Takaat and Mountain Movers
Three Sheets
New Haven
May 4, 2025
Ahmoudou Madassane of Takaat finished a long flourish on his guitar, raw and lyrical at the same time. Mikey Coltun answered with a drone on bass, supportive and grounding. Souleymane Ibrahim played a long swell on drums. Having created a wide-open musical landscape, the trio proceeded to charge through it on a galloping rhythm. The audience — a crowded room, with everyone standing close together — swayed as if hit by a wave, already in tune.
Such was the mood Sunday afternoon at Three Sheets on Elm Street, as the New Haven-based Mountain Movers opened for Takaat, a new three-piece band at this time better known as the rhythm section for Mdou Moctar, the shredder from Niger who tours internationally as a standard bearer for the younger generation of Tuareg guitarists.
This wasn’t Takaat’s first visit to New Haven. Moctar has made multiple stops in New Haven since 2017, thanks to musician and concert organizer Rick Omonte. So the audience was ready, and hungry, for what was coming, as together the Mountain Movers and Takaat represented two far-ranging musical directions a band with psychedelic, experimental inclinations could go in from both sides of the Atlantic.
“Hi, we’re the Mountain Movers from New Haven,” singer and guitarist Dan Greene said to start the band’s set. He expressed his excitement at seeing Takaat, which he promised would be “mind-blowing.” But first he and the rest of the band — Kryssi Battalene on guitar, Rick Omonte on bass, and Ross Menze on drums — had something to say musically themselves.
Battalene and Greene began the first song by creating a dreamy soundscape of softer sounds, while Omonte began the second song on a slow, sneaky groove. In the past the Mountain Movers have dished out some of the loudest music in the Elm City, creating molecule-rearranging sheets of sound. This set was remarkable for being quieter, while retaining the Movers’ way of creating a sense of vast space in their music, aided by Battalene’s solos, which carried the coiled energy of a slow-motion explosion.
A song explicitly about New Haven, featuring a recognizable walk through the harbor, returned to the refrain that “the sun is coming up”; by that time the music had created such a haze that it was possible to wonder if the singer was an early riser or had just been up all night. The Movers built kinetic energy throughout their set by setting up contrasts. In their second-to-last song, Menze set up an insistent groove that grew more intense as the song progressed. Battalene and Greene responded by seemingly slowing down, letting the sound get deeper and wider. In the middle of it all, Omonte pulsed on a simple bass figure, serene and steady. The effect was mesmerizing.
The expansive mood was just right for Takaat to hit the stage, which the trio did in an immediate blaze of sound. As the liner notes to the group’s first album relate, Takaat “started during soundchecks while on the road with Mdou Moctar when the trio indulged their shared love for amps cranked to 11 and the sound of blown out speakers. Toward the end of 2023, the three started writing music together, inspired by their shared experiences with the sounds and energy of Hausa bar bands, gritty soukous, and 2000s post-punk.” They draw from “the DIY ethos of punk” but also “that thrill of the new and the ecstasy of togetherness.”
Their unified sound brought the audience together at once, with spacious intros that headed into rhythm after galloping rhythm. The songs were anchored by tough riffs and keening vocals from Madassane, but the fireworks lay in the long improvisations that followed. With Coltun nailing down one muscular bassline after another, Madassane and Ibrahim urged each other on in song after song. At a moment about two-thirds of the way through each number, the already high-energy beat shifted — it got a little faster, but more important, it picked up energy, a boulder rolling downhill. Coltun dug in more, and Ibrahim both hit harder and added more polyrhythmic flourishes to his playing. These had the effect, often, of launching Madassane’s guitar parts, as he worked the strings to sometimes create long, arcing melodies and sometimes to create squalls of distortion. The feedback in the electric instruments mirrored the feedback the musicians created with one another and with the audience, a constant sense of gathering and releasing energy. The crowd swayed and moved, heads bobbing, some eyes watching with intent, others closed completely, as if transfixed. The raucous cheers at the end of every song let out all the bottled energy left, which seemed inexhaustable.
Near the end of the set, Coltun offered a note of gratitude. “Thanks everyone for coming, and thanks to Rick for setting this up.”
“No, thank you,” someone said in the audience. The crowd’s silence, waiting for the next song to start, sounded a lot like consensus.
