Even by Lebanon’s standards, the period from 2019 to 2021 was a turbulent period in the country’s history. In October 2019 protests against political corruption and the government’s poor handling of the stagnating economy erupted across the country. A new government was formed, yet this too crumbled in the wake of the huge explosion that rocked Beirut’s port area in August 2020. Rolling blackouts, shortages of fuel and medicines and general economic woe kept the protests – many of which were driven as much by women as men – continuing well into 2021.
If the problems are still very much present, the turmoil did have one unexpected result. Previously keeping to their own districts of Beirut, the musicians in the city’s underground…
Category: world
Seattle-based Polyrhythmics are celebrating 15 years of sonic exploration with the release of their highly anticipated new album, Life from Below. Since forming in 2010, this seven-piece powerhouse has redefined instrumental music with a sound that blends funk, soul, psychedelic rock, R&B, and Afrobeat into a kaleidoscope of rhythm and groove. Known for their dynamic live performances and innovative compositions, the band has earned a reputation as one of the most captivating acts on the contemporary music scene.
Polyrhythmics emerged from the rich creative soil of Seattle’s eclectic music community, releasing their self-titled debut album in 2011. Since then, their discography has grown to include fan-favorite albums such as Octagon (2015)…
It’s uncommon to have two violins in a klezmer band; more frequently, one violin vies with clarinet and other solo instruments for virtuosic dominance but, on Two Strings – the new album from highly renowned US klezmer fiddlers Jake Shulman-Ment and Abigale Reisman – the pair combine and lift each other towards a glorious synchronicity.
It’s an album of original compositions, Yiddish poetry settings and resurrected pieces from forgotten manuscripts. The violins are joined by some other klezmer stalwarts on cello, cimbalom, clarinet and percussion.
From the poignant opening of ‘Nigunim’ to the ecstatic ending of ‘Black Sea Suite’, the ensemble members are tight and communicative. There’s a section during the title track where…
Chance happenings sometimes take music to the right place. For Spanish-German, Cologne-based singer-songwriter Wolfgang Pérez that place is his new succulent album Só Ouço out now via Hive Mind Records. Two albums into Pérez’s pop fusion experimentation, Who Cares Who Cares from 2021 and last year’s Ahora, the thrilling tones of Música Popular Brasileira were already oozing through his work. Then, while studying composition in Rio his interest went beyond watching, listening and learning. He jammed, he formed a band, they played shows and at one gig his tunes caught the ear of Angelo Wolf, sound engineer connected to Rio’s recent resurgence as MPB central (e.g. Bala Desejo, Dora Morelenbaum, Ana Frango Elétrico et al). From here the momentum…
Rocío Márquez is an established singer, experimentalist and PhD graduate intent on refracting flamenco through a 21st-century lens. Steeped in over three decades worth of performing, recording and reframing the genre, she flounces, skirts swishing, along a fine line between respecting tradition and innovating in ways that have flamenco purists pausing mid-palmas. An electric guitar wig out? A spot of Shakespearian word play? “¿Y por que no?”, figures Márquez, whose clutch of albums include the acclaimed Firmamento (2017), Visto en el Jueves (2019), and Tercer Cielo (2022) – she has also worked on film soundtracks and collaborated with Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler and famed Spanish musician Kiko Veneno.
In just five years, Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti has become one of experimental music’s biggest names. In addition to her spellbinding solo releases, she is an eager collaborator, working with the likes of Efterklang, the improv quartet Amor Muere – which she co-founded in her adopted home of Mexico City – and with her romantic partner, guitarist Hector Tosta, as Titanic. On the latter’s superb 2023 debut, Vidrio, they pioneered a genre-agnosticism that veered from squealing free-jazz saxophone to hammering drum grooves and aggressively processed cello, always anchored in Fratti’s soaring falsetto. It heralded the arrival of a group who embraced experimentation as much as earwormy melodies.
On Hagen, the duo double down on their…
Nueva Timba is the sophomore Blue Note release by pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa. The first, 2023’s Timba a la Americana, marked not only his label debut, but his first recording since leaving Cuba for France in 2021. López-Nussa has been at the forefront of recontextualizing and innovating Latin jazz in the 21st century without once sacrificing tradition.
He uses most of the same band from the earlier album: harmonicist Gregoire Maret, bassist Luques Curtis, and drummer/percussionist brother Ruy Adrian López-Nussa. Their focus offers an irresistible meld of Cuban timba, post-bop, and Spanish classical music. It was recorded live in performance at studio Le Duc des Lombards in Paris. The tapes were then extensively…
Fueled in part by the visual aesthetics of ’80s and ’90s Sports Illustrated, Leon Michels could have taken the ball and really run with it for 24 Hr Sports. Instead, the title is only a little more indicative of its contents than that of Yeti Season, El Michels Affair‘s non-conceptual preceding album as lone headliner. There’s a marching band intro, two interstitial themes, a song with soccer-referencing lyrics (in Portuguese), and another features a chorus (however blurred) declaring “We want the gold!” In other words, nothing approaches Jock Jams territory or even remotely resembles Chuck Mangione’s “Give It All You Got.” Athletically-uninclined listeners needn’t worry about being bombarded with sports stuff. 24 Hr Sports is largely standard EMA, reconstituting…
From El Boraro, the vampiric demon on 2018’s Anticlines, to Petra, the alien observer of 2022’s ¡Ay!, Lucrecia Dalt often uses fictional personas to explore complex themes and emotions in her work. However, with A Danger to Ourselves, she sheds the chrysalis of these alter-egos to emerge with her most personal record yet.
The title, borrowed from David Sylvian’s lyrics on opener cosa rara, hints at the album’s preoccupations; emotional volatility, self-sabotage, and the uneasy pull between intimacy and annihilation. It’s Dalt at her most exposed, and somehow, her most inscrutable.
On ‘divina’, you sense this newfound vulnerability as she sings about improbable love against a backdrop of staccato piano and the sharp,…
Zé Ibarra is clearly a scholar of Brazilian music. The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album pays respect to strains of his country’s MPB, funk and jazz with a precision that occasionally makes it feel like a long-lost gem discovered from the vaults.
That feeling is enforced by the vintage styling of the long-haired, rock god-like portrait of Ibarra that adorns the album’s front cover.
Fortunately, it’s a far more compelling listen than its somewhat backward-looking range of influences might suggest.
First off, there’s Ibarra’s voice, a supple and expressive instrument that recalls Caetano Veloso at times, Jeff Buckley at others. From the Lincoln Olivetti-like punch to the horns…
Now domiciled in Lyon, France, this young Venezuelan singer, percussionist and member of the Réunionese-Venezuelan quartet, Parranda La Cruz, has delivered a first solo album brimming with confidence and panache.
The 11 numbers are characterised by Baroque-sounding cello and violins, traditional indigenous percussion and the singer’s extraordinary soprano voice. A quiet drama keeps you riveted throughout, coloured by sounds of the forest and referencing religious ceremonies and other facets of a life left behind.
Based around an ancestral chant that inaugurates the ceremony of Saint Jean-Baptiste, ‘Abreme La Puerta Juana’ sets the scene memorably; ‘Sol de Luna Llena’ has an earnest…
Projects that fuse electronic and traditional music risk doing neither genre justice if they don’t get the basics – songwriting and production – correct. Electro Baghdad reaps the rewards of its two creators’ sustained, patient collaboration and attention to detail.
Shiran and Bakal self-released the joint EP Electro Hafla in 2023, in tribute to the Yemeni component of their respective heritages; on this full-length follow-up they do the same for their shared Iraqi ancestry, painting a triumphant tapestry of multiple identity and depth at the level both of text and sound. Bakal’s restrained and elegant use of a range of dance music styles (techno, reggaeton, breakbeats) lays the foundation for moments of real catharsis when Shiran’s Iraqi…
This collaborative album is born of a musical meeting at Toronto’s Experimental Link Series event. The series focuses on celebrating and reinvigorating what it describes as Persian classical music through cross-cultural collaborations with Canadian musicians from other backgrounds. In this case, Hamid Motebassem, a renowned Dutch-based setar and tar musician, came together with the George Crotty Trio – a Canadian jazz trio featuring Crotty on cello, Jonathan Chapman on bass and Dhaivat Jani on percussion.
Though the result is described as a “jazz-forward musical exploration”, it is very much focused on Iranian classical composition, with Motebassem’s setar as the central instrument. Deeply contemplative, the atmosphere of this…
If it wasn’t for Salif Keita, Kassé Mady Diabaté would surely have been recognised as the finest male vocalist in Mali, with a distinctive style that was relaxed, thrilling and soulful.
A griot, he was steeped in the Mandinka traditions, but always happy to experiment, as he showed with his work with Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra or in collaboration with Toumani and Taj Mahal.
His six solo albums, including the classic Kiriké, were a glorious reminder of his roots, and this set of recordings made soon before his death in 2018 follows much the same pattern. His voice is as glorious as ever, and he is backed by a fine acoustic band, dominated by guitars and balafon.
His daughter Hawa – herself a fine singer and…
A masterclass of 20th century Cuban-American showbiz, this has all the vintage allure of a night at Havana’s Tropicana, or indeed one of the Miami clubs Albita Rodriguez is still playing 40 years after abandoning her career as a country singer in Cuba for a white trouser suit and the bright lights (and anti-Castrists) of Florida.
Here she’s teamed up with fellow resident Chucho Valdés, grand old keyboard maestro responsible for 60 years of an unstoppable and headlining amalgam of Afro-Cuban lore, classics, jazz, funk, ballads and more. It’s all virtuoso stuff, with Valdés’ vamping montunos and rippling arpeggios flowing across a selection of six standards and three new compositions by Albita.
The standards are best: you can’t have too many…
In a Digital Audio Workstation world producers have more tools at their disposal than ever before, with a seemingly endless supply of plug-ins to help create anything the mind imagines. It can lead to analysis paralysis, as anyone who’s tested out a series of possible kickdrums can attest, but electronic music still sounds most vital when the rhythms are fiery and the arrangement pops.
Guedra Guedra’s second album is an exhilarating fusion of African sounds with intricate beats, drawing inspiration from techno, breakbeat and old-school electro.
The percussion of ‘Calling Out’ is initially stark and bass-heavy, as various ticking, knocking sounds interact with pattering hi-hats and a drum-machine cowbell. When the track’s vocal…
Haruomi Hosono was obsessed with American music. Growing up in postwar Japan, he ignored domestic artists and listened to foreign sounds broadcast by the Far East Network, radio stations operated by the U.S. military. One of his childhood favorites can be considered the most consequential track of his early solo career: Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village.” The song, which nabbed the fourth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1959, brought exotica to the masses, ushering in new possibilities for sonic fantasy. “My music has always been fiction,” Denny said in 1998. “Everything comes from my imagination… it wasn’t about authenticity.” In the mid-’70s, Hosono was listening to Caribbean music but didn’t think he had the chops to make the real stuff. Exotica provided a way in…
Rarely does a band remain as grounded and unpretentious as The Good Ones, a bare-bones folk act from a small Rwandan village whose four previous albums have been recorded live in the field by American producer Ian Brennan. Their original songs about heartbreak, poverty, and the brutal genocide its members survived in the mid-’90s are delivered with unexpected warmth and sweetness. They are an unlikely success story who have toured internationally, recorded for hip indie labels like Dead Oceans and ANTI-, and realized dreams far beyond their meager origins.
Despite this, the simplicity of their approach remains unchanged. The Good Ones are essentially the duo of Adrien Kazigira, who sings and plays acoustic guitar, and his…
Originally developed during an Australian Art Orchestra residency in remote Tasmania, the Hand to Earth ensemble creatively established itself in 2021 with their glorious self-titled debut album, followed up in 2023 by the equally impressive Mokuy. Founded by trumpeter-producer and ex-AAO musical director Peter Knight, the progressive multicultural quintet also features Indigenous Arnhem Land songman Daniel Wilfred, his yidaki (didgeridoo)-playing brother David, contemporary South Korean vocalist Sunny Kim and Australian woodwind virtuoso Aviva Endean.
As the evolution of this unique collaboration continues, their third album is perhaps more ambient-electronic in nature, but no less grounded in the timeless Aboriginal manikay…
There is a restive, Christmas-time sound of new hope and expectations running throughout Shir Yedidot that is hard to fathom at first, given that the repertoire moves effortlessly from Chabad nigunim (Hasidic wordless melodies) into original compositions. It is as if the gifted trio — leader/bassist Yosef Gutman Levitt, pianist Yonathan Avishai (Joys and Solitudes, 2019; with trumpeter Avishai Cohen Playing the Room, 2019) and oudist Yagel Haroush. Haroush also adds depth and texture playing the kamancheh (Persian bowed instrument) and ney (end-blown wood flute). The players seem to have set out to exclaim all the joy in all our voices and how those voices together radiate out to each other. Over days, over years, over centuries.