Ammar Kalia

“We’re always trying to make the most interesting thing we can,” Doug McCombs says. “We figure if it’s interesting to us, it will probably be interesting to someone else. That’s the only thing we think about when we write and play as a group.” Since co-founding the instrumental quintet Tortoise in Chicago in 1990, McCombs and his band have attracted a slew of descriptors – “interesting” among them – for their genre-hopping, amorphous sound. Variously labelled “pioneers of pos

By turns frenetically fast and hulkingly heavy, yet somehow nimble and tender, tabla player Zakir Hussain ’s percussive sound was one of a kind. Over the course of his five-decade career, Hussain was renowned globally for his capacity to blend Indian classical tradition with jazz, electronica, folk and psychedelia.  Bestowed with the honorific of Ustad, meaning a master of his craft, Hussain collaborated with artists across genres, from West Coast psychedelic pioneers the Gra

In every coming of age story there is an awakening, a revelatory moment where our protagonist transforms from child to adult. It might be an instance of first love, first loss or fresh knowledge. For Bangladeshi British film-maker, composer and visual artist Imran Perretta , his real-life awakening was a racially motivated police stop and search when he was just 13. “It was after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, I was a kid and I was dragged into the back of a police car because of

In the room is where it happens. On an icy November night in London, drummer and producer Makaya McCraven is commanding the dark club space of KOKO, pounding muscular grooves behind his kit while bassist Junius Paul interlocks with rooted rhythm, Matt Gold provides wafting reverb-laden melodics through his guitar and trumpeter Marquis Hill punctuates with soaring harmony. Each drum-hit, note-strike and button-push is attuned to the specificity of the present moment, improvisi

“Le Trio Joubran is no longer a project about myself or my two brothers,” Adnan Joubran says. “It has become about the people of Palestine. It belongs to us all now.” Since the release of their debut album, Randana, in 2005, Palestinian brothers Le Trio Joubran have received international acclaim as the world’s first professional three-person oud ensemble, selling out New York’s Carnegie Hall and bringing their virtuosic interpretations of Arabic classical music to the United

Words are more than just a means of communication for Yasir Razak, they are a way to experience the world. As the frontman of the Arabic indie band Nabeel and a teacher of English as a second language, this thread runs through most every aspect of his life.  “There’s a unique quality to all languages and they each colour the feelings we express,”  says Razak, 35. “My parents moved from Iraq to the US when I was a kid and so I grew up speaking Iraqi Arabic at home. When I spe

Debit – Desaceleradas M exican-American producer Delia Beatriz, AKA Debit, has a talent for making historical sounds her own. Her 2022 breakthrough, The Long Count, featured woozy, ambient soundscapes made from electronically processed samples of ancient Maya flutes. On her latest record, Desaceleradas (Decelerated), Beatriz turns her attention to the 90s trend of cumbia rebajada . Slowing the Afro-Latin dance genre of cumbia to a sludgy tempo, cumbia rebajada is a dub-infl

Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Punjabi Disco I n 1982, London-based Sikh devotional singer Mohinder Kaur Bhamra recorded a true oddity. Accompanied by her son Kuljit on an early Roland synthesiser and drum machine, the pair laid down nine tracks of Punjabi folk vocals backed by hammering electronic percussion, disco basslines and fizzing synth melody. Only 500 copies of the resulting album, Punjabi Disco, were pressed; it was released to confusion from a diaspora audience used to th

On an overcast Wednesday in May, a room full of people at South London venue Ormside Projects break into a sweaty moshpit, moved by thunderous bass frequencies and bursts of screams emanating from the stage. A heavy, thrashing sound fills the air: guts shake with low-end vibrations and wailing distortion rattles teeth. Speakers clip and briefly cut out, while the mixing desk groans under the weight of its redline limit. It's so loud you can barely hear your own thoughts. The

‘I want to be the slowest sitarist on the planet,” Rishab Sharma says. “Everyone is trying their gimmicks and playing as fast as they can...