Tinariwen was formed by exiled Tuaregs in a refugee camp in Libya. A Tuareg rebel leader from Mali bought the band its first electric guitars and amplifiers and used its songs for propaganda during the rebellion. A decade of uneasy peace later, Tinariwen sings stark, hypnotic songs about the harshness of desert life and a still-smoldering rage.

The songs are call-and-response tunes set to lean but spellbinding guitar patterns. Most of the early set's songs are on the band's new album, "Amassakoul" (World Village). Handclaps and a hand drum sketch three-against-two rhythms to mesh with sparse guitar and bass lines: a little trill, a brief run, just enough to pinpoint a mode and a groove. The songs reach back to ancient drones and ecstatic rituals that build through repetition and acceleration.

With electric guitars replacing more traditional lutes, the songs can suggest the kind of bleak one-chord blues that John Lee Hooker played - music with African origins that has been reworked again in Africa. Every so often, Tinariwen's choppy guitar chords create a kind of North African funk. One song, "Arawan" was a rap in which Alhousseini Abdoulahi declared, "Nobody cares about the people of the desert who are suffering from thirst."

Yet the power of Tinariwen's music comes not from its modern elements but from its ageless ones: from the Arabic and North African turns of the melodies, from the way terse lines add up to propulsion and profundity, from the austere power of the drone. Although the lyrics are often melancholy, there's no self-pity, just a spartan determination. Most of the singing was done by the group's five men, but in "Aymana," men intoned an overlapping drone note while the voice of a female singer, Mina Walet Oumar, rose above them, sharp and incantatory.

Tinariwen's music seems inseparable from its origins. With the drones and circular patterns, songs can extend like sweeping desert landscapes. And like a nomad traversing those sands, Tinariwen's music carries only essentials and needs nothing more.

Tinariwen performs tonight in Washington at Lisner Auditorium and tomorrow night in Santa Cruz, Calif., at the Kuumba Jazz Center.