Two of those explorations could be heard Friday night at the Speakeasy. Lo’Jo is a French folk-rock band that fell in love with Tinariwen in 1999 and began incorporating North African elements into their sound. Founder Denis Pean looks like a 1950s French gangster from a Jean-Pierre Melville movie and sings like Leonard Cohen in a recitative baritone. Richard Bourreau lit up these meditations with virtuosic violin that slipped back and forth between the European and African traditions.

Two older women added their higher, more supple voices to Pean’s conversational grounding, and a young rhythm section gave the folkloric elements a muscular push. The result was a strange blend of Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin with Tinariwen, between the crowded cities of France and the empty deserts of northern Mali. It was quite effective and suggested that desert-rock can be put to many different uses.

An even stranger use was demonstrated by the following band, Imarhan Timbuktu. The band is another desert-rock band from northern Mali’s Tuareg tribe. But they are touring North America without a rhythm section, so they recruited a bassist and drummer from the Navajo American-Indian tribe for their SXSW show. The lead singer was an older man in the traditional desert costume, but his guitar parts had been refined into easy-to-grasp riffs that almost became pop hooks. The nearly seven-foot Navajo drummer added a rolling sway to the music, however, that gave it a whole different dimension from Tinariwen.