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Her grandmother had run out of stories for the night. Go to the cow pen, she told six-year-old Kasiva Mutua , and listen to the secret the black bull is telling the white one. Kasiva went, listened, and returned having heard nothing but a bull sniffing the air. Her grandmother sent her back, told her to listen properly, that the secret was being told right now. The second time, she heard it. Crickets layered on top of each other. Cows […]...
La Feria returns to Liverpool this October for its eighth edition, spreading five days of Latin American music, theatre, dance, visual art and food from Hope Street down to Chinatown. The festival was launched in 2018 by Luma Creations, the Liverpool organisation led by Chilean-born songwriter Francisco Carrasco, to put artists from across Latin America and its British diaspora on the city’s stages. This year’s music starts in Chile, with songs built on the Andean rhythms of huayno and tinku […]...
In a house in Lomé, a woman kept a set of ceremonial pots she used for preparing potions for the older women of the Vodun temples. Vodun is the West African religion the Ewe and Fon have practised across Togo and Benin for centuries, the one that crossed the Atlantic on slave ships and became Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo. Its spirits are bound up with natural forces and they are reached through drumming and singing, so those women sang […]...
Faris Ishaq‘s uncle had got hold of some reed cane from Jericho and asked Faris’s older brother to cut holes in it so he could play it. The brother made the flute. Faris, sixteen at the time, picked it up before his uncle got the chance and kept it. He was four years into euphonium lessons at the Edward Said National Conservatory, but the sound of that homemade nay took hold of him completely. Nobody taught him what to do with […]...
For the fourth episode of our Musical Road to WOMEX, we head to a village room in southern Taiwan, where a group of Paiwan elders usually gather to sing their own folk songs. Into that room, one afternoon, walked a young metal drummer who had just moved home. Sauljaljui was back in Kapanan, her village in the Hengchun peninsula at Taiwan’s southern tip. Behind her were the university years, a nu-metal band, and a pile of rejected applications to Spring […]...
LATEST POSTS
Event Review: Viljandi Folk Music Festival 2026 (Viljandi, Estonia; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
Words & Photos by Marco Canepari
Event Review: WOMAD 2026 @ Neston Park (Corsham, Wiltshire; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
Words by Ursula Billington / Photos by Garry Jones