What is the attraction in crossing borders musically? And what are the challenges to overcome when blending together two different musical cultures into one harmonious sound? 3songsbonn spoke to Piers Faccini ahead of his concert with Ballake Sissoko at Pantheon Theatre in Bonn. Thank you Manuel from ‘Over The Border’ for arranging the interview.

I believe this is the first full album that you’ve done together?

That’s right, yes.

And when did you actually start playing music together with Ballake?

20 years ago. Ballake played on my second record in 2005, which I recorded in Los Angeles, an album called Tearing Sky. We played a few songs on that album. We met because we were at that time on a label called La Belle Bleu, based in France.

So it was a lucky chance meeting?

I’d just come over from London. And we have a mutual friend, Vincent Segal, who I don’t know if you know, he’s the cello player, with Ballake.  So, I met him 20 years ago, and we had sort of developed a little circle of friends. We would bump into each other and play shows together. he’d come and guest, I’d come and guest.

So how did it take so long to put down a whole album together?

He was very busy and I was very busy, both with solo projects. But the beauty of that was that those 20 years just getting together from time to time, but staying in touch meant that when we decided to do it, we were really ready to do it. 

                                                            

Why did you think working together would be a good idea?

Specifically, I would say for one very important reason.  A lot of the time when a Western musician invites a soloist like Ballake or someone who plays a non-Western instrument, very often they don’t make so much effort to change the form, they just find a way to find a place on a song, where the soloist can do his thing. So, what I wanted to do was the very opposite of that. Instead of Ballake, as he’s so often done on all the collaborations with musicians not from Mali, being the one making more of the steps.  I wanted it to be the other way around. I wanted to go towards him much more than he needed to come towards me. And I felt like that was very important to do in 2025, symbolically. So it just felt, yeah, it just felt like kind of politically correct and spiritually, and for all kinds of reasons, and also because of my love of Malian music, it felt like the right thing to do.

So basically what I did is, I spent many, many years studying Malian music and studying those modes and understanding how when using those modes I could also bring my own songwriting in the English language, my way of playing guitar, that we could see everybody meet in the middle as it were.

How did you decide what to put on this album?  you said you’ve got your songs and your own style. The two of you have played frequently together. How did you finally decide from that what you were going to actually put down?

Basically, if you like, the concept was to really keep the songs.  Even though I was writing in English, to keep the songs and the musical language as much within a kind of manding Malian musical modal language. So, I’m singing in English, but the actual melodies and the rhythmic placement of those melodies is very much Malian in terms of musical language. So that was the, if you like, the working concept that we tried to stick to as much as possible. And it created something, I think, quite surprising from that point of view that not everyone gets, because it’s quite subtle, because people hear me singing in English and they sort of might not listen and understand how Malian the musical language is, even the melodies that I’m singing and the rhythmic placement. But for those who understand music a little bit better.

How did you physically create the new album then?  Did you write the music, say, and the lyrics, and then put everything down and then…

It’s completely oral in the sense that, apart from the lyrics, nothing is written down. And that’s the beauty of it, once you understand how to improvise and how to work within a mode and how to sort of explore it – then the melodies that I would then write lyrics for just came out of that kind of way of improvising in a mode, the mandingo  tradition. And I just, you know, I’ve been in love with Mali music way before even meeting Ballake.   So, it’s many years that I’ve listened to it and I’m also playing with a lot of other Mali musicians. So it’s something that’s familiar to me, you know?

But 20 years between meeting and this recording. Why so long?

Because I think we just weren’t in a hurry to do it, because he had his solo project, I had my solo project. And I also think, like, I love taking time to do stuff, particularly if you’re going to do it in a way that’s profound and goes beyond that sort of superficial idea of meeting between musicians. Because one of the things that we often say is, like, there’s always this cliche that music is a universal language. But, in order for it to become universal, you actually have to learn the language of the other! Otherwise, what are you really speaking? And there’s so many examples of that. Many of the rhythms, for example, in Mali music, if I ask the average Western musician to tell me where the one is modally, they get it in the wrong place. And not only will they get the one in the wrong place, i.e. they don’t even know where the pulse is, also, if they have to count it, sometimes there are ternary rhythms that they would count as a binary rhythm. So, there’s a perceptual element, a very interesting perceptual element, it’s about understanding a whole other concept of rhythm and rhythmic placement that’s very, very, very, very different that you do not hear in Western tradition.

You have a busy European tour but only this concert in Germany.

Yes. A lot in France. We were in the UK, we played at the Union Chapel in London. We’ve been playing a bunch in Europe. We’ve played in Spain, in Portugal, we’ve played in Italy, in Belgium. We’re going to the US for a month in September. So yeah, we’ve done a bunch of shows. Maybe  we’ll come back next year. I don’t know. Ballake was touring also with another project quite recently in Germany, possibly It’s come a little too soon from that point of view, so maybe we’ll be back. But I know that the record won a critics award that is quite prestigious in Germany. (editors note: The ‘Deutschen Schallplatten Kritik’ quarterly choice of quarter 2, 2025)

So you know, the record went down really well. It’s just, yeah, I hope we’ll get more opportunity to play.

There might be a second album?

The second-half, why not? Hopefully.

Waiting another 20 years?!!.

Yeah, we’ll probably be too old by then I think!

Thank you for the short interview.

My pleasure.  I hope you enjoy the concert.