World Music Recommendations

[kareface]

I'm taking world music because I heard great things about the teacher. I'm doing a blog for the class reviewing world music and I wanted to get some suggestions from people. Any songs they like that I might enjoy listening to. The music can't be what you would consider American or classical. Preferably bands that aren't from the US. If anyone has any suggestions I would be grateful.

PS I have to be able to get my hands on the music, so nothing I have to travel to hear in person, lol.

[Viq]

옌 (Yen) from South Korea is an interesting all female group that uses traditional Korean instruments along with some modern electronics to make some really cool music. Here are a couple of videos from a TV show that they were on a couple of years ago. I'll poke around and see if I can find any footage of their performance at the Ulsan International Music Festival a couple of weeks ago too.

[kareface]

Great, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks Viq.

Anyone else have any suggestions? Please, anything would be cool.

[kawaiiuzume]

hmm, I don't think i listen to any american music so I'll throw up some of my favourite songs

Blof is great band, their album Umoja was probably one of the better ones. They're from the netherlands.

from Portugal Mafalda Veiga is pretty good. one of my more favourite songs.

another from Portugal is Cristina Branco, She mostly sings older songs as well as Fado.


From Korea, I could go on for a while but I'll only put up a few.
Clazziquai Project


Epik High


W&Whale



From Japan
Monkey Majik(yeah i know they're Canadian but it's Japanese music >.>) and the Yoshida brothers (two different groups here)


Crazy ken Band


Not sure if this is the kind of stuff you're looking for

[kareface]

That's great, I'll watch through those later tonight.

[Cadsuane]

Brazillian Bossa Nova, MPB, Samba, Tropicalia, is a whole universe of music unto itself.

Starting off with Caetano







Some Gilberto Gil







And Baden Powell



Cartola (you may recognize this if you watched City of God/Cidade de Deus)





And finally a very nice version of Carinhoso by Marisa Monte and Paulinho da Viola



Cristina Branco's version of Avenida de Angola posted above I've never heard before, but I still prefer the original Zeca Afonso version. Also worth checking out, incidentally. Other essential Portuguese speaking artists: Vinicius de Moraes, Amalia Rodrigues (very important), Chico Buarque (also very important), Tom Jobim, Elis Regina, and many more that I haven't thought of.

[isladar]

[volcanicweather]

#1 "World Music" (hate that term) group in my opinion:

[Tidy]

Oh, can't be classical. NEVERMIND

[Rhinox]

^
by Joselito from Spain and Antonio Aguilar from Mexico.


^
with an alternative version by Travis edmonson from the folk band Bud and Travis.
Travis was extremely talented. This song is not easy to sing by even Mexicans and he sung it flawlessly.


^
by Jorge Negrete who in my opinion is Mexico's greatest tenor to ever live.

You can pretty much pick a movie from Mexico's golden age of cinema and there were literally hundreds if not thousands of beautiful songs that were never released on vinyl thats why youtube has the movie clips. Personally I'm particularly fond of Rancheras from that era.

[fishstix]

Sigur Ròs - Untitled 3
wiki describes the band as Islandic post-rock

[kareface]

Just started back in on this project and I'm working through everyones recomendations. Thanks Fish, Rhinox, Tidy, Volcanic, Isladar, Cadsuane (great stuff!), kawaii and Viq. If anyone else has any other suggestions I'm all ears.

[Viq]

Here's another Korean group for you. This is a Jazz-Pop quartet called Winterplay. They have become really popular here lately, at least in the southern part of the peninsula. Personally, I like their previous album a little better so the first two are from last year. The third video is the song that is getting played non-stop in coffee shops near my school off the album they released in September.

[Kerberoz]

Same type of instruments:

there's some traditional stuff in the channel

[Viq]

That was pretty awesome. They all looked like 가야금 in that video. Pretty impressive if they made that happen without a 거문고 (essentially the bass to 가야금's guitar.)

[Halion]

Wow I love that Tool cover. I'll contribute although I'm not sure exactly what doesn't count as "world". Most of what I would think of is "traditional" or "new age" I guess.

[Cream Soda]

[tripnotic]

You can look for Mari Boine from Norway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_Boine) or Rokia Traoré from Mali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokia_Traor%C3%A9).
Sigur Ros is definitly not world music but post-rock/ambient and Bliss is from Denmark so not really traditional stuff from this country but It is still good

[isladar]

Thanks for bumping this, I'd forgotten to dig through for more goodies.



I was trying to find the actual Pilentze Pee track from Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, which VAST sampled for the song 'Touched', but this is the London Bulgarian Choir performing it:



Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a recording on Youtube, but this is Mohammad Reza Shajarian's "Language of Fire". It's very much worth listening to.

http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=130047062&m=130106360&t=audio

I'm not sure if this counts, but Helium Vola is a German group that combines a classically trained composer and a classically trained vocalist; they take early music (most of their songs are from scraps of poetry in Old French (langue d'oc and langue d'oil), old German, old Italian, Latin, etc.) and make/rework the music for it. One of my favourite bands. Her voice fucking murders me.




You could probably also make a solid argument for Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ as being world music:

[Kais]

cambodia actually has some good 50's-60's tunes, some are just covers of popular US songs. I forgot the actual names of artists but you can find some decent compilations. Dengue Fever also does a good job covering them.




http://japaneserockforfuckssake.blogspot.com/ also has some pretty cool japanese psych stuff

Brazillian Bossanova/tropicalia is also the shit. always looking for more 60's loungy recommendations if you can find any