‘On every track the frenetic energy in the studio is palpable, giving the recordings a beautifully personal feel and a sense of the phenomenally creative vision Bertrami, Malheiros and Conti were realising at the time. Fifty years on, Azymuth’s earliest recorded music retains an ineffable, futuristic quality, standing amongst their most captivating and moving work.’

An all-time classic of contemporary Egyptian music, recorded in 1971. The composition is by Baligh Hamdi, for a full orchestra, featuring Omar Khorshid on guitar.

Judith Juma’s wonderful mbira playing — shona ritual music, with singing, drum and rattle.

Sublimely refined songs about broken hearts, dazzling landscapes and lost kingdoms, with zither and flute accompaniment.

Sundanese ritual music for the goddess of rice and the ancestral spirits, performed by Pupung Supena and Tahya — tarawangsa fiddle with ostinato accompaniment on kacapi zither.

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.

Masterful playing of the qin zither, in China considered the most noble of instruments, as if tracing the shapes and meanings of silence.

Playing the xun, an ancient ocarina, the xiao, a vertical flute, and the qin zither, half the time with ‘amateur’ ensemble or zheng zither accompaniment. A last exponent in 1996, haunting and poised… dead now.

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).