Tag Archives: International/World

I have been at war with myself: on one side of the DMZ are the anal forces of completism that drive me to carry every project out to its fullest extension. Since I don’t write very quickly, this tendency makes most any review I write take agonized hours. As a …

Hun-Huur-Tu, the throat singers of Tuva, have been darlings of the World Music scene (and Public Radio) for some years now. I had my first chance to see them live and up close last Friday at Satalla, a new, modest-sized NYC venue specializing in World Music. Seeing and hearing music …

Billboard reports on the return of pop music to Iraq: Iraqi pop stars, tainted by association with Saddam Hussein’s rule, are slowly making a comeback, but, as in politics, it’s the exiles who are hogging the limelight. Iraq once had dozens of young pop singers, but during the 1990s they …

“The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” (1984), one of the great electronic dance numbers of the ’80s, is essentially a technopop deconstruction of the melodic line from the Token’s classic “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (1961), to which the title coyly alludes. The brilliance of the song lies in its juxtapositioning of organic …

Some of the most indelible music of the ’80s was made by Dead Can Dance, a rotating phalanx of players around singer/songwriters Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard incorporating medieval, gothic, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and various other ancient and sacred musical influences into songs and tone poems with mythic titles …

The major labels aren’t the only ones accused of ripping off artists. This why publicity and media coverage of these kinds of things are so important: when victims of pedophile priests, women sexually harassed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, or artists ripped off by record labels hear about others in the same …

I feel superlatives coming on today. Though in general I love the ECM label, there are times when its euro-centric “chamber jazz” is too arch or attenuated for my taste. With the welter of Italian names all over the Gianluigi Trovesi Ottetto’s (“Octet”) Fugace, I must confess to a small …

I love the Putumayo World Music label – now ten years young – everything from their wildly eclectic, lovingly curated collections like Arabic Groove, World Lounge, Samba Bossa Nova, and African Groove, to their colorful, iconic cover art by Nicola Heindl, to their “it’s a small world after all” optimism. …

The great sultry, angry jazz singer died at her home in France. All Music Guide has a fine bio: Of all the major singers of the late 20th century, Nina Simone is one of the hardest to classify. She’s recorded extensively in the soul, jazz, and pop idioms, often over …

Chad Orzel posted a super cool mix tape last week with comments (of course, this is Blogcritics) and one of the songs on the tape was Steve Earle’s “I Can Wait.” I was very disappointed with Earle’s latest, Jerusalem, but Chad’s post reminded me how much I love Transcendental Blues …