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…
Tag Archive: Glitterbeat
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…
Narrative albums are a lost art in the modern musical age, where songs are quickly broken down into ten-second highlights for social media and those without an attention span.
However, the album format has never truly lost its ability to tell an expansive overarching story, which is what Japanese psychedelic trio Kuunatic have been doing since their inception in the mid-2010s. Their early releases established the mystical land of Kuurandia, and their stunning sophomore album, Wheels of Ömon, expands upon this compelling universe.
According to the band themselves, Ömon is the sun of Kuurandia, and the new album details an entire orbit of that sun. While this premise might seem a little intense for first-time listeners,…
Longtime listeners of Eblis Álvarez are used to a certain amount of eclecticism. The Colombian tropicanibalismo artist has been taking a wide-angle lens approach to Latin music for years, blending various tropical genres in his band Meridian Brothers. So, naturally, no one would be surprised if one of the biggest influences for Álvarez’s record with Los Pirañas. Could it be that Una Oportunidad más de triunfar en la vida was inspired by Pennsylvanian math rock pioneers Don Caballero?
Not necessarily. The latest from the Colombian supergroup that Álvarez formed with bassist Mario Galeano (of Frente Cumbiero) and drummer Pedro Ojeda (of Romperayo) is largely a product of jam sessions that the three lifelong…
Park Jiha is a super-talented and gloriously inspired Korean multi-instrumentalist. Her new album follows Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022) and continues to mine a rich vein of Korean tradition, which she filters through a contemporary aesthetic. This isn’t fusion, but the wonderfully original and beguiling exploration of a musical world in which sound, timbre, and form evoke the world of nature.
In cultures of the East – China, Japan and Korea – all languages (visual, verbal and musical) are connected to nature in a much more direct way than in the West, where words describe at one remove, ‘programme music’ attempts to duplicate, and painting seeks to reproduce a naturalistic view of the world. Jiha’s music…
For his last few albums Samba Touré has examined the state of Mali in the wake of the political crisis of the early 2010s and found it wanting. “Liars, thieves”, he commanded, “get off our road.” His new album Baarakelaw homes in on the informal workers of Bamako and paints a more specific social-realist portrait; a griot hymning the praises of the low-income members of society rather than the privileged. Fittingly, it was recorded in humble circumstances. Working under the capital’s ongoing electricity shortages, the musicians dashed across town to the house of Touré’s manager whenever there was a gap in the blackouts and laid down tracks quickly and roughly. This spontaneity shines through, and although producer Mark Mulholland later added…
Avant-garde music is an endlessly broad spectrum which incorporates everything from the blues-orientated sounds of Captain Beefheart to the pioneering performance art of somebody like Gary Wilson. Today, with the musical landscape so oversaturated with artists worldwide, it can be difficult to strike upon something truly original and experimental. For Colombian songwriter Julián Mayorga, however, this has never been a problem. His latest record, Chak Chak Chak Chak, is his 9th studio album, and yet he is still creating new and endlessly diverse avant-garde excellence.
Hailing from Colombia, Mayorga is clearly indebted to his home nation’s cultural heritage and vibrant art scene. Colombia, like many regions in Latin America, has a rich musical…
Few clichés are as maddeningly played out as the description of a work of art, particularly a film or an album, as a “love letter” to a given place. The phrase is regularly lobbed at artworks associated with your standard-issue major metropolis, especially when it touches on said metropolis’s most retroactively glamorized era: Paris in the ‘20s, Rome in the ‘60s, New York in the ‘70s or, with increasing frequency, the early aughts.
In fairness, the phrase is typically complimentary. But the trouble with love letters is that those not written by, say, Anaïs Nin or Franz Kafka tend to be interesting only to the intended recipient. And the trouble with writing a love letter to a city is that to truly understand a place is to feel more than just affection for it.
Both Jewish and Arab, musically omnivorous but unmistakeably Middle Eastern, globe-trotting trio El Khat are a fascinating hot mess of sounds and influences. Their founder, frontman and primary songwriter Eyal El Wahab is part of the huge Yemeni-Jewish population in Israel, mostly children of refugees who fled persecution in Yemen in the late 1940s, a diaspora now numbering over 400,000.
Named after the plant famous for inducing mind-bending euphoria, El Khat’s mission is to keep the unsung cultural heritage of their ancestors alive, but on their own terms, adding a healthy dollop of DIY attitude, psych-rock energy and noisy experimentalism. They are promiscuous folk-punk mongrels, not prim world-music puritans.
Vocal harmony is in the dense weave of so much traditional music, and it becomes a startling, golden thread in Landless’s second album. Named after an Irish word that can mean a cloak for protection, a breastplate and a hymn, Lúireach is a collection of 10 sublime songs, many of them about bold women. It also showcases four female singers (Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch), whose voices seem to rise from the sacra of their spines, emerging from their bodies in heavenly flight or heavy drones.
As ancient, deep and moving as an unusual early music instrument, Meir’s tones are the first that we hear, on ‘The Newry Highwayman’. She is joined by her bandmates in tender support, plus Alex Borwick’s soft, sighing trombone, string…
Svetlana Spajić has spent the last twenty-five years visiting villages in the Balkans, absorbing the words passed down from generation to generation, as well as the decasyllabic cadences of traditional folk tunes. Hers is a voice of such unique power that spiritual uplift and deep pathos simultaneously imbue the listener when she’s in full flight. Alongside her in Gordan are drummer Andi Stecher and noise-maker Guido Möbius, a pan-European experimental trio who hail from Serbia, Austria and Germany, respectively. Gordan brings together resonant acoustic drums, unpredictable feedback and Spajić’s remarkable voice on tracks like ‘Barabinska’ from the band’s self-titled second album. Stecher’s drums and percussion – although deliberately off-kilter in…
Mixing up the West African folk traditions of urban griot Kaito Winse with the avant-punk of Belgian guitarist Nico Gitto and French drummer/producer Benjamin Chaval, Talitakum is the second album of joyful noise from transnational trio Avalanche Kaito. It is both more cohesive and wide-ranging than their debut, hardened on the road but still crammed with rough-edged vigour. Their sound is a striking, molten blend that sparks and shakes with life. Driven by an unstoppable uplifting energy, this is a record in touch with music’s ritual power.
Named for the traditional horn in the blaring sample that kicks things off, ‘Borgo’ is a wild call to action. It feels like something is coming, sounds like a gathering crowd beating a rhythm,…
Only one song on Ana Lua Caiano’s debut album, Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado, lasts for more than three minutes, and yet each individual piece feels less like a pop song and more like a technically complex and emotionally charged exercise in musical bricolage. Caiano reaches back into Portuguese folk music and sideways into avant-garde composition but claws her influences back into a dense, bright centre: the star in her musical galaxy is her unerring sense of melody, which means that every track transcends the merely interesting and becomes genuinely invigorating and soulful.
An initial listen to Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado might have you thinking that Caiano has been doing this stuff for years, such is…
Glitterbeat is home to a wildly eclectic and reliably brilliant world of artists, from Korea’s Park Jiha via Slovenia’s Sirom to Mauriania’s Noura Mint Seymali, Turkey’s Altin Gun, and desert blues masters Tamikrest. Hailing from the Sahrawi refugee camps of the Western Sahara – disputed territory for decades now – the superbly distinctive singer Aziza Brahim returns after five years with Mawja (‘Wave’), her fourth album with the label, and an excellent addition to her her catalogue, one that revisits the feel of her 2014 Glitterbeat debut, Soutak.
Now based in Barcelona, with Mawja she combines Saharan and Iberian percussion with subtle desert-blues guitar figures and warm grounded bass provided her long-time musical…
Saramaccan Sound are named after a river and a language. A former Dutch colony, Suriname extends from the sea to the Amazon and the Saramacca flows through the middle. Saramaccan is spoken by people of West African descent and combines English, Portuguese and several African languages. For the latest in Glitterbeat’s Hidden Musics series, producer Ian Brennan travelled to a remote rainforest location to record brothers Robert Jabini and Dwight Sampie performing their own songs in Saramaccan. They sang through the night on their porch, composing tracks on the spot, Brennan following with his microphones desperate not to miss the flowing music.
The exoticism of a remote jungle setting is alluring, but the very first track is…
From the Lowlands comes an album from the elevated, fictional Mount Matsu, where the sounds of Bangkok, Chicago and Berlin all converge. YĪN YĪN actually hail from Maastricht and entreat us to dance from their studio in the Belgian countryside where all of their music is recorded. In recent times, there have been some changes in the lineup, with co-founder and multi-instrumentalist Yves Lennertz leaving and YĪN YĪN turning from a trio to a four-piece. Most significantly, it has shifted the songwriting dynamic, with all members reportedly contributing equally to the songs along with the band’s stalwart drummer Kees Berkers.
That arrangement brings variety but it doesn’t always hold together as well as it should. You sense YĪN YĪN are still finding their way in this…
Well, in all fairness, he DID title it Self-Portrait...