world music
Kieron Tyler
Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). While in Ghana, he also produced The Pace Setters, the first and only album by local band Edikanfo.In the reminiscence Eno contributes to the new reissue of The Pace Setters, he says “having spent the previous few years immersed in Fela Kuti's early albums and the previous few months stuck into John Miller Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bab L’Bluz are a Franco-Moroccan band, They’re the latest in a succession of musicians - going back to the pioneers Nass El Ghiwane, and the recently departed Rachid Taha - to have created a vibrant fusion of traditional sounds from the Maghreb with the energy of rock. They draw their inspiration from the trance music of the Gnawa brotherhoods, communities of musicians and healers whose music connects with West African origins, and inevitably reflects common roots with the American blues.Yousra Mansour, the band’s versatile and charismatic vocalist, breaks with a tradition in which men alone Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.The new compilation Early Years – Madagascar Cassette Archives soundtracks a previously untold backstory by revealing what Damily’s music was like on his Read more ...
caspar.gomez
What times. They cancelled Glastonbury. Festival season 2020 disappeared. Then certain potions and compounds associated with festivaling ran dry. Well, the latter exist, of course. There’s a fellow over the road who’s still selling talcum powder and stinking chemo-skunk from his porch. The reprobates who gather there on sunny days clearly think “social distancing” is an alternate term for a restraining order which, on this one lucky occasion, doesn’t apply to them. So how about a mini-music fest right here? With all the quality quivver fizz and nom noms an insurmountable car journey away, I’m Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the second of our lockdown specials. It’s a small but vital dip into what’s new on plastic. Other than that, theartsdesk on Vinyl wishes you well in these strange times. Stay at home, play records, turn up the volume.Various Cadence Revolution 1973-1981: Disques International Vol. 2 (Strut)Welcome second volume of Strut Records’ carefully collated history of Guadeloupe’s Disques Debs International, “the longest-running and most prolific label to have come out of the Francophone Caribbean”. It follows An Island Story: Biguine, Afro-Latin & Musique Antillaise 1960-1972 which Read more ...
Joe Boyd
When it comes to making records, I love deadlines. Embarking on an open-ended project, particularly with the infinite number of overdubs made possible by ProTools, is my idea of hell. Back in the Nineties, I once spent an afternoon combining vocal takes line-by-line into a master track for one song. That’s when I started to think writing books might be a better way to make a living.But, having just four days in a studio with a quartet of world-class musicians, an engineer who loves moving microphones around in a single space to achieve the perfect sonic blend (Jerry Boys, with whom I’ve been Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20th century music. A musician, composer and teacher, he had an extraordinarily fruitful career that spanned nine decades and reached the entire world. He did more to build a bridge between the music and spirituality of India and the West than any of his contemporaries.He is probably most widely-known known for his relationship with George Harrison and the association of the sitar with the psychedelic explorations of the 60s. There was however, a good deal more, as we discover in an outstanding, forensic and deeply sympathetic biography by Oliver Craske: Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s global music radio update was recorded on the road in São Paulo, Brazil, featuring some of the most interesting local musicians a couple of weeks ago – before the virus tsunami hit (Brazil was behind the curve, its first case only reported on 25 February). One of the main subjects of part of this show was protests against President Bolsanaro, who in an attempt to out-Trump Trump, has been encouraging censoring school textbooks, plays and musicians, spying on teachers, and bringing repressive initiatives against minorities from indigenous groups to Read more ...
mark.kidel
Moonlight Benjamin, the fierce and deep-voiced vocalist from Haiti, is a powerful presence on stage. On her second album, she is once again supported by a tight cohort of French musicians led by guitarist Matthis Pascal, who has written the music for Moonlight’s Creole lyrics. The band play raunchy yet sophisticated blues, tinged with the bounce of Guadeloupean Zouk, as on the opening track "Nap Chape" and a good dose of pile-driving heavy rock, ably demonstrated on songs such as "Tchoule" and "Belekou".Moonlight Benjamin has a rich contralto voice, at time seductively soft and at others Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is natural logic in the unholy marriage between heavy metal and Mongolian throat singing. The Hu are not to be confused with The Who – although John Entwistle’s vocals on “Boris the Spider” were an early manifestation of the "death growl" in death metal, but perhaps not a major source of inspiration for this new band from the East. “Hu” in Mongolian signifies the human realm or race, as opposed to the world of animals and their spirits. The Ulan Bator band have taken the world by storm, as the armies of Ghengis Khan, their distant ancestors, before them, with over 30 million views on Read more ...
mark.kidel
Fatoumata Diawara knows how to please: with a winning and innocent smile, she wins the audience over in a matter of seconds. She has a vocal style all of her own: in her first song, “Don Do”, a quiet and meditative prelude to the boisterous show that follows, she seduces with sensual textures and a slight rasp unique among West African women singers, and which owes as much to jazz and gospel as to the traditions of her musically-rich country.After the first of a number of slightly predictable but heartfelt intros, in which she promises to give us an Africa beyond the clichés of poverty and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Drums away: Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police and a score of other groups, composer for films, video games and operas, now beams enthusiastically at us from the small screen. He’s writer and presenter of this three-part Adventures in Music series for BBC Four, which has as its thesis his view that music is what made us human, differentiated us from the Neanderthal and was our earliest form of communication. Sounds came before words. Copeland was imprinted early. He remembered sitting in a dark room aged seven, listening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and recognising in some way Read more ...