Influenced by desert blues legends like Ali Farka Touré (1939 – 2006) or Khaira Arby and growing up listening to tapes of BB King, John Lee Hooker or Jimi Hendrix, the four members of Malian band Songhoy Blues play a raw and energetic mix of blues, rock and R&B on a straightforward guitars, bass and drums […]
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Anaïs Mitchell: Why we build the wall
Released in 2010, American singer songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown is a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Introduced as a “folk opera”, the concept album began life as a stage production which premiered in 2006 in Mitchell’s home state of Vermont. Influenced by the plays and operas of Berthold Brecht and Kurt […]
Hurray for the Riff Raff: St. Roch Blues
Originally from the Bronx in New York, singer-songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra left home at the age of 17 to travel westwards across America before settling in New Orleans. Perfecting her craft busking and singing with various bands while immersed in a city rebuilding itself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Alynda Lee Segarra formed Hurray […]
Zoë Keating: Escape artist
“One-woman avant-garde orchestra” Zoë Keating is a classically trained cellist and electronic artist born in Ontario and now based in California. Exploiting all the melodic, rhythmic and even percussive potential of the cello, the musician also integrates live samples of her own sound with a laptop and a loop station to generate the beautiful textured […]
Jeanne Balibar & Rodolphe Burger: Le tour du monde
Jeanne Balibar (b. 1968) is a French stage actress who has also featured in over 40 art house and independent films by directors such as Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas or Arnaud Desplechin since the beginning of the 1990s. A chance meeting with musician and singer Rodolphe Burger in 1999 sparked the start of a fruitful […]
Antony and the Johnsons feat. Björk: Flétta
This exquisite collaborative track comes from Antony and the Johnsons’ 2010 recording Swanlights. The track was originally composed in 2006 during the recording sessions for Björk’s album Volta which includes two duets with Antony Hegarty. In “Flétta”, Antony and Björk sing to actual Icelandic words and interweave vocal lines over Antony’s original piano song. As Björk explains: We […]
