Turkish artist Ozan Baysal makes his debut in an unusual style. Traditional, tonal and jazz harmonic elements build a bridge between antiquity and modernity. The musician plays on a non-standard double-necked bağlama, using the oldest techniques of playing this instrument, which have survived to this day thanks to masters such as Erdal Erzincan and Arif Sağ.
We are talking about şelpe: a style without the use of a plectrum, relying solely on hand techniques such as finger tapping (parmak vurma), plucking (tel çekme) and strumming (pençe).
Baysal proves how much freedom and space for experimentation the world of makams allows. He enchants as an old soul in the world of modern music. Tel ve Ten also gains…
Category: world
Egyptian guitarist Maurice Louca’s music has shapeshifted continually across the years.
Rooted in Arabic music, he’s refracted its traditions in styles as disparate as experimental electronica, avant-jazz or the noise rock of his work with The Dwarfs of East Agouza alongside Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop.
Blessed with a stellar line-up of musicians, his latest solo album Fera is a more sedate affair than much of his past work, though no less bold in its ambition. Driven by percussionist Khaled Yassine’s hypnotic polyrhythms throughout, Louca’s intricate guitar lines interweave with Ayman Asfour’s drone-like violins on opener ‘Polaris’.
Both ‘Lawendi’ and ‘Sahar’ are jazz-focussed affairs, with the deep pulse of Rosa Brunello’s…
With his longtime drummer and percussionist Tommy Larkins and former Modern Lovers bandmate Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) on keyboards, balladeer Jonathan Richman returns with his 18th studio album Only Frozen Sky Anyway, following in his longtime tradition of injecting his lyrical wit into indie rock in a fashion that he has perfected over decades.
…Harrison plays keyboards on five songs, including two tracks that have been made available in advance of the album — “I Was Just a Piece of Frozen Sky” and “O Guitar.” Harrison’s daughter, Aishlin, sings backing vocals on a song titled “But We Might Try Weird Stuff.” Richman’s wife, Nicole Montalbano, plays tamboura on the album’s final two tracks — “The Wavelet”…
…This compilation isn’t a sweeping history of Libyan music — it’s a personal journey into the sounds we fell in love with while digging through tapes, conversations, and stories across Libya and beyond. Rather than spotlighting the country’s most famous musical exports, the compilation brings forward a mix of overlooked gems and local classics of the cassette era: artists whose work thrived in spite of political limitations, and scarce international exposure.
The music featured here blends reggae rhythms, synthy disco grooves, gritty pop, house, and funk, a vibrant collision of genres that reflects Libya’s unique sonic landscape from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Many of these recordings were recovered from the TK7 cassette factory in…
Seydou Diabate was destined to play the balafon, a resonated xylophone that carries a long history with Mandé people of West Africa from which Seydou gets his name. Born to the Diabate griot family in Burkina Faso, as a child Seydou’s life revolved around the instrument.
At the age of 10, Seydou tragically lost his father, pushing him to leave his village for Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second largest city. It was there that the cosmopolitan energy infected Seydou, and he began to dream of a life with his balafon without borders.
In 2011, Seydou moved to Toulouse, France with that mission at heart. Upon his arrival he began to construct a group, an Orkestra, that could accompany his balafon.
“From 1967 to 1983, Guinea’s government presented selections of songs from the Voix de la Révolution catalogue on its own recording label, Syliphone. These recordings were described as ‘the fruit of the revolution’.
Syliphone was revolutionary in many aspects: it was the first recording label to feature traditional African musical instruments such as the kora and balafon within an orchestre setting; it was the first to present the traditional songs of the griots within an orchestre setting; and it was the first government-sponsored recording label of post-colonial Africa.
Syliphone represented authenticité in action, and over 750 songs were released by the recording label on 12-inch and 7-inch vinyl discs.
Guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada made a big splash with his 2022 album Boleros Psicodélicos. On it he explored the lush and romantic baladas of his youth with the help of a stellar guest list made up of singers from across the spectrum of contemporary Latin music. The record was brimming with brilliant performances, wonderfully loose and occasionally funky arrangements, and enough moments of thrilling drama to give chills to anyone whether they are fans of romantic baladas or not. It all went so perfectly that Quesada figured he’d take another crack at it and 2025’s Boleros Psicodélicos II turns out to be another triumph. He sticks to the same basic idea of pairing vintage sounds with exciting vocalists on a batch of dramatic songs and it’s…
For his seventh solo outing, MVD LUV, singer/songwriter Juan Wauters returned to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay, to record an album in loving tribute to the place where he grew up, something he’d always wanted to do but never had a chance to before now. Wauters explains this more or less exactly over a jaunty piano on “Amor Montevideo,” the short, spoken introduction that begins the album. While in Montevideo, Wauters enlisted a crew of backing musicians and collaborators from the region, bringing elements of Uruguay’s musical heritage into his lighthearted and exuberant songwriting. This can manifest as the Spanish-sung lyrics and persistent hand drum rhythms that join woozy synthesizers on “Manejando por Pando” or as a spontaneous…
Co-released by Cairo’s HIZZ imprint and Heat Crimes, Egyptian producer Elkotsh‘s debut album skirts the experimental edge of mahraganat, disrupting electroid rhythms and dextrous live percussive workouts with acidic synth improvisations and warped instrumental vamps.
Elkotsh’s kaleidoscopic, forward-thinking productions are representative of a vital new wave of Egyptian electronic music, alloying sounds that vibrate through the country’s street festivals and cafés with clubwise mutations from across the wider world.
…This hard-charging, bass-bombing set of squirrelly, footwork-damaged, mostly instrumental, mutoid mahraganat – aka electro-shaabi – is positively electric with the necessity of creation.
Three continents, three musical world citizens. Morocco-born Majid Bekkas, Franco-Vietnamese Nguyên Lê and American Hamid Drake have combined their astonishing musicality, their origins and their global experiences to create a captivating live concert programme encompassing desert blues, Gnawa trance, Middle Eastern jazz, sixties rock and Far Eastern serenity.
Voice, oud and guembri (bass lute)…electric guitar with a wide spectrum of shimmering timbres…a percussion arsenal between subtlety and physicality – these are the tools deployed here by three remarkable, world-class, globe-trotting protagonists… Majid Bekkas’s innovations have cast a wholly new light onto the fascinating music and culture of the Gnawa minority in…
Among the Shona communities of northeastern Zimbabwe, the matepe, a type of mbira, is used to evoke trance states to facilitate communication with ancestral spirits.
Following a campaign of vilification by Zimbabwe’s dominant Christian sects, who associate the rituals with witchcraft, Chaka Chawasarira is one of less than ten remaining matepe masters. Dubbed the ‘Mozart of mbira’, the 83-year-old musician has dedicated his life to the instrument, and Useza is his way of celebrating and conserving matepe traditions for future generations.
Across the record, Chawasarira’s deftness on his device shines, the instrumentals summoning the sounds of Shona ceremonies through its complex melodies. On ‘Wako Ndiwako’, looping…
Amayo was the only actual Nigerian in the Brooklyn afrobeat juggernaut Antibalas, reigning from 1999 to 2021 in colored face paint and elaborate headdress over pulsing Fela-obsessed grooves. A devotee of martial arts, he is a practitioner of Kung Fu’s Chinese Lion Dance, as well as Nigerian Edo traditional arts. Lion Awakes celebrates all these elements of the Amayo creative package, unfurling frantic blasts of brassy syncopation around intricate narratives of supernatural kicking, punching might. This is not a long album, but it has epic scope that’s well beyond the limitations of the usual five-song EP.
It begins with Amayo’s tribute to his grandmother, a black magic shaman woman in touch with supernatural energies. The song, “Black…
In many ways, Malawi’s Madilitso Band are an enigma; a prime example is that they remain far better known in Europe than in their own country. Whilst an upcoming documentary recounting the Madalitso’s story, entitled The Banjo Boys, might garner greater domestic recognition, the release of Ma Gitala is destined to further expand their ever-growing reputation with Western audiences.
However, the success of Yobu Maligwa and Yosefe Kelekeni, the two musicians who make up the band, has not been achieved overnight, as a basic outline of their history reveals. Yobu, born in a small rural village, eschewed the football played by his peers, engrossing himself in one thing only: music. Yosefe had the same sole interest, wetted after seeing a local playing a basic guitar,…
Ben Kelly, aka Aboutface, made his slow, arduous way through northern Peru, five hours on an off-road vehicle and four more on a boat up the Rio Santiago. His destination was Guayabal, a tiny village of the Wampís people of the Amazonas region. The Wampís were welcoming, but relations were initially tense; Kelly’s arrival was the result of months of discussions, but he was still not sure that granting him unprecedented access was a decision that was universally agreed upon within the community. However, Kelly had a secret. To demonstrate the sincerity of his intentions, he’d learned to play the quena, a traditional Peruvian flute. He played music deep into the night with his hosts, gradually building the rapport that would allow them to record the collaborative…
Votia, a group from La Réunion, come steeped in tradition: powerfully voiced lead singer Marie-Claude Philéas Lambert is the daughter of the late Gramoun Lélé. He was one of the great masters of maloya, a song and dance genre that re-emerged in the 1970s after defying the French authorities’ attempts to outlaw it; it now features on UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Lambert has kept the bluesy, percussive tradition in the family, forming Votia with her husband, friends and children, wielding percussion instruments including the kayamb reed shaker and singing her own compositions about daily life, good luck and misfortunes in Malagasy and Creole. The Asian and African influences are as they were when the enslaved people of La Réunion,…
Asked to imagine sounds associated with the islands off the coast of Spain, the first thing you might think of is balearic dance music. But the three members of Lagoss shine a light on the less-recognized Canary Islands, using balmy ambience to conjure oceanic topographies and hypothetical coastlines.
Founded by Discrepant label head Gonçalo F. Cardoso, along with Mladen Kurajica and Daniel García — who cut their teeth in the electro-acoustic act Tupperware — Lagoss flips exotica tropes into playful audio-visual experiences. Across a handful of thematically nuanced releases, Lagoss has retooled Tropicália for the modern age. “I’m a huge fan of the genre of manufactured worlds, almost like a science fiction thing,”…
In the early 1970s, a newly independent Zambia was forging a sound of its own. Young bands such as the Peace and Ngozi Family mixed distorted guitars with bluesy riffs, falsetto vocals and Fela Kuti-influenced Afrobeat rhythms to produce a genre they labelled Zamrock. At the forefront of this scene was singer Emmanuel “Jagari” Chanda’s Witch (We Intend to Cause Havoc). With his nickname paying homage to Mick Jagger, Chanda channelled the Stones’ swagger – alongside a healthy dose of lo-fi vocal grit and meandering, prog-influenced grooves – into five Witch records.
Although the group splintered in the 80s, reissues of their music in the 2010s sparked a Witch resurgence: in 2023, Chanda reunited with keys player Patrick Mwondela to…
It’s eight years since Nadah El Shazly’s debut, but her works since – particularly the astounding Pollution Opera with Elvin Brandhi – point to an artist still open to bringing in new sounds, one with a freeform approach to influence, intent on channelling as much as possible through her blend of experimental electronics and traditional Arabic influences.
This instinct remains on Laini Tani, songs clearly bearing the influence of myriad sonic worlds, but it’s strange that they manage – at least early doors – to coalesce into music quite so characterless. Her voice remains gorgeous, but tracks like ‘Banit’ and ‘Elnadaha’ never lift beyond a plod; never seizing in the way you know her work can.
Then, from the throbbing opening of…
In the late ‘60s, three men inspired by South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile operating under the name The Last Poets took the words of the Black Art Movement and set it to funk rhythms. The cultural effect they had was huge: They would later be referred to as proto-rappers from the Civil Rights Era, and their songs have found their way into rap music through samples and features.
At the same time that The Last Poets were active in Harlem, across the Atlantic Ocean in Nigeria, Fela Kuti was inventing Afrobeat — music that was similar in spirit to the Poets, with politically charged words set to a rallying drum beat courtesy of drummer Tony Allen. Before Allen passed away in 2020, he recorded drum tracks intended for use by The Last Poets, but further…
Five decades after releasing their iconic eponymous debut album, Brazilian jazz-samba trio Azymuth celebrate the anniversary with Marca Passo, their 40th album. The original group included keyboardist Jose Roberto Bertrami, bassist Alex Malheiros, and drummer Ivan “Mamao” Conti. All sang. Bertrami left to pursue a solo career in 1990, and was replaced on a few albums. He returned for 1996’s Carnival, their Far Out Recordings debut. He died in 2012 and was succeeded by Kiko Continentino, a revered Brazilian keyboardist and composer. Mamao died in 2023, leaving Malheiros the only original member. Ubiquitous session drummer/composer Renato “Massa” Calmon came aboard for 2024’s international tour and remains. Marca Passo was co-composed by…