condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

Divergo was one of the small Italian labels of the late seventies that tried to publish the world with the same seriousness as the cantautori, and this is one of its stranger releases: love and war songs of the Bedouin of Aswan, recorded in Upper Egypt, issued in Milan with a booklet of Italian translations. The title ("We have reached the Sinai") comes from a song about the 1973 war, sung by men whose relation to the Egyptian state was at best distant.

The music is voice and frame drum, with the long melismatic lines and call-and-response of the Nile Bedouin tradition, recorded close and unedited. The Italian ethnographic-label moment (Zodiaco, Albatros, Divergo, Cetra's Folk series) produced a handful of records like this that nobody else in Europe was making. Italian pressing with booklet.