Guedra Guedra, the moniker under which producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts energetic electronic landscapes, invokes a specific scene in and of itself. Among Amazigh groups indigenous to Hassak’s native Morocco and other parts of North Africa, the guedra is a dance and a cooking pot that can be converted into a drum, embodying music, movement, and life.


It suits Hassak’s music on the new Guedra Guedra album Mutant, a breathtaking record filled with thoughtful assemblages of field recordings, d...

There’s ambition suggested by the title of Mádé Kuti’s sophomore release, Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From?, that makes sense for an artist of his lineage. As a musically inclined son of Femi and grandson of Fela, multi-instrumentalist Mádé surely has plenty of stories to tell and the skills to arrange them in song. As his first actual standalone solo work (2021’s For(e)ward was packaged with father Femi Kuti’s Stop the Hate), Chapter 1 gives him a chance to start. It’s one he takes wit...

When we hear formative film music, it hits us on many levels at once. We remember visual spectacle, sonically mediated emotion, and full-body cinematic experiences grounded in spaces and times past, often with a deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia. We should, of course, be careful of nostalgia, but we can also appreciate things that make us happy. In 2019, artist Svetlana did just that with Night at the Movies, an album of old classics and newer cuts ranging from “Moon River” to Coco’s “Remember...

Cosmopolitanism, scholar Paul Gilroy tells us in his 2004 work After Empire, is a dangerous framework when applied from the top of the power structure downward. Too often, he writes, powerful agents who participate in such “have never paused over the actual history of past imperialism and the ongoing effects of colonial and imperial governance” (66), an eliding of the experiences of those subjected to such–the majority of the world’s population, Gilroy notes.


In the world of reissued 1970s re...

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...