Ammar Kalia

Chala Chala Nav Bala (Maze Baal, 1943) With more than 12,000 songs to her name, Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle is one of the most recorded and well-known voices in Bollywood cinema. Born into a musical family, with her father Deenanath Mangeshkar working as a singer for regional Marathi theatre and film throughout the 1920s and 30s and her older sister Lata Mangeshkar becoming a Bollywood playback singer in her own right, Bhosle entered the industry at just 10 years old w

Listening to Peter Cat Recording Co is to be transported into a musical world without a sense of fixed time or place. The group’s funk-inflected guitars and warm reverb of humming basslines might recall a West Coast ‘70s analogue feel, while their sharp trills of strings could take us to the ‘80s disco, crooning vocals to the Vegas strip of the ‘50s and buzzing synth lines into the globalised 21st Century. You might be forgiven for thinking you are listening to a lesser-known

Sanaya Ardeshir – Hand of Thought A s Sandunes, Indian producer Sanaya Ardeshir has spent the last decade exploring the melodic side of electronic music with three ebullient albums that drew on the bright instrumentation and pop references of contemporaries such as Bonobo. Now releasing her first record under her own name, Ardeshir explores entirely new territory, namely expansive piano compositions that supplant dancefloor rhythms with slowly unfurling minimalist repetition.

O n a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. “I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,” he says. “It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: ‘Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.’” The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launchi

“I just want to document the maximum possible amount of my feelings,” Abdullah Miniawy says. “I never chase inspiration, I just live life and then things come up from a personal place to become poetry, whether it’s in words, music, art or film.” Over the past decade, the Egyptian poet, singer and multidisciplinary artist has been channelling his myriad experiences into a prolific and diverse catalogue of work. As a vocalist, Miniawy has released three albums and accompanying

In 2022, Dagmar Zuniga packed up her life in New York, sold her belongings and moved to rural Norway. Armed with a few essential items of clothing and the Tascam tape recorder she’s had since her mid-teens, the producer and singer arrived on a farm and spent the next eight months shepherding, gardening and cooking for a family in exchange for room and board. Keeping her hands busy, it was during this quiet time under wide Norwegian skies that the seeds of her tape-worn debut

T he past five years have been punishing for Isaac Borquaye, AKA the British rapper Guvna B. In 2021, he was left without sight in one eye for several months after being targeted in an unprovoked racist attack at his local coffee shop in east London. It left him shaken, but also motivated him to write his searing 2023 album The Village Is on Fire, which questioned structural racism. The album’s cover featured a closeup image of his bloodied eye. In the opening track, the 36-y

S ince their formation in 1979, Tuareg guitar band Tinariwen have been constantly moving. Based variously in Mali, Libya and Algeria, the Grammy-winning group have used their desert blues music as a lament for a wandering refugee status that continues to this day. Co-founder Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni says the group are currently in Algeria , after band members had to flee their homes in Mali in October 2024. “The Malian military and the Russian mercenary group Wagner have been

Simo Cell and Abdullah Miniawy – Dying Is the Internet E gyptian singer Abdullah Miniawy has spent the past decade lending his melismatic voice and Arabic classical maqam melodies to a fascinating range of experimental music, and. Alongside French trumpeter Erik Truffaz he released the 2023 jazz-inflected album Le Cri du Caire ; in his ongoing collaboration with German trio Carl Gari, his vocals are paired with sparse electronic atmospherics; and his trio features two trombon

I n 2022, everything changed for Tom Misch. The London-based singer-songwriter had been at the height of his powers: his easygoing blend of hip-hop-influenced beat-making with soulful guitar melodies and yearning vocals led his self-released and self-produced 2018 debut album Geography to chart at No 8 in the UK, while 2020’s collaborative record with the jazz drummer Yussef Dayes reached No 4 and earned them both an Ivor Novello award nomination. In 2022, riding high from