looking to be turned onto some cool Nigérien bands.  It is, however, a thoughtfully assembled love letter to free-form radio that also happens to double as a fun and enjoyable collage
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