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What happens if the sun disappears? The question lingered over the stage at Viljandi Folk Festival on the morning of its closing day. Tell Your Birds brought it there, playing songs from a still unreleased record in front of a crowd for the first time. Kristīne Tukre‘s concert kokle carried the melodies, Vija Moore‘s percussion under them, Kärt Tambet‘s bowed hiiu kannel cut across both, and everything the three of them played ran through Simone Spampinato‘s processing. They sang in […]...
Her grandmother had run out of stories for the night. Go to the cow pen, she told six-year-old Kasiva Mutua , and listen to the secret the black bull is telling the white one. Kasiva went, listened, and returned having heard nothing but a bull sniffing the air. Her grandmother sent her back, told her to listen properly, that the secret was being told right now. The second time, she heard it. Crickets layered on top of each other. Cows […]...
La Feria returns to Liverpool this October for its eighth edition, spreading five days of Latin American music, theatre, dance, visual art and food from Hope Street down to Chinatown. The festival was launched in 2018 by Luma Creations, the Liverpool organisation led by Chilean-born songwriter Francisco Carrasco, to put artists from across Latin America and its British diaspora on the city’s stages. This year’s music starts in Chile, with songs built on the Andean rhythms of huayno and tinku […]...
In a house in Lomé, a woman kept a set of ceremonial pots she used for preparing potions for the older women of the Vodun temples. Vodun is the West African religion the Ewe and Fon have practised across Togo and Benin for centuries, the one that crossed the Atlantic on slave ships and became Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo. Its spirits are bound up with natural forces and they are reached through drumming and singing, so those women sang […]...
Faris Ishaq‘s uncle had got hold of some reed cane from Jericho and asked Faris’s older brother to cut holes in it so he could play it. The brother made the flute. Faris, sixteen at the time, picked it up before his uncle got the chance and kept it. He was four years into euphonium lessons at the Edward Said National Conservatory, but the sound of that homemade nay took hold of him completely. Nobody taught him what to do with […]...
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