Jazz musician Amir ElSaffar could not ask for a better start to his new Maqām Records label than what he’s produced on Maqam Al-Iraq. A series of performances by Hamid Al-Saadi, reputed to be the last living master reciter of the poetic Iraqi maqām repertoire, is both a finely crafted album and a priceless historical record. Al-Saadi honors centuries’ worth of tradition in his singing; ElSaffar honors Al-Saadi by accompanying and recording him. In doing so, both ensure that the oral transmission...

Sunwise, the new album by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, begins with a drone. It features almost six minutes of that drone, a risky and utterly transfixing move that clears the way for Chaimbeul to march forth and pipe with wild abandon. What emerges is astounding work, Chaimbeul’s approach to the bagpipes as deeply rooted as it is innovative. Capable of exceeding exponentially their players in volume, endurance, breadth, and depth, bagpipes are instruments unique among winds for...

Among the central pillars of the Garbage approach to music is an unflinching resolve. It comes through in music and lyrics alike, in songs about love, hate, sorrow, and struggle. Throughout the highs and lows of the last band’s three decades, it has been their hallmark, providing them with a structural integrity that has endured through all manner of sonic experiments.


The latest addition to the Garbage corpus, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, emerges from this same principled core. It s...

The creative innovator, intellectual powerhouse, and social commentator extraordinaire Francis Bebey left this world almost a quarter of a century ago. His legacy, though, has only grown. The plugged-in styles Bebey revolutionized so many decades before the notion of electronic music became mainstream hold up today as perhaps even more powerful in contemporary discourses of global music.


Well before categories like folk fusion and Afrobeats, and—if we must—”ethnic electronica”, Bebey was mak...

Too often, dub is used as a superficial shorthand for slowed-down, chilled-out, reverb-laden instrumental bonus tracks. I tend to encounter “dub versions” of songs tacked onto the ends of albums like musical petit fours, which can come across as a tropicalist trope with broad appeal; who doesn’t like a breezy beat, after all?


Other artists use dub as a backdrop–not as far off from early uses of the technique as a canvas for toasting–but in ways that seem less interested in engaging with the f...