Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, the eight-piece collective Fauna offer up a colourful tapestry of sounds in which Eastern instruments and styles interweave with psychedelic guitars, atmospheric effects and electronic beats. Swedish compatriots Goat are an obvious point of reference, though Fauna’s focus is more firmly rooted in the dancefloor. The band are at their best when they slowly build up a blend of musical layers.
‘En Munfull Sand’ begins with tribal drums and circling Anatolian rock guitar riffs before ritualistic flutes, darbukas and chanted incantations create a deep, trance-like groove. ‘Bland Träden’ opens with swirling vocal atmospherics before deep rumbling basslines and tabla beats underpin a slowly unfurling blend of electronic…
Tag Archive: Glitterbeat
Staffed by Turkish, Indonesian and Dutch members, Altın Gün have always favored tunings and tonalities exotic to Anglo-American ears. Utilizing a saz (a long-necked lute played in Eastern Europe, the Levant and Asia) as lead instrument adds distinctive flavor to their respectful yet non-rote modernizations of Turkish folk classics and to their own serpentine compositions. It would be easy for Altın Gün’s recordings to come off as arid museum pieces, but through sheer virtuosity and zeal for the source material, they instead create vibrant renovations of these chestnuts.
Garip focuses on reimagining the work of Turkish troubadour/bağlama player Neşet Ertaş (1938-2012). Here, Altın Gün put supple muscle on the bones of Ertaş’ stripped-down songs,…
On their fourth album Yatta!, the celebrated Dutch quartet YĪN YĪN extends, bends, and ignites a joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs. UNCUT magazine previously dubbed their highly addictive sound “cosmic disco”—a fitting starting point—but as Yatta! proves, the band’s sonic footprint is an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of sounds, textures, and beats.
As with their breakthrough album Mount Matsu (2024), their devotion to getting the dance floor moving remains front and center. That impulse, already strong, has intensified — Yatta! lifting it to an ecstatic next level.
The result? An album that reveals a band whose groove just keeps getting deeper.
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…
Širom’s approach is contradictory. Their music is rooted in the traditional, yet never becomes a prisoner of what’s gone before. It is expansive, playful, seemingly always looking for a way to spiral upwards and outwards, into the future.
The group’s preferred term for what they do is “imaginary folk”. The term was first coined by the French musicologist Serge Moreux to describe the creative approach to Hungarian traditions applied by composers like Bartók and Kodály. Like their forebears across the Pannonian Plain, Širom’s relationship to the customs and rituals of Southeast Europe is ‘idealised’, chimerical – and all the better for it.
But how do you explain Širom’s music? The sounds you hear on the band’s remarkable fifth…
Welsh musician Cerys Hafana’s first release on the brilliant subsidiary of Hamburg-based global music label Glitterbeat explores the full sublime potential of its title, one all too often invoked to mean meekness and sweetness.
Opening track ‘Helynt Ryfeddol’ (An Incredible Ordeal) introduces a folk story about an old man drawn towards the purest music he has ever heard, sung by a bird, to which he listens until it stops. He returns home to find his house entirely changed and lived in by different people. Seven tracks later, the title track tells us that the bird was an angel, and that the man went away for 350 years, never to be seen again.
Angel is the third release by this piercingly beautiful singer and exceptional, adventurous…
Kimatika, the 3rd album by the Slovenian audio-visual trio Etceteral, consisting of Boštjan Simon, baritone sax and electronics; Marek Fakuč, drums; and Lina Rica, visuals, is a visceral plunge into the raw undercurrents of futuristic jazz, motoric propulsion, free improv and elastic compositions.
…As often happens with instrumental music, especially jazz-based, the lead is taken by the sax which fills any void left by the absence of vocals. While jazz of a futuristic and improvisatory bent is part of their charm, it is modernised by the presence of motorik rhythms and blasts of techno, all making for an energising concoction. More than on their previous two albums, Kimatika has an emphasis on composition so that while the playing still has a wonderfully freeform feel,..
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…
Recorded in the shadow of Lesotho’s Famo gang violence, For Those Left Behind is a defiant, dizzying triumph. The five-piece here channels beauty and brutality.
Riffs of accordion (an instrument left behind by German colonisers and reborn by Basotho migrant miners) skitter like retooled polkas over diesel-drum and tire-tread percussion.
Lead singer Tebotho’s raspy vocals evoke loss and resilience, especially on ‘I’ve Been Betrayed By So Many People, But My Bandmates Saved Me’ and ‘Prayer for Peace’. Response singer Leeto offers explosive energy with raps, whistles and irrepressible joy. There is a disjointedness in the composition of this group that merges in unison when making their music.
The Denmark-based Tunisian producer Ammar 808, aka Sofyann Ben Youssef, brings a deep fascination with texture to his work. It starts with the TR-808 bass synthesiser from which he takes his numero de plume — a deep, squelchy rumble that often serves as an unsteady foundation in his tracks.
His first solo album, Maghreb United, was a north Afrofuturist manifesto that brought gimbri, gasba and zokra to a science-fictional landscape. His second, Global Control/Invisible Invasion, was a Chennai-based dancefloor-infused take on The Mahabharata. Now, on Club Tounsi, his scope is surprisingly smaller. This is an explicitly Tunisian album, based around mezoued. This genre of village-folk-gone-urban became…