2009 collection of live tracks from the Senegalese singer and guitarist. The recordings on this release span a decade of live magical performances. The warm meditative melodies supplied by the kora playing of the late Kaouding Cissoko are enhanced by Maal's rich vocals, resulting in a hypnotic set of acoustic masterpieces. The songs featured are some of his best loved hits from the last decade, with a couple of hidden treasures for the aficionados.
There are samples for you to listen when you click the link below.
This is a gem.
Bassekou Kouyaté is Mali's leading player of the ngoni, a simple desert lute that looks like a stocky cricket bat.
It's West Africa's oldest string instrument and the ancestor of the banjo.
One of the most gorgeous tracks is an instrumental with Toumani Diabate on kora.
Laid-back music of the highest order.
There are samples for you to listen when you click the link below
2008 release from the French vocalist best known for her work with Nouvelle Vague. Camille's third studio album 'Music Hole' shows a key turn in her career: it is mostly sung in English. "In 'Music Hole', I tried to mix the story-telling, "chansons" feel from musicals with something more tribal: body percussions, minimalist trance, sub bass and throat singing" says Camille.
There are samples for you to listen when you click the link below
From Brazil, CSS is the first South American band Sub Pop has foisted upon the global marketplace. The title is Portuguese for "Tired Of Being Sexy" and the sound is a thick, pulsating thing full of haphazard synths and a come-on of call and response that tears down any attempt at posturing. It's equal parts rock mantra and throwback into something new, transcending boundaries of genre and geography. It goes full speed into dance territory, into the unknown and untouched, to emerge all hot and bothered with wild electro-rock. Quick, tightly-wound, unfastened, and supreme.
There are samples for you to listen when you click the link below
The group began at least as a tribute to the playful yet heavy psychedelic pop scene that flourished in Cambodia before Pol Pot came to power and silenced countless suspected dissidents in that country's infamous killing fields in the mid-1970s. Like the Cambodian pop music that so enamored them, Dengue Fever began by revitalizing strong elements of '60s surf and garage rock in their sound. Dengue Fever now plays original, swirling, psychedelic pop.
There are samples for you to listen when you click the link below.
Wonderful piano pieces by Brazil's modern classical composer Egberto Gismonti. A well known guitarist in Brazil, Gismonti began formal piano training at the age of six. After studying classical music for 15 years, he went to Paris to study orchestration and analysis with Nadia Boulanger and the composer Jean Barraqué, a disciple of Schoenberg and Webern
"The king of Berber music assembles the best artists in world music today for new interpretations of his classic songs." With voice and guitar Idir has popularized Berber music from Algeria, and the pieces on Identités provide us with a good taste of this rich music.
As a meeting of living masters, this collaboration would be hard to top. It is not surprising that their recent USA tours were routinely sold out or that their debut album, Without You, was nominated for a 2003 Grammy. The tradition these artists exemplify is drawn from medieval Persian court music and Sufi devotional poetry.
2008 release recorded with the Mazeeka Ensemble, Ana Hina is a new direction for Middle Eastern music icon and singing sensation Natacha Atlas. The album finds Natacha exploring a more traditional roots world, again infusing Oriental and Western music but looking to the past to uncover a rich history of musical collaboration. Atlas's voice is heard as never before, a priceless jewel in a rich and eclectic setting. World Village.
1999 album that mixes traditional Asian music with jazz-soul and drum 'n' bass. NME called 'Beyond Skin', 'movingly anti-sentimental, political without being polemical, it's beyond stereotype & careening close to sublime'. Outcaste.
