Globally acclaimed music phenomenon Africa Express is back with a brand new studio album titled ‘Africa Express presents… Bahidorá’, recorded in Mexico and bringing together artists and musicians from four continents. The boundary-breaking music collective has, for over two decades, united artists across countries and genres in radically creative collaborations in which anything can, and does, happen.
With the idea of bringing together artists from different cultures, genres, and generations to perform and make music, Africa Express was founded in 2006 with a trip to Mali connecting local stars Toumani Diabaté, Bassekou Kouyaté and Amadou & Mariam with artists including co-founder Damon Albarn, Martha Wainwright and Fatboy Slim.
Category: world
The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.
Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané Bahir’s title translates to ‘the sound created when earth and water meet’ in…
Radio Tarifa were one of the great Spanish bands of the ’90s, their blend of Spanish, North African and medieval styles winning deserved international success. Benjamin Escoriza played a key role with his rough, smoky and emotional singing, prior to the band breaking up in 2006. He sadly passed 13 years ago, but Tarifa are back, revived by surviving members, multi-instrumentalists Faín Sánchez Dueñas and Vincent Molino, and helped by 15 other musicians, including five singers. Together, they create a patchily impressive affair.
The exuberant title-track features vocals recorded by Escoriza back in 2004, while the best of the new songs sound more Spanish than North African, with compelling vocals from the flamenco-influenced Javier Castrillón, and a stately…
…includes two bonus tracks “Sittin’ Here (Karizma DJs Dub) and “Sittin’ Here (Peacey Remix).
Coming 15 years after he dazzled the world with his jazz-house album Tourist, Ludovic Navarre returned to his St. Germain moniker with this self-titled 2015 effort, the self-titling being a signal that the project was reborn. It is, at least partially, as rare groove jazz has been replaced by music from Mali, West Africa, along with blues and funky jazz guitars from around the world.
In the case of the highlight “Real Blues,” it is a Lightnin’ Hopkins sample that supplies the blues, while Navarre does his usual — and intoxicating — light house shuffle underneath. Many of the cuts here sound like an Amadou & Mariam release that’s constantly segueing into…
Based in Mumbai, architect turned vocalist/ songwriter Vidhya Gopal has a lifelong adoration for Hindustani music, lending her a variety of vocal influences, including thumri, qawwali and ghazal. The follow-up to her 2023 debut EP Par, Mehfil is a concept release reimagining Indian semi-classical music with a modern sensibility. Recorded in front of a live audience, Gopal is joined by an ensemble consisting of keyboards, harmonium, tabla, electric guitar, bass and percussion.
On opening tracks ‘Piya Milan’ and ‘Akeli Darr Laage’, Gopal’s voice is accompanied by piano only – with well-chosen harmonic structures imbuing the songs with a tender, cinematic quality. More instruments are introduced as the concert progresses, shifting the tone from…
On Back to Hermetics and Martial Arts Vol. 1, Belgrade-based collective The Cyclist Conspiracy take the listener on an extraordinary world tour of sound, blending the music of three continents and countless cultures into an engrossing cinematic dreamworld. Previous albums have showcased the troupe’s inspiration from Greek rebetiko, Balkan music and North African beats. Those influences are still very much present on Back to Hermetics, but the Conspiracy’s palette has broadened, and they show mastery of every style they tackle.
The Cyclist Conspiracy is named for a book by fellow Serb Svetislav Basara, in which a clandestine Brotherhood meets in dreams and meditates on the bicycle in order to gain secret knowledge. Members of the band refer to…
Following a four-year studio album silence, famed Cuban singer Raúl Paz returns with a good-natured set that leans into themes of identity and place – ruminating on his 15 years outside his homeland. The album marks his return to the French music scene and comes with his trademark blend of traditional Cuban son, European pop and singer-songwriter music. The project’s name is a playful reference to him being a guajiro, a person from rural areas of Cuba, as well as guajira music, with which he is associated.
On ‘La Mala’, Paz combines a choppy acoustic guitar line, crisp percussion, brass fanfares and an earworm chorus to great effect. He demonstrates his versatility across the record, moving from upbeat numbers like this,…
Juan Pastor‘s Afro-Peruvian jazz outfit Chinchano has undergone personnel changes since its 2014 inception, but the iteration on its fifth album is a keeper. While pianist Stu Mindeman has been with the project from the start, the bass and horn chairs have been occupied by different players. Now, the quintet on Memorias featuring bassist Matt Ulery, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and percussionist Gian Luiggi Cortez Mejía feels like the most perfect realization to date of Pastor’s vision. For the drummer and cajón player, this incarnation offers a “more mature, introspective approach to blending Peruvian music with jazz,” and some of that can definitely be attributed to Laurenzi, whose attack is more smooth than abrasive.
As intimated by the title, the album’s thematic…
Originating from the port city Tumaco in Colombia’s Pacific region, Bejuco‘s name comes from a jungle word for a hanging plant stem, symbolizing truth, wisdom, and evolution, reflecting their deep connection to their roots.
The second album from this dynamic outfit follows their 2021 debut, Batea, which introduced listeners to their self-styled ‘bambuco beat’ – that is, a seamless combination of the rhythms of Afrobeat with the tenor of the region’s traditional music. So, marimbas vie with drums, bass, guitar and synths, along with thrilling, fiery vocals.
Listening to the irresistible opener, ‘Me Mueve el Tambó’, tells you much of what you need to know about the album’s intensity. There’s a similar urgency to most of the other eight…
One of the challenges for a group like the Kronos Quartet is to keep finding new pathways to explore. They’ve spent a half-century commissioning works from cutting-edge composers, collaborating with unlikely partners, and stretching the boundaries of what a string quartet can do. Where else is there to go? Their latest release, Forgive Us For, has a few answers: Palestine, Iceland, and Ukraine. The album features three very different pieces, each topical in its own way.
The opener is “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal” (Going Up the Mountain), a traditional song that Palestinian women would use to communicate with men in prison. The album notes date it to the British Mandate; other theories trace it back further, to Ottoman times. More recently, vocalist…
Legendary French industrial pioneers Vox Populi! arrive on Dark Entries with a reissue of Sucre De Pastèque. Vox Populi! was founded in Paris in 1981 by Axel Kyrou, a multi-instrumentalist of Greek, French, and Palestinian roots. He soon recruited his future partner, Mitra, and her brother Arash Khalatbari, who were born in Iran and came to Paris in their teens, as well as bassist Fr6 Man (Francis Manne).
Their sound was motley, combining elements of musique concrete and early industrial with horns, flutes, and traditional Persian instrumentation. Improbably prolific and ceaselessly divergent, Vox Populi! found their way onto dozens of cassette compilations during the heyday of the 1980s DIY tape music scene, including releases…
Multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck and DJ and producer Patrick Forge have been making music under the moniker Da Lata for a good quarter-century now. In all that time, the gist of the project has remained largely consistent: Da Lata‘s music is warm, soulful, and made, more or less, in collaboration with (or at least inspired by) artists working with musical styles that have emerged from African-Brazilian interchanges.
It’s a comfortable niche for Da Lata, which has done an admirable job of making music that holds up pretty well over the decades, even with heavy lounge and jazz-fusion vibes. Now, a full 25 years after the debut of Songs from the Tin, the new album Edge of Blue continues the group’s steady stream of appealing tropical grooves.
…includes instrumentals and acoustic versions (plus a new stripped track).
On their first two albums Kit Sebastian — the duo of multi-instrumentalist Kit Martin and vocalist Merve Erdem — hit upon a winning formula. They blended ’60s psychedelia from around the globe with jazz, soundtrack funk, easy listening, and nostalgic pop, then added winsome vocals and catchy, moody melodies played on instruments often unfamiliar to Western music, like oud and saz. Things were working do well that when it came time to record a third album, they didn’t tinker with the approach much.
Maybe New Internationale is a little more focused, taught and more psychedelic in spots? Perhaps a little less jazz and a little more sounds of…
Combing through a family member’s history following their death is a routine, if sombre and difficult task that falls to many a close relative. Committing to publicly honour that person’s life and work in a tangible way is something else entirely. Over seven years, just such a project has occupied Berlin-based producer Joseph Kamaru, who makes leftfield electronic music as KMRU.
His objective was to memorialise and widen awareness outside Africa of his grandfather, also Joseph, a hugely influential figure in Kenya’s music history and a political activist, who died in 2018 aged 79.
Heavy Combination may be a labour of familial love but like the dozens of his grandfather’s recordings that KMRU has remastered and…
Active as a professional DJ in Japan since the late eighties, DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite is also a renowned remixer, compiler and producer. An avid record collector and an expert of Wamono music, Yoshizawa has published in 2015 the now-classic Wamono A to Z records guide book, which instantly sold-out. The book unveiled a myriad of beautiful and rare records from a highly prolific, but still then unknown, Japanese groove scene. He has also selected a large part of the music in our highly acclaimed Wamono compilations.
For this brand new chapter in the series, Yoshizawa explores King Records’ legendary catalog and unearths exceptional, rare and unknown musical gems. King Records has been releasing music since 1931 and is one of the most prestigious labels…
While group names can often be random, Nusantara Beat has chosen one that encapsulates its ethos. Nusantara means all the islands that make up Indonesia and dates back to when kings wanted to unite the whole archipelago.
Today, it means unity, many cultures coming together as one. Accordingly, Nusantara Beat mix the rhythms and music of the Indonesian archipelago into one sound.
The Dutch group are well-placed to explore these sounds on their self-titled debut. Bassist Michael Joshua was born in the Indonesian province of West Java and moved to the Netherlands aged 15 while the other five members are of Indonesian heritage. Their musical starting point is Sunda Pop, which in the 1960s blended traditional…
Based in the Ecuadorian Andes, ‘neotraditional’ Jatun Mama, AKA producer Jesús Atzil Bonilla, reshapes the music of his native land in modernised settings, often employing electronic backing. Both ‘Jatun Chica’ and ‘Chificha Pugru’ are prime examples of his idiosyncratic and playful approach, adding pulsing electronic beats to ritual kichwa singing and Andean instrumentation.
What makes it work is the obvious reverence shown to the original source material, which is placed centre stage rather than treated as an adjunct to the beats, studio trickery and instrumental backing. Much of ‘Gulacpamba’ features raw and unadorned Andean singing and traditional instrumentation before being given subtle ambient backing. ‘Chiri Paramo’ takes the rhythms of…
Best known for his vocal, kora and balafon work with the glorious Afro Celt Sound System, N’Faly Kouyaté now shows that he has all the makings of a solo star.
He is, after all, an impressive musician; he comes from a distinguished griot family in Guinea and studied at the Royal Conservatory of Belgium. On this self-described “Pan-African Sonic Manifesto” he shows off his skills as a thoughtful singer-songwriter on a set dominated by electronica, percussion and stirring and tuneful ballads.
Kora and balafon solos are also included, of course, but what is most impressive here is the range and intensity of his vocal work, as he switches from intimate and direct songs like ‘Departure’ to the commanding ‘Mökhöya’ or…
Ah, Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81 — a classic compilation. Released in 2009 by Soundway Records, it’s an epic five-LP set held in the highest esteem by those among us whose attention was caught by the fiery sounds of old West African music. Sixteen years later, the label is giving the album a second life by whittling it down into a lean 10-song suite titled Ghana Special: Highlife. Dedicated fans of retro Ghanaian sounds might be disappointed by the lack of fresh catches here (Soundway did actually release a direct sequel last year), but that doesn’t diminish the fact that every song is a killer example of how great this music could be. And given the shorter running time when compared to its lengthy forefather, it’s easy to envision…
Fabiano Do Nascimento is not simply sticking to his Brazilian roots. After all, he currently has a split residence between Los Angeles and Japan, trying to include all his experience and form them into a specific whole on his latest album offering Cavejaz. Primarily a guitarist, he uses various multi-string and multi-tuning (nylon string) guitars, stretching the sound of his instrument as far as it goes and in any direction it takes him, while at the same time trying to firmly root his sounds into his Brazilian heritage. For Cavejaz, Do Nascimento organised three separate sessions – one as studio sessions with renowned UAKTI member Paulo Santos and Jennifer Souza back in Brazil, while the second was recorded live during a Tokyo concert with with veteran Japanese musician…