If you want to know how a Rockville native became the bassist, producer and utility knife with Mdou Moctar, a guitar virtuoso from Niger who fronts a namesake quartet, it all started at his home.

Mikey Coltun, 33, remembers beginning music lessons with his siblings when he was 3. His father, Rob, is a guitarist who plays experimental jazz and owns Bossa Bistro & Lounge, a music venue in Washington.

That meant Coltun’s childhood car rides to karate and other extracurriculars boomed with sounds from West Africa and avant-garde musicians. Coltun kept on with his music lessons and began to compose his own music. His dad needed a bassist to play with Cheick Hamala Diabate, a Grammy-nominated Malian musician, who toured and had a weekly gig at Bossa. So, around age 13, Coltun started performing alongside musicians from West Africa and elsewhere, some of them decades older.

Early in high school, he could find himself playing in Richmond, Virginia, on a Wednesday night and making it back to Rockville in the wee hours, said Coltun, a Thomas S. Wootton High School alumnus. “And then go to class late and my dad would write a note.”

He kept touring and went to Mali around 2011. That’s when he first heard the driving Tuareg, a nomadic Saharan ethnic group, rock music most popularized by Tinariwen. This winding path led Coltun to play with Mdou Moctar, who has played sold-out shows and music festivals including Coachella. The rhythm section of that band has formed a side project, Takaat.

The trio, with guitarist/vocalist Ahmoudou Madassane and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim, plays Friday night at Rhizome, an art space in D.C.’s Takoma neighborhood just across the Montgomery County border.

Takaat — pronounced tuh-cot, meaning “noise” in the Tuareg language Tamashek — is about pushing the sounds and energy of Mdou Moctar even further, Coltun says, blending it with his own childhood favorites and music from his years in the region’s punk scene. What does that sound like? “It’s familiar yet different,” Coltun says on a phone call from Asheville, North Carolina, near the end of a two-month tour.

You can hear, in the mix and chant-like melodies, for example, the guitar sounds of Western artists such as Eddie Van Halen. Coltun and his compatriots hit their stride on songs such as “Tiwayyen” from August’s EP, “Is Noise, Vol. 2.”

Here’s one way to explain the sound: Imagine you’re driving down a long, wide stretch of empty road. Suddenly, you spot a few cars in the rearview mirror as the sun creeps above the horizon. One speeds up toward you with a propulsive pounding of Ibrahim’s snare drums and cymbals. Another is not far behind with a hypnotic ping-pong between Madassane’s guitar and Coltun’s bass. When they all blaze ahead in a massive, blown-out roar — that’s Takaat.

“We’re taking a big risk together,” Coltun says. “The energy at these shows are different than with Mdou, we’re playing on the floor with no stage, and you can feel everyone.”