Christopher Kirkley went to Mali to make field recordings, but returned with a mixtape of music taken from Saharan Sim cards

However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads – this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.

"The cellphone is such a fixture of west Africa. Everyone has a phone even in villages lacking reception," explained Kirkley, who collected MP3 memory cards in the Tuareg city of Kidal in northern Mali. "They're not just phones, they're all purpose media devices. In the west we maintain a repository of data on hard drives, in Sahel, the cellphone does the same thing."

Kirkley originally travelled to Mali to make field recordings, but soon took to trading tunes with the locals: "I'd carry my netbook while walking down the promenade in the evening and offer to trade songs, filling excess space on the cards with albums on my own hard drive – Townes Van Zandt, John Vanderslice, Elliott Smith …"

Despite claims on some blogs, his collection came from trading alone and not collecting discarded memory cards. "It's a funny notion," he laughs. "The idea of discarded unused memory cards laying around in west Africa."

Returning to Portland, Kirkley teamed up with Mississippi Records to put out a vinyl release of his field recordings (Ishilan n-Tenere: Guitar music from the Western Sahel) but also wanted to do something with the mobile phone MP3s. He says: "I chose some of the more DIY, electronic, modern recordings and put them together on a cassette. It ended up being ripped online, back to MP3. It's a weird chain of analogue to digital to analogue to digital."

Music from Saharan Cellphones begins with local heroes Tinariwen, who are swiftly followed by the song Desert Blues, a solo track from Tinariwen songwriter and guitarist Abdallah.

The third track on side A is a sharp gear change from Abdallah's twanging guitar and a reminder of just how all-conquering Auto-Tune has been. Slathered on the oeuvre of artists from T-Pain to Bon Iver, it's found its way to the desert, too; an unattributed track (apparently from Niger) features a singer crooning in French beneath heavy layers of the pitch-tweaking effect. Kirkley only has scant information on the song: "It's by a Tamashek band from Niger. Apparently their name is Emsikta. I'm doing my best to find the band. I'd love to do a proper release with the group."

Listening to the mixtape is like sitting beside a desert radio controlled by a restless herdsman. The second side has twitchy guitar and biscuit tin drums, an unidentified Touareg musician noodling on an 80s synth and French hip-hop coming together in a mesmerising mix of sounds.

Kirkley says he'd like his next project to be a tape of non-African music from Saharan cellphones but fears it might have less appeal: "It would probably only be interesting in the ethnographic sense, I can't imagine a lot of people wanting to buy a cassette of Le Bouche and the Scorpions."

Listen to Music From Saharan Cellphones