FEATURED
MUSIC... IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US
EXPLORE A WORLD OF MUSIC: CLICK ON THE DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AND GET READY TO TRAVEL
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 […]...
For the fourth episode of our Musical Road to WOMEX, we head to a village room in southern Taiwan, where a group of Paiwan elders usually gather to sing their own folk songs. Into that room, one afternoon, walked a young metal drummer who had just moved home. Sauljaljui was back in Kapanan, her village in the Hengchun peninsula at Taiwan’s southern tip. Behind her were the university years, a nu-metal band, and a pile of rejected applications to Spring […]...
Four years ago Intibint started making a record she wasn’t sure anyone would fund. Last July she threw a fundraiser for it on her own birthday, at The Rum Shack in Glasgow’s Southside with the Arab club night WSHWSH, and told the room that the politics in her work might cost her the grant she was applying for. She got there in the end, politics and all: Half Moon Eyes comes out on 18 September through Bandcamp and SoundCloud and […]...
For the third episode of our Musical Road to WOMEX, we travel not only in place but also in time: back to Saigon before 1975, when GI bars ran fuzzed-out rock and twist alongside Cải Lương theatres and bolero radio. That’s the era Saigon Soul Revival dug back up in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, after a handful of musicians found a compilation called Saigon Rock & Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968-1974 by Seattle label Sublime Frequencies, and realised […]...
For the second episode of our Musical Road to WOMEX, we go from Caracas to Berlin by way of a conservatory in Barquisimeto, the route that shaped Gotopo into one of the more unclassifiable voices on the Afro-Latin Dance circuit. She runs Afro-Indigenous Venezuelan rhythm through techno production until neither side gives way, calls the result Ancestral Futurism, and stages it with a female-warrior aesthetic built as much for main-room dancefloors as festival fields. She started at the conservatory in […]...
LATEST POSTS
Event Review: Viljandi Folk Music Festival 2026 (Viljandi, Estonia; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
Words & Photos by Marco Canepari
Event Review: WOMAD 2026 @ Neston Park (Corsham, Wiltshire; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
Words by Ursula Billington / Photos by Garry Jones
