Originally surfacing on Duncan Brooker’s indie Kona label in early 2001, the album single-handedly kick-started the thirst among jazz, funk and soul fans and ‘diggers’ to rediscover lost music from Africa made during the ‘60s and ‘70s from a time when many countries were gaining independence and celebrating a Pan-African identity within their music. This compilation paved the way for Strut's brilliant Nigeria 70 compilation as well as labels like Soundway and Analog Africa! Out of print for over 8 years, the album has been reissued on Strut in its original form with an extra bonus track, a dynamite unreleased psychedelic cut by Kenya’s Ishmael Jingo.

Saramaccan Sound (Suriname) are a brother duo - Dwight Sampie and Robert Jabini - who write and perform flowing acoustic songs sung in Saramaccan, the language from the Americas with the most African elements. Their debut album was recorded in situ by Grammy winner Ian Brennan (Parchman Prison Prayer, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones) along a remote riverside in the Amazon region of Suriname. The lyrics are topical and reference everyday strife such as the rising tides and floods in the area due to global warming.

All 37 songs from Europe's favourite TV show contest together on this official compilation. This 68th edition of the competition will take place in Malmö, Sweden, in May.

In Ki moun ou ye Nathalie Joachim asks, “Who are you?” This is a question Nathalie has been answering since her previous album Fanm d'Ayiti, a love letter to Haitian women, the foremothers of Haitian music, and the matriarchs in her personal life.

“When I wanted to exist, I couldn’t”. Mystical inscriptions on ancient Bosnian tombstones inspired this programme.

Award-winning composer Reza Vali is a native of Iran but is now based in the United States after studies in Europe. Vali’s distinctive cross-cultural style is founded in a quiet rebellion that saw him return to his Persian musical heritage. Following the dazzling concert opener Ravân, Vali has taken a text by 13th-century poet and mystic, Rumi, two traditional texts, and words by Vali himself, to create the moving cycle The Being of Love, with each song evoking a different aspect of love. Isfahan uses Persian modes and forms, and is among Vali’s most striking microtonal works, pushing the orchestra beyond its usual twelve-note sound-world in an exciting way.

The making of Congo Funk!, our long-awaited journey to the musical heart of the African continent, took the Analog Africa Team on two journeys to Kinshasa and one to Brazzaville. Selected meticulously from around 2000 songs and boiled down to 14, this compilation aims to showcase the many facets of the funky, hypnotic and schizophrenic tunes emanating from the two Congolese capitals nestled on the banks of the Congo River.

By the mid-'90s, Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré was expanding his signature acoustic African blues by changing his instrumental palette and collaborating with Western musicians like Ry Cooder (as on 1994's Talkin' Timbuktu). While Touré gained prominence during this period, many die-hard fans tout the artist's earliest work as his strongest. The double-disc set Red & Green brings together two albums originally released by the French label Sonodisc between the mid- and late '80s. The original vinyl versions were long out of print and difficult to find, until their issue here on World Circuit/Nonesuch. Both albums are entirely acoustic (Touré didn't introduce an electric guitar until 1991's The Source), with minimal accompaniment on calabash and ngoni (a traditional four-string guitar), which perfectly complements Touré's percussive guitar style and plaintive, keening vocals.

Places of Worship signals trumpeter and composer Arve Henriksen's return to Rune Grammophon and furthers his collaboration with both Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Here his experimentations with sound, space, and texture offer listening environments that reflect various sacred spaces the world over, hence its title. While these tracks are impossible to separate from the influences of Jon Hassell's Fourth World Music explorations or the more murky moodscapes of Nils Petter Molvær, they are also more than a few steps removed from them. Henriksen never separates himself from the environmental information provided by his natural Nordic landscape. The lush, wild, and open physical vistas of its geography provide an inner map for the trumpeter and vocalist that amounts to a deeply focused series of tone poems.

Their reputation growing by leaps and bounds, including a huge underground following in the U.S. – they were able to tour there even without one domestic release available, while at one point Dead Can Dance was the biggest selling band in 4AD's history – Perry and Gerrard once again did the business with Aion. Its cover taken from Bosch, Aion's medievalism was worn more openly than ever before, with songs adapted from centuries-old material. The beautiful, entrancing "Saltarello," with lead performance by what sounds like an old wind instrument, comes from an Italian dance of the 14th century, while the mysterious moods of "The Song of the Sibyl" derive from 16th-century Catalonia. The group's command of not merely recording possibilities – witness the exquisite layering of vocals on the opening "The Arrival and the Reunion" – but of musical traditions, instruments, and more from around the world was arguably never stronger. Gerrard's vocals in particular have an even stronger, richer feeling than before, not merely able to command with its power but softly calm and seduce.