Back catalogue: Folk/Americana

Review: Ammar El Sherei's intoxicating instrumental album Oriental Music was written in 1976 and has remained a cult classic for all the deep diggers, world music lovers and curio obsessives. For this record, the iconic Egyptian artist, composer and producer actually served up his own take on six classic compositions by another Egyptian legend, Mohamed Abdel Wahab. The results are utterly hypnotic and majestic melodic affairs with organic drums and percussion and North African melodies that worm their way deep into your brain and transport you to the hustle and bustle of a dusty open air market or street side coffee spot.

Review: Ensamble Acustico was conceived in the early 1980s by Billy Pereyra and Eduardo Roland in Blancarena, a resort on the coast of the Rio de la Plata, east of Colonia, Uruguay. In 1989, after only a few performances, the duo released their first and only album: a cassette of eight songs titled Un Exceso De Luz (An Excess Of Light), co-released by independent labels Perro Andaluz (Uruguay) and Circe (Argentina). The album was critically acclaimed and lauded as the first 'new age' project to come out of Uruguay. Yet lumping Un Exceso De Luz into that most vast and heterogenous confluence of musical genres, akin to 'world music', dismisses the alchemical breakdown of minimalism with gestures of contemporary jazz, exemplified by the shifting harmonic figures of 'En Los Campos de Colonia' ('In the Fields of Colonia'). Pereyra and Roland sound strings in tandem, forming harmonic compositions that generate unexpected resonances. Together they build a climatic character that gives the sound of Ensamble Acustico its most distinctive seal, sharing more with the aesthetics of contemporary jazz than the nebulous new age label.