Ed Motta Between Rio and the American Radio Dial
Cameo, the S.O.S. Band, and Gap Band are the coordinates of 'Toc-Toc', an album of drum machines and bass synthesizers that sends Motta back to what the radio was playing when he was a teenager.
Cross-Cultural
A Word for Melody, Mood, and Land — Wild Gods on 'The Glorious Abysmal'
Recorded in five days and sung in Gàidhlig and English, 'The Glorious Abysmal' draws on the waulking songs of the Hebrides, Georg Cantor's set theory, and the year Livingstone spent learning production alongside people leaving prison.
Curió Curió Turns Distance into a Collage of Voices
Luiza Monteiro sings in Portuguese to find her way back to Brazil, slipping between the characters a theatre stage taught her to inhabit.
Skin, Bone, and Electronics — Beibei Wang and Hannah Peel on 'The Endless Dance'
Wang's grounding in Beijing opera, Peel's synthesizer instincts, and their shared Taoist faith in following the flow converge in a series of improvised sessions tracing the full arc of the Chinese solar calendar.
DoYeon Kim and the Lives of the Gayageum
Korean gayageum player DoYeon Kim discusses how her apprenticeship in traditional music led her to improvisation, her instrument-damaging technique, and why she occasionally screams at her audience.
Servants of Music — The Folk Theater of YAGÓDY
Ukrainian folk ensemble YAGÓDY discuss songs handed down across generations, lyrics using invented phonetic samples, and the theatrical instincts behind their performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville.
'Chasing Shadows' and the Ancestral Frequencies of Nubiyan Twist
Tom Excell talks through the making of Nubiyan Twist's fifth record, 'Chasing Shadows,' a collision of Afrobeat, jazz, dub, and hip-hop fueled by a rotating cast of collaborators and a growing unease with the forces pulling music away from the people who make it.
Nearly Broken, Nearly Beautiful — Fågelle's 'Bränn min jord'
Swedish artist Fågelle spent three years making 'Bränn min jord' in the forests, community halls, and village gatherings of rural Halland, arriving at a record about what distance reveals and what returning demands.
Digitizing Benga's King — KMRU on the Archival Weight of Joseph Kamaru
For 'Heavy Combination (1966–2007)', KMRU digitized five decades of his grandfather's music, discovering how Joseph Kamaru's political songs diagnose today's Kenya and how the archive became a grounding for an artist constantly in motion.
Drinking from Tradition — Fabiano do Nascimento's Quiet Guitar
'Cavejaz' finds the Brazilian guitarist collaborating with UAKTI percussionist Paulo Santos, Japanese tabla master U-zhaan, and Los Angeles percussionist Tiki Pasillas on an album that privileges listening and space over the virtuosity his tradition demands.
Sessa Finds São Paulo's Rhythm in the Cosmic Ordinary
Three years of sessions in São Paulo yielded 'Pequena Vertigem de Amor,' an album born from the submarine days of early fatherhood and the vertigo between extraordinary love and ordinary routine.
Peter Knight and Hand to Earth — Drawn Together by a Thread
The Australian trumpeter discusses 'Ŋurru Wäŋa', the concept of raki that underpins his quintet's practice, and what he learned from his musical relationship with Wágilak song keepers Daniel and David Wilfred.