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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 […]...
Gelareh Pour and Brian O’Dwyer build each show live, on the spot, from a kamancheh, a voice, and a drum kit. Nine years into the project, that’s made them genuinely hard to predict, even for themselves. Pour grew up in Iran, where the path to a singing career ran through very narrow lanes for a woman; she carried that instrument and that history with her to Australia, where she met O’Dwyer, a drummer with a strong ear for improvisation and […]...
The ruins of Pompeii, Buffalo mozzarella from Caserta, the switchback drop of the Amalfi Coast, a sfogliatella still warm from the oven, just after a pizza. Now add thirty years of the Ariano Folkfestival to the list, because apparently once Campania gets good at something, it doesn’t stop. Set eight hundred metres up in the Apennine hills, the hilltop town of Ariano Irpino transforms every August into an open-air crossroads for global roots, brass traditions, and tropical sound systems. Celebrating […]...
It is Monday morning, checkout time at Grand Hotel Viljandi, and a German festival goer with his wristband still on hands back his room card and asks what a double costs. Not for tonight, he specifies, for the same weekend next July, when Viljandi Folk comes round again, and preferably the very same room he has just spent four nights in. The receptionist explains that the system will not take a booking more than 11 months out. He takes this […]...
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Event Review: WOMAD 2026 @ Neston Park (Corsham, Wiltshire; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
Words by Ursula Billington / Photos by Garry Jones
