Central Asian art music — derived from the Shash maqam of Bukhara — performed by the singer Jurabeg Nabiev, with the Ensemble Dorrdane.

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

Switzerland has four official languages and numerous dialects, and this mosaic of sounds is judiciously wide-ranging and open — starring wonderful yodelling, alphorn, Jew’s harp, zither and musette-style accordion.

1950s recordings, mostly vocal, with wide range and variety — Alpine choral polyphony, poetic improvisation from Central Italy, funeral laments from the South, Sicilian songs to cure tarantula bites…

Traditional and popular pieces for drums, xiao and dizi flutes, banhu fiddle, sheng mouth organ, yangkin hammered zither, pipa lute, and xun ocarina (an instrument at least 7,000 years old).

The joropo, pasaje and tonada (with roots in sixteenth-century Spain) played on the bandola, a pear-shaped, four-stringed guitar, made from cedar — with maracas and cuatro accompaniment.

Music for spirit possession ceremonies, performed on the goge, a bowed single-string spike-fiddle — a half-calabash covered in iguana skin, with a wooden neck, and a string made of bunched horsehair.

Various songs — and valiha zither, made from a bamboo trunk, the sodina flute, the angorodao accordion, the kabosy lute, and the amponga tany, a ground zither made of plant rope, wood, and shit.

Fine singing and oud-playing, with zither and violin, and the percussion which characterises the hejaz style — nasgar and naqrazan, darbuka and tar, both held at the same time in the left hand, struck by the right.

The dignified, expressive music of Andean Indians — the huayno, the slower tonado, the syncopated pascua — sung and played on charangos and guitarrillas by the Alvis Family, including Barbara, aged eighty-six.

Erik Marchand singing, with his accompanist Thierry Robin finding the ud better suited than guitar or mandolin to the intervalic arrangements of quarter tones peculiar to this repertoire.

Epic poetry wrapped up in the rabab viol (a coconut shell covered with fish skin, with a long, spiked handle, two horsehair strings), the vertical suffara flute, the arghul double clarinet, droning and melodious.

Mainly female vocal ensembles performing seasonal, child-bearing and wedding songs, with instrumental dance excursions by violin, reed-pipe, cymbalum, accordion and drum.

Stirring, beautiful historical recordings of paralogues — deep, traditional melodies — drawn from folklore, everyday life and classical mythology: solo voice, or choral, or with clarinet, ud, lyre, violins.

Possession and funeral songs and drumming, full of Africa, but sustaining its Indian Carib roots.

Double-headed drums, horns and shells, guitars and violins, reed flutes and cascabeles whirled together in festive and ritualistic dance music, an amazing mixture of indian-Mexico and Spanish Middle Ages.

Startlingly fresh and unusual, these timeless, traditional peasant songs from north-west Spain — mostly with percussion accompaniment, sometimes with flute, bagpipe, oboe or rebec.

Deep, rough, hypnotic recordings of the Fulani lute (and singing), made by this inspirational French label around Douentza and Bamako, Mali, between 2002-2004.