Amadou & Mariam Aim to Expand Audience With "Folila" Timothy Greenfield-Sanders On a new album, the married Malian duo Amadou & Mariam are joined by a singular group of accomplished fans. CALL it double exposure. "Folila," a new album by Amadou & Mariam, the blind husband-and-wife duo from Mali, was recorded twice, once in New York with an all-star cast of indie musicians and once in Mali with a crew of traditional instrumentalists. Though their original plan was to make two albums, they ended up mixing the separately recorded tracks together. Released last week by Nonesuch, "Folila" is their attempt to expand their audience in the United States, where their mix of Malian pop and blues-rock has been slower to catch on than in Europe. The list of American guests on the CD reads like a Who's Who of hipster New York: the guitarist Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the electro-pop singer Santigold, the rapper Theophilus London, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and the vocalists Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, of TV on the Radio. Other guests include Bertrand Cantat, a French rocker, and Ebony Bones, a British songwriter. "They are so interested in working with other people and seeing where songs go," Mr. Zinner said. Surprisingly they are not precious about their music. Of the recording sessions, he added: "It was very casual, very loose. It reminded me of just sitting around with your friends and talking and coming up with an idea. Such cultural mash-ups are not unheard-of in the digital age. Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from Mali, and the Chieftains, the Irish folk band, have both put out records in the last year that featured American indie-rock guests. The practice harks back to Paul Simon's partnership with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on "Graceland" and Ry Cooder's albums in the 1990s with Ali Farka Touré of Mali and the Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba. "It's been a regular part of trying to carve out some visibility in the West," said John Schaefer, a radio host with WNYC (93.9 FM) in New York. But Amadou Bagayoko, 57, and Mariam Doumbia, 54, are not Western players on a mission to explore strange new musical worlds. They are African pop musicians who have won admirers on the rock-festival circuit and are making recordings with those musicians to broaden their appeal. It was "Dimanche à Bamako," their 2005 collaboration with the French-Spanish indie rock star Manu Chao, that gave them a gold record in Europe and catapulted them onto the French pop charts. In 2009 they won critical acclaim when they collaborated with the British rocker Damon Albarn on their next album, "Welcome to Mali." Now they are hoping the American guests on "Folila" can generate similar buzz in the United States. "When you are an artist coming from a poor country like Mali, your big goal is to be known abroad," said Marc Antoine Moreau, the duo's manager and producer. Since Manu Chao we had this opportunity to spread the music more, all over the world, and to meet people like Damon Albarn and so on. It's a constant trend. That's why I thought it was the time now to build up more in the U.S. Mr. Bagayoko and Ms. Doumbia assembled their collaborators on"Folila" through jam sessions and alliances formed at music festivals. They met Jake Shears at a music festival in 2006. They first played with Mr. Zinner at a free jam concert in Spain to promote African musicians. They invited Theophilus London to a jam session in London after hearing his remix of one of their songs. "All the people who are featured came to work with us out of love," said Mr. Bagayoko as he sat with Ms. Doumbia in a dressing room before a recent concert at the Box on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mr. Bagayoko said the initial idea was to sell the two albums as a double CD set. That plan, he said, reflected conflicting desires: How do you return to your roots while still courting a larger international audience? In the end, however, he said the couple decided to fuse the recordings into one album, mixing them together and making small adjustments to tempo and pitch. Their longtime engineer, Antoine Halet, spent three months on the project. Despite all the guests the album sounds more traditional than their two previous records. "Dimanche à Bamako" echoed the heavily produced electronic sound of Manu Chao's solo records. "Welcome to Mali" also had a pop sheen over Malian beats. But no Western drum kit is used on "Folila." The percolating rhythm from djembe and doumdoum hand drums dominates the songs, mixing with the twang of traditional Malian string instruments. The album evokes the dirt roads and charcoal fires of Bamako more than Manhattan's skyline. Mr. Bagayoko's driving guitar riffs push the music along, giving it shape, and Ms. Doumbia's vocal lines - her voice is nasal but angular and resounding - ride above the complex rhythms, threading the beat with hypnotic melodies.