Int'L & World Music

In the mid-70s, musician and songwriter Phil Arosa fled Southern Rhodesia's apartheid (now Zimbabwe) to settle in the Netherlands and pursue his musical career under more mundane skies. Alongside his partner Marga, he started the band Zimba which played...

In the late 70s/early 80s, songwriter Wim van der Stelt composed an instrumental track that he later recorded during leftover studio time after a long recording session as a studio musician. A special and strange piece of music that is difficult to name...

In the early 1980s, Akira Inoue's genius as a composer and arranger permeated Japanese pop music and culture. His breakout arrangements for Reflections, actor Akira Terao's nighttime city-pop smash, helped make it the best-selling album of the decade...

In the early 1980s, Ahmed Malek was already in his 50s, when he discovered synthesizers and electronic music for himself and started to experiment with sounds. The result was a mixture of ambient synth music, field recordings he made in Cuba and a wide...

In the beginning of Habibi Funk, our search was focussed on vinyl records. Around a year ago though, we got to the point where we realized that it became substantially harder to discover music, that we enjoyed and hadn't heard before. It became apparent...

In the 21st century, the music of the Tuareg people, a diverse group spread across the Sahara encompassing Mali, Niger, and beyond, has reached an unprecedented international audience. Groups including Bombino, Mdou Moctar, Tinariwen, and Les Filles de...

In the 1970's, an outsider multi-instrumentalist known as Luie Luie created a conceptual album titled "Touchy". The album consists of instrumental tracks each containing their own monologue that connects them to the concept of Touchy through dance or...

In spring 2013, military tensions on the Korean peninsula had reached a boiling point amid escalating rhetoric between North Korea and the United Nations following Pyongyang's third nuclear test. In this tense atmosphere, a small team of Norwegian...

In November 1953, when the RTF recorded Georges Brassens at the Trois Baudets, it did not two years he has been singing in public. After a visit to Patachou, who literally pushed him on scene at the beginning of 1952, Jacques Canetti hired him in his...

In March 2022, EMPIRE assembled some of Africa's finest singers and songwriters, the musical equivalent of Ocean's Eleven, at a writing camp in San Francisco. The result is Where We Come From, Vol. 1, a 15-track compilation featuring Afrobeats royalty...

In January 2004, S?bastien Tellier released 'Politics', an ambitious album which preaches the defense of the oppressed peoples, in a luxurious dressing. The press ignites, but he was considered as an original elitist. Nevertheless, 'La Ritournelle' is a...

In 'Hitsville Re-Visited', the mighty trio add a dose of uptempo funk into traditional highlife grooves. The legendary Ebo Taylor was involved in many funk and highlife records to emerge from Ghana in the 70's and 80's. He worked with bands such as...