Utterly beautiful contemporary recordings.

Ceremonial music from villages in south-west Turkey, featuring a range of saz lutes, violin, and sipsi (a small oboe).

A liturgy and feast headquartered in the mountains of Antalya, with semah sacred dancing and sung poetry accompanied on the saz lute. Six instrumentalists, two vocal lineups here: from 2004 and 2011.

Two heart-breaking songs and a clutch of rug-cutters from the Taurus mountains in southern Turkey. With accompaniment by Hayri Dev on the uçtelli, or lute. Terrific.

Chris King from Dust To Digital giving a heap of Turkish 78s the pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap reissue treatment. Naff artwork and crap notes, but some marvellous music to wheedle out, no doubt.

Electronic dance collaborations with Damon Albarn, Natacha Atlas, Rachid Taha and others, crossing North African forms like gnawa with clubby takes on dub, hip hop and rock.

Knockout stuff. Superb restorations of original 78s — many original compositions, rare recordings of his violin-playing, ud solos; also his most famous improvisations, recorded when he was only nineteen.

The Sulayiti Kalungi Ensemble Of Kampala presenting dances, religious invocations and profane songs, to a barrage of percussion and fervent choral singing.

The last living master of surti singing, a precursor of the ancient Islamic devotional music of qawwali. Wonderful.

Shashmaqom trio improvisation from Uzbekistan, artful and serious: heartfelt singing and fine tanbur lute playing, set off by the accompaniment of dutor and rabob lutes, and doyra percussion.

Deeply moving singing from Ferghana in Central Asia — classical, slow, suspenseful and meditative in a world of pain — accompanied by lutes, chang (a psaltery), nay flute, dayera tambourine, and ghijak spike fiddle.

Besides all-new recordings, this features two fond souvenirs from Valle’s late-seventies sojourn in California, out of reach of the military dictatorship at home: Feels So Good, a precious two-step collaboration with Leon Ware, initiated in 1979 but unfinished till now; and a fresh version of Life Is What It Is, sunny AOR disco originally written for the Chicago 13 album, now with upped tempo and a deeper groove.
The rhythm section is Alex Malheiros and Renato Massa, from Azymuth, and percussionist Ian Moreira.