337: Port, by Forabandit

Forabandit (Turkey/France/Iran)
Port (2014)
10 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The world of musical fusions is a weird one. There are projects out there that fuse music between almost any styles or cultures that you can name, yet the successfulness of the combinations is always hard to tell just by the elevator pitch. Yes, some cultures share enough in common to make such fusions easier to facilitate from a musical point of view – Mande music and the blues, hip-hop and reggae, Hindustani and Persian classical music – but there are no combinations that are necessarily destined to work even from these. So much comes down to the individual artists taking part, their flexibility, their ability to bend their own music to another’s, and just their overall skills as a musician. And because there are so many variables, it also means that unlikely or unusual musical combinations sometimes have just as good a chance at success as the obvious ones. And so we come to Forabandit…

Forabandit’s music brings together the folk styles of Occitania and Anatolia. The band’s project is based on the idea of a shared Mediterranean culture, emphasising the connections between the people from all across the sea’s coasts who have exchanged goods, language and art through trade for millennia. Those cultures are represented in the band by Ulaş Özdemir from Turkey and Samuel Karpienia from Occitania in the south of France; the trio is shored up by Iranian percussion master Bijan Chemirani.

And – and you already knew this, because this is a blog about Good Albums – the fusion works so well that you could be convinced that the three musicians all came from the same culture, rather than those separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea. The sounds of the instruments at play go together perfectly. Özdemir plays the Turkish bağlama in the traditional manner of the Alevi-Bektashi aşik, or wandering bards. The instrument is a long-necked lute with double-coursed strings and frets that allow for all sorts of intriguing quartertone scales. Karpienia, on the other hand, plays the mandocello, which is basically a baritone version of the mandolin, about the size of a guitar. When both of these instruments are playing together, the sound is remarkable. They are similar in many ways – steel strings, double courses – but their slight differences in tone mean that when they play together, it sounds like a weaving: a jangling, shimmering mix of high and low tones through which strands of bağlama or mandocello sometimes reach out to create an elegant thread, maybe entwining briefly with the other before settling back into the fabric. The zarb and daf drums of Chemirani hold it together with a mix of rhythms that take in patterns from Occitan, Turkish and his own Persian styles.

The album is all about these connections, in terms of its sound and its lyrics. It’s named Port, which gives you an idea – all around the Mediterranean, it is the ports that served as sites of cultural exchange and linkage. Port cities are some of the most important cultural centres around the sea for that very reason. There’s Marseille and Istanbul, which are crucial here, but it’s the same across the region: Barcelona, Naples, Oran, Beirut, Thessaloniki… That’s one of the great things about musical fusions, and something this album does so well. It highlights connections between people where otherwise they would have been unclear. In that way, ports help to create great music, but music itself can also be a port of a kind, a place where people from many different regions and backgrounds can come together and discover similarities and interesting differences, and work together to create something new in a way that benefits all involved.

331: Now, by Electro Bamako

Electro Bamako (Mali/France)
Now (2015)
12 tracks, 50 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I opened my review of Now by Electro Bamako in the dearly departed fRoots Magazine with ‘Phwoar! Now this is an album,’ and that much really cannot be disputed (although you’re welcome to try).

The premise is simple: it’s wassoulou music from the streets of Bamako, represented here by the voice and kamelengoni harp, meets underground club music, courtesy of Damien Traini and Marc Minell from France. As a fusion, this one ain’t big and ain’t clever. It doesn’t break any major boundaries, and nothing about it particularly leaps out as a surprising, first-of-its-kind, turn up for the books. When you go into this album, you know what you’re going to get, even right down to the band’s name.

But it sure is funky. Music doesn’t have to innovate wildly at every turn to still be a bloody good time, and I feel like this album exemplifies that. Maybe the artists involved wouldn’t necessarily agree with me, and maybe they’d be put out at that assessment, but a good album is a good album, and Now is. It does everything right. Every groove it layers up is interesting and full of vibe, the Malian element is pronounced and treated with dignity while still chopping it and changing it to suit the transcontinental context, and it has beats for days. If you got rid of the three superfluous ‘radio edit’ versions at the end (the only thing I can fault of the album), it’s also a tight 40 minutes – just long enough for a satisfying time without dragging.

Now won’t create a new futuristic way of telling the time, but it’s definitely an album you can set your watch by. This is one to enjoy with no complications and no hesitations. And, after all, isn’t that what we all want from our music listening experiences, most of the time?

328: The Tokyo Concert, by Richard Galliano

Richard Galliano (France)
The Tokyo Concert (2019)
13 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album has some broad similarities to Llio Rhydderch’s Sir Fôn Bach, which I wrote about a month-ish ago. They’re both entirely solo instrumental albums released this year, by musicians who are considered to be at the very top of their instruments’ mastery. And, for my part, I’d not heard of either of them before I put on their albums.

Richard Galliano is a virtuoso of the button accordion and a great innovator of bal musette. You know bal musette even if you think you don’t. Imagine a romantic Parisian café in all its wistful, clichéd glory: cobbled streets; candle-lit tables; wafts of coffee, wine and garlic; a bubble of witty conversation on the light breeze, and outside is a musician playing his accordion for the sophisticates within. That is bal musette. Galliano’s music brings that scene vividly to mind, but he also goes much further.

A great comparison that I heard is that Galliano is to bal musette as Astor Piazzolla was to tango. He places the French folk style as the crucial foundations of his music, but he takes it into high-art territory by combining it with classical and jazz sensibilities of harmony, arrangement and performance. Me being me, I really love it where, on tunes such as ‘La Valse à Margaux’, the style is so utterly French while including wildly extended and dissonant chords like some outer reaches of jazz. This album also shows his comfort in bringing in Argentinian tangos and Brazilian choros into his influences or repertoire.

Probably my favourite piece on this album is ‘Aria’. It’s Galliano’s own composition, written in the style of Bach, but there’s a really lovely feature about it that makes me marvel every time it comes around. It’s quite a simple thing really. The whole piece goes along in the manner of one of Bach’s grandiose organ compositions, ebbing and flowing with grace and drama, and you can feel it building up to a perfect cadence – sort of like a musical full stop. He sets it up with the chords before it, leading into a classic iic-V-I sequence, where your brain expects to hear that last, grounding chord in a major key, giving the otherwise dark piece a ray of light at the end – what’s called a tierce de Picardie. But Galliano doesn’t do that. When it gets to that point, the final chord is left open, before a minor third comes in after a slight pause. It makes it feel both resolved and unresolved at the same, as well as tamping the imposing nature of the piece with a shy, nervous ending before it sets off once more. It happens a few times throughout the piece and it surprises me every time. It’s a perfect example of defying the audience’s expectations in a thrilling way.

This is the only album I’ve ever heard by Richard Galliano, so this might be one of his best or one of his worst, I wouldn’t know. But it must certainly be a good recommendation. He shows such an amazing verve and intelligence in every aspect of music making, from composition and arrangement to the sheer, eye-watering skill of his performance. Add into that the gentle ease at which he plays entirely alone with just an accordion to an auditorium of 5,000 fans, as cool as you like, and it really shows just how much of an expert performer Richard Galliano really is.

312: La Grande Folie, by San Salvador

San Salvador (France)
La Grande Folie (2015)
4 tracks, 26 minutes
Bandcamp
This is the only real release that San Salvador have made, and it’s an EP. I’ll also recommend you take a listen to Choeur Populaire – Massif Central, a four-track live recording from 2016 EP – it’s available to listen on Soundcloud, and the two sets only double-up with one song, so if you put them back-to-back you’re even getting near album length, huzzah!

So, about the band themselves. Well, sometimes – and I know it’s very hard to believe, but it’s true – sometimes, I’m wrong. Shocking, right? But I am. The first time I heard San Salvador was about a year ago at WOMEX in Gran Canaria. Their write-up in the programme sounded vaguely interesting – voice and drum music from the Occitan region of France – but when I saw them, it left me completely cold. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that the sound system was incredibly loud, to a painful degree, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling it. I left before long.

Thing is, afterwards, almost everyone I talked to was raving about them, to the degree that they sounded like one of the successes of the event. I was baffled, but okay. They must have heard something I didn’t. Then the next summer rolled around, and San Salvador were scheduled to play at WOMAD, and on one of the biggest stages, the Siam Stage, too. I thought they would surely not be able to command a stage that large, but I decided to check them out nonetheless, remembering the hype that followed their show last time.

It was jaw-dropping. I finally heard what everyone else did and I’m so glad. They are just six voices – three men and three women – who between them play two floor tom drums, a tambourine, a small pair of cymbals and lots of handclapping, but it’s completely gripping. These young musicians have taken a polyphonic tradition that is often dour and usually performed with austere expressions and turned it into something electrifying by the sheer weight of their performance. The music itself is still largely traditional, but there is such an energy to San Salvador that brings it fully to life, whether their voices are skipping and jumping in and around each other, creating interlocking melodies, singing in complex harmony or thrashing out thundering polyrhythms with palm, drumstick and cymbal. Performed live, their pieces are very long – I think they only managed to fit in five or six over their hour-and-a-quarter set – and it allows them to develop themes and motifs slowly, create a slowly evolving shape and to refer back to earlier material throughout. It is an amazing live show, and it left the WOMAD audience (and myself) completely entranced. One of the top highlights of this year’s festival.

I was wrong. The crowd had it right at WOMEX: San Salvador change the game for Occitan music. The recordings that they do have, such as this EP, give a glimpse of what they can do, but don’t quite capture the raw energy of their live show, so let’s all hope that there’s an album on the way soon that will explode out of the speakers just as the band do on stage. The most important thing is to give artists second chances – you may never know what you’re missing otherwise.

304: Rûwâhîne, by Ifriqiyya Électrique

Ifriqiyya Électrique (Tunisia/France/Italy)
Rûwâhîne (2017)
9 tracks, 44 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Ifriqiyya Électrique are responsible for one of the most intense musical experiences I've ever had – twice. This record – their debut – gives a good idea of the sound of their music, but it cannot convey the sheer power of its live performance.

The Banga are black Africans, descendants of West African slaves, who live in the Djerid desert in the south of Tunisia. They are a Sufi community, and as such they use their music as worship, reaching out to Sufi saints and the spirits of their ancestors in large-scale healing ceremonies, where initiates fall into ecstatic trance, vehicles for the unknowable forces.

Ifriqiyya Électrique is a collaboration between four Banga musicians and Italian-French industrial noise duo Putan Club, with additional electronics from Pierpaolo Leo and extensive samples from on-the-ground recordings of the rûwâhîne (spirit) ceremony. On the face of it, these collaborators may seem to have very little in common, but their musical aesthetics align in wonderful ways. Both use sound to break the brain. Banga music and industrial noise are both used to confuse the ears, to detach the listeners from mundane reality and occupy the entirety of body and cranium.

Together, they create an overwhelming wall of noise. Clattering krakebs, wildly distorted bass, pounding Tunisian tabla barrel drums and naghara kettle drums, smashing cymbals, anguished massed cries of religious utterances, wailing electric guitar, garbled synthesised sound, low-pitched rhythmic chanting and authentic sounds of late-night ceremonial hubbub. All of it combines to create something terrifying, exhilarating, raw and passionate. The intensity comes in waves – sometimes the noise is all encompassing, but at others it is smouldering, tension building and just as captivating, and both modes work to increase the impact of the other.

In live performance it is ear splitting. In the dark, shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans, moving together, sweating together, it becomes an assault of simultaneous sensory deprivation and sensory overload. The only way the feeling could be more acute is if it were conducted in the ceremony’s rightful location, in the deserts and tiny huts, surrounded by candles and in air suffused with many incenses, teas and highly-spiced food.

You won’t get that from this album, but you will get a flavour of it. Play it as loud as possible, turn off the lights, turn up the central heating and bring your neighbours around and you’ll get closer. But, if you can, experience Ifriqiyya Électrique in the flesh. There’s nothing quite like it, and you may never feel quite the same again.

284: Pixvae, by Pixvae

Pixvae (France/Colombia)
Pixvae (2016)
8 tracks, 45 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

There so many fusions, combinations and admixtures all across the world of music. We’ve considered a fair few on this blog, and there will be many more to come. Some fusions are incredibly effective and frequently successful due to many inherent and obvious similarities in their constructions – think jazz hip-hop or West African blues. Some take such wildly disparate styles, smush them together and fall flat on their face to the surprise of hardly anyone. And then you have fusions between musical genres that should never work, from very different times, places, and culture, but that end up creating mad, previously unthought-of mid-point that sounds so natural and potent you feel a fool for ever having doubted it.

To that end, stick Pixvae in your ears. Their music is Afro-Colombian math rock with a death metal jazz edge. The band is actually a six-piece collision of two groups, with guitar, drums and baritone sax/synths from the group Kouma and three voice and percussion from Bambazú. Why does it work? I don’t know, but it does.

The Colombian element is currulao, a style from the Pacific coast of the country. It is based on percussion polyrhythms and interconnected vocal lines that duck and dive over each other as well as making sweet harmonies. Having developed among the Afro-Colombian population, the music still retains a strong African vibe. In the original style, it is all held together with the marimba xylophone, but instead, in Pixvae, that place is filled by noise.

Great noise, mind. The ‘math’ element of the rock means that even more complex polyrhythms are added to those of the currulao, meaning at some points there can be three or four different beats going on at the same time, all shifting in and out of phase with each other. The guitar, saxophone and synths are very loud and all have their own rawness to them – the reedy honking of the sax, the overdriven distortion of the guitar, the sawtooth waves of the synth – but they still manage to add to the sound in a subtle way, mostly focusing on short and interesting riffs that loop around and around. Again, these riffs are usually of differing lengths but played simultaneously so that the effect is ever-shifting and evolving.

When both of these come together, they fit together in a really pleasing way. They don’t always fit together easily – there are lots of crunchy dissonances created in all of the different overlapping vocal and instrumental patterns – but the shifting nature of the melodic and rhythmic cycles mean that each piece contains waves of tension and release. Even the sweetness of the vocals against the noise of the instruments provide a juxtaposition that doesn’t need a resolution, they’re just two very different flavours that nevertheless combine perfectly, like chocolate and salt.

Afro-Colombian folk music and heavy math rock jazz seem too far removed to birth a successful fusion, but Pixvae found the elements that link them and exploit them to the grooviest ends. Maybe no musical fusion is too ambitious to work, perhaps it just needs the right musicians to find those connections. Pixvae do it in the most exciting way possible.


N.B. In my research for this album I came across the review in Songlines Magazine…and they gave it a one-star review! Bollocks to that. What do music journalists know anyway?!

259: H, by Grégory Dargent

Grégory Dargent (France)
H (2018)
7 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

H is a multimedia art project from L’Hijâz’Car bandleader and oud player Grégory Dargent, of which this album is only half. Together with a 112-page book of artful, haunting photographs taken by Dargent himself, this music is a meditation on the nuclear bomb tests conducted in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s and their impacts on the land, nature and the local nomadic peoples. Dargent created the project after learning about the tests in 2013 and visiting the sites and speaking to the people in Reggane and Tamanrasset in 2017.

The album is created by a trio of Dargent on oud and electronics, Anil Eraslan on cello and electronics and Wassim Halal on Arabic drums and percussion. As with the subject matter, the music of H is harrowing. Its concept was to sound irradiated, and this is achieved with unsettling accuracy. Between the trio’s acoustic instruments they create a style based in equal parts on Arabic and European classical music and Maghrebi folk music, but the introduction of electronics changes and corrupts those traditions with acrid and abrasive noise, turning it at points nearly into non-music.

Despite, and in a way, because of, its disturbing and distressing element, this album becomes strangely beautiful. The ethereal art music struggles against the ugliness of the electronics as the natural struggles against the artificial, a fragile rose blooming from cracked concrete. This music is despair and hope, pain and healing, loss and regrowth. H is a powerful listen and its sonic journey is not one to take lightly, but it is an important one to take nonetheless. Through image and sound, Dargent has created an incredibly impactful work of art.


Image © Grégory Dargent

234: Carnaval Odyssey, by Dowdelin

Dowdelin (France/Guadeloupe/Martinique)
Carnaval Odyssey (2018)
10 tracks, 34 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album by Dowdelin is one of my big discoveries of this year – although, yes, it came out last year. I was a few months late, but as long as we get there in the end, good music is good music, right?

And this is good music. Dowdelin are a trio based in Lyon, France, with their heritage across the Caribbean, particularly the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The music reflects that heritage, but it doesn’t quite take the form that you might expect. The rhythmic language at play is recognisably Afro-Caribbean, even occasionally using traditional percussion instruments (or samples of them) to build up the rhythmic foundations, but from there it goes in all sorts of directions. The two main strains of Carnaval Odyssey that overlap and entangle are jazz and that strangely indefinable sound of chillwave/lo-fi hip-hop.

The percussion, the jazzy sax and the soulful Kréyol vocals, but it’s the synths and the drum machines that really get me excited about this one. The synths have that very particular flavour that is nevertheless difficult to put one’s finger on; the sound is wavy, soft but still slightly distorted and comes in swells and drifts. You know that feeling you get when you’re trying so hard to stay awake and your eyelids feel like the heaviest things in the world? That’s how Dowdelin’s synths sound. No, I’m not sure I know what I’m going on about either, but still. Then those synths find their home in the mix of J. Dilla-esque drum samples and traditional beats and then with all the other sounds involved, and it all sounds like some sort of futuristic-yet-retro disco party on the beach of a French Caribbean island paradise.

When I sat down to write this entry, I went looking for what the band had done before, and I looked for quite a while. Obviously, this is their debut. Which makes sense for why I hadn’t heard of them earlier. But their sound and their vision are so fully-formed that it feels like they’ve been on their own odyssey for a long time. If this wickedly groovy album is what they came up with on their very first disc, I can’t wait to hear what happens once they’ve had enough time for all the elements to percolate for a while. Exciting times!

171: Super Parquet, by Super Parquet

Super Parquet (France)
Super Parquet (2015)
4 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Featuring albums by Dub FX and Dr Didg in the past couple days, we’ve been in a world of loops, and now that we’re with Super Parquet, that isn’t going to change just yet. When I interviewed the band back in 2017 for an article (which you can read at my other blog), they were totally clear on what was the most important thing about their music when they just kept saying “drones and loops” over and over, in a quite nice verbal representation of what they do.

In a sentence, Super Parquet’s music is a marrying of folk dance music form the Auvergne region of France with electronica, techno and musique concrète, but such a description gives only a small hint as to what the group actually sound like. They’re not very easy to listen to; their instruments all have harsh tones, from the cabrette bagpipes, banjo and the boîte à bourdon (the ‘bumblebee box,’ sort of a cross between a hurdy-gurdy and a shruti box) to the overdistorted synthesisers and the super-crunchy drum machines. They also revel in disturbing sounds, dissonances are found and dwelled upon, without the musicians ever really feeling the need to resolve them. Throughout the entirety of the first track, a harsh, sawtooth synth drone plays, first in the bass registers but slowly sliding all the way upward towards mosquito levels, and hitting every single dissonance along the way. It’s uncomfortable and they love it.

The great thing about their sound is that it’s completely unrelenting. That’s the thing about drones and loops – they will go on forever until you tell them to stop…and this is a band that don’t like to stop. They will build and build for as long as they like, raising the tension and never really letting that drop come in the way you expect. That’s taken to the extreme in the final track of this set, ‘Bourrée à Solomagne’, which is 22 minutes of beautifully agonising build up before the tension is released right at the end.

This is music to overwhelm the senses. In that way, it’s quite like the ritual music of North African Sufis such as the Gnawa or Stambeli. The band have got the ears covered, but to get that full out-of-your-mind experience, there needs to be some element of disorientation. The only time I’ve seen them live was in a huge arena in Poland. Their performance was up to scratch, but the venue was just too spacious. I’d love to see them in a small, packed club, incredibly dark except for the dancing and strobing stage lights, with heavy, incense-tinged air. I reckon in that context, this music would be a trance-inducer to rival any religious ritual.

Super Parquet is the only material the band have released so far, and it is from four years ago. They seem to have gone fairly quiet in the last year or so, and I really hope that means that they’re busy focusing their attention to the studio, creating some brilliant new album. Fingers crossed, eh? But until they come out with that one, at least we have this one to be getting on with – it’s not bad!

UPDATE: I have been reliably informed that we will be getting some exciting new recordings by Super Parquet very soon, and a whole new album by the end of the year – score! So if you like what you hear from this album, keep an ear out for their new stuff. I can't wait!

158: Naktės, by Merope

Merope (Lithuania/France/Belgium)
Naktės (2018)
9 tracks, 53 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Now here is a particularly nice coincidence! Today’s album is from a group fronted by Lithuanian musician Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė – the very same Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė that made such lovely music on yesterday’s ‘album.’ Well, how many others do you know?

Merope are a trio whose music is based on traditional Lithuanian folk songs or – in the case of their own compositions – heavily influenced in that direction. But although that is the jumping off point, Merope themselves are decidedly not traditional. Indrė on the kanklės zither and song anchors them in the Lithuanian repertoire, Frenchman Jean-Christophe Bonnafous plays the bansuri flute from the Hindustani classical tradition and Bert Cools from Belgium contributes layers of guitars and electronics.

The group say of Naktės that it ‘presents a world full of wonder, inspired by the atmosphere of the night,’ and that certainly comes across. While the sound is very calm throughout, it often blossoms into the mystical and spectral, and there’s even something a little unsettling about it at times. The bansuri obviously brings an Indian edge, but it’s also used in a more freeform way, making sounds for their timbres as well as just their tones. The electronics also create this feeling, with sheets of hypnagogic noise that brings to mind the washed-out retro synths of vaporwave but in a more ambient context. And when the electronics turn their attention to the kanklės, processing the instrument’s twinkling strings, it echos the higher-plane-inducing sound of Laraaji. Altogether, the instruments and sounds coalesce and disperse like the Northern Lights, a soundscape rooted in place but with license to soar.

Naktės is Merope’s third album, but this is actually the first time I’d heard of them, and asking around, it seems like I’m not the only one for whom they’ve flown under the radar – and it seems like a popular album once people get it in their ears. So here you are then: this is Merope, they’re a good band and Naktės is a good album. And if you don’t know, now you know.

056: Au Cabaret Sauvage, by Lo'Jo

Lo’Jo (France)
Au Cabaret Sauvage (2002)
12 tracks, 45 minutes
I can’t find anywhere to listen or download this album in the UK. It’s on Spotify if you’re from elsewhere (might work in France?) and there are some tracks on YouTube and Vimeo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but that’s it. Weird. Hit me up and I can sort you out with a download.

[Introductory note: some versions of this album were called L’une des Siens but I’ve no idea why they decided to change it – the insides remained the same. The cover is also basically the same too, so if you see that one about…it’s this one.]

I can’t remember whether it was myself or my dad (our record collections are basically one and the same by now), but one of us got this album at a second-hand CD shop in Lyme Regis. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that shop – I’ve even been scouring Google Street View to no avail, so I guess it must have gone the way of so many of the best record shops and closed since I was last there. A shame, because over the few times we visited Lyme Regis, we picked up a bunch of great albums there, including several that will feature on this list.

Lo’Jo are long-time veterans of what is easiest (and laziest, vaguest) to call ‘world fusion,’ but where a lot of musicians in the scene went the electronica-with-samples route, Lo’Jo did it all live. With a core of smokily charismatic singer and keys player Denis Péan and Algerian singer-multi-instrumentalist sisters Nadia and Yamina Nid El Mourid, the group introduce as many guests as musical styles, creating their own sound which mixes variously French folk music, classical, Latin, North African, manouche jazz, spoken word, flamenco and even dub and circus music, and anything else that catches their ear. This is chamber music for the internationally-eared.

On Au Cabaret Sauvage, Lo’Jo draw particular influence from Tuareg music, both traditional styles and the essouf guitar music made famous by Tinariwen, foreshadowing the French band’s many appearances at the Festival au Désert in the coming years. Tuareg sounds are all over the album, and it even features cameos from various members of Tinariwen, including Mohamed Ag Illale, better known as Japonais, who gets a track all to himself (odds are you won’t have seen him live even if you’re a big fan of the Tuareg group – he never took part in the touring band, preferring to stay close to the desert).

There are a bunch of great tracks on this album, but the one that stood out in particular on relistening to write this entry was ‘Petit Homme.’ It brings so many of the band’s influences together in a really effective way. The interplay between the guitar riff, Tuareg imzad (one-stringed fiddle) and bendir (frame drum with gut strings) gives a wonderful Saharan-hued bed for Péan’s gruff poetry and Pablo-ish melodica.

Over the years there have been so many projects that aim to mash-up music from everywhere into one whole, but few that do it with the subtlety, class and charm of Lo’Jo, and Au Cabaret Sauvage (or L’une des Siens) shows their work at its strongest.

043: The Man Who Would Be King OST, by Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre (France)
The Man Who Would Be King OST (1975)
10 tracks, 30 minutes
Listen on YouTube

The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine and set in the 19th century, it follows two British officers adventuring around India and Afghanistan, until one of them becomes revered as a god-king in the city of Sikandergul. It’s a classic tale of hubris punished, with more than a dash of colonialism and orientalism.

The soundtrack, composed by Maurice Jarre, is quite a mix between Western classical music, British folk and military music and Hindustani music, and features a brass-heavy orchestra and heavy use of Indian instruments such as the sarangi, sarod, surbahar and shehnai and even some slightly misplaced Tibetan horns. As is common for film music, a lot of the material is based on a few short motifs that are developed and varied throughout the film. A neat touch for The Man Who Would Be King, though, is that the most prominent motif is lifted in its entirety from the melody of the old Irish song ‘Minstrel Boy’ – a song which becomes important to the plot near the end of the film. By that point, the theme has come around so many times in so many different ways, we already know every note of it.

What I enjoy the most in this soundtrack is its very particular combination of Western and Indian classical musics that really evokes, for me, the 18th and 19th century interest that Western composers had in South Asian music. It’s heard most clearly when the Indian instruments are not playing, but where the North Indian melodic and rhythmic elements are transposed into the setting of the Western orchestra. I’m not sure whether this was Jarre’s intention or not, but I think it really captures that spirit of orientalist composition of the time: it’s rather clumsy and made without the depth of knowledge required for sensitive fusion (or at least composed specifically to sound that way). It’s that lack of sensitivity that makes this style rare today, but from a purely musical standpoint, it creates a sound that is very much rooted in time and place, and all the more evocative for it.

004: Donso, by Donso

Donso (France/Mali)
Donso (2010)
11 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

This is the first album of Malian music on my list and it took four whole days! Malian music is massive. Musicians from Mali have a worldwide reputation for their prodigious skills, and the country seems to produce a new ‘world music’ star every month. There’s plenty more to come as well, but for now…

Donso stand out from the rest with a mix of styles that isn’t often heard. Their name comes from the Bamana word for ‘hunter,’ so it makes sense that the band’s sound is based on the music of the Bamana hunters. Hunters’ music is incredibly powerful both sonically and spiritually, with its never-ending 6/8 rhythms, bluesy pentatonics and the harsh tones of its two main instruments, the karignan iron scraper and – most importantly – the donsongoni, a rattling, thumping bridge-harp. It’s a fantastic tradition that is unfortunately overshadowed by other styles of the region – particularly that of the jeli griots – in the West.

A music with such deep roots may seem an ill fit with dance music, but that’s just what Donso do, and they do it excellently. The two Malians and two Frenchmen that make up the band mix so much into their music, but at the core is that mix between electronics and acoustics. Donsongoni, jelingoni (a fretless lute related to the banjo), guitar and synths play off each other to create a tapestry of timbre while drum kits, karingnan, tama (talking drum) and drum machine make mad polyrhythms that are 100% designed for dancing, and it’s all tied together by the voice of Gédéon Diarra.

It feels like it shouldn’t really work, or if it did, it shouldn’t work this well. But of course it does. While their spirituality may be different, Bamana hunters’ music and electronica share their focus on repetition and trance, and they lose none of that when they’re combined. Turn your brain off when you listen to Donso, and let it make you feel how it wants you to feel. Play loud and dance out of your head!