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Halfway through Wednesday’s set, Marlon Williams sent the Yarra Benders offstage and sat down at the piano alone. What followed was ‘Kāhore He Manu E‘, the tender Māori-language ballad that features Lorde on record, stripped to just his voice and the keys. He filled both parts himself. The room didn’t need anything else. That moment was the centre of a night London’s Kiwi expat community had been waiting for, and they weren’t the only ones. Williams is a singer-songwriter from […]...
Congolese-British collective KDN (Kongo Dia Ntotila) have been quiet for a while. That ends on Saturday 23rd May when they return to their Dalston stronghold, The Jago, to premiere their upcoming album, Moving Fire, in its entirety: front to back, months before it’s out. Led by the Kinshasa-born bassist Mulele Matondo and jazz guitarist John Kelly, the ensemble fuses the intricate sebene patterns that power DRC dance music into the heart of London jazz and dares both sides to keep up. […]...
Marseille was voting, the far right was closing in, and Babel Music XP moved through a city with all of that already in the air. This year’s edition ran from 19 to 21 March, with the mayoral runoff due the next day, so the festival never felt detached from the week around it. Marseille did not feel like a neutral host either. Posters, canvassing, impromptu sit-ins and demos, pettier but heated bar talks: the public mood had politics in it, and […]...
Every April, Tallinn becomes a place where the question “what is music for?” gets asked in a hotel conference room at 10am and answered on a warehouse stage at 2am. Tallinn Music Week does not separate those two moments. The festival has been running since 2009 on the understanding that the industry panels and the live stages need each other, that you cannot talk about creative survival in the abstract when a Kinshasa band is three streets away playing instruments […]...
By the time La Linea Festival closes in London on Wednesday 6th May, someone will have danced through La Yegros’ nu-cumbia at Fox & Firkin in Lewisham until 3AM, someone else will have sat in pin-drop silence at Union Chapel as Silvana Estrada holds the room, another crowd will have caught Renata Flores bringing Quechua and Andean reference points into trap and pop at The Jazz Cafe, and a room full of children will have learned bullerengue call-and-response in the […]...
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Interview: Q&A with Mondocane – “Music That Stayed on My Skin” (March 2026)
Cover Photo by Agnese Zingaretti
