Finnish singer Mirel Wagner’s music takes inspiration from the blues and her lyrics tend toward the morbid.
The hugely popular Nairobi-based band Sauti Sol has created its own version of Afro Pop and now is aiming to make it big in the US.
During my last day at SXSW, Austin was reaching critical mass. This year St. Patrick’s Day happened to coincide with the big Saturday blowout, so things were bound to get crazy on Sixth Street [...]
My third day at South by Southwest kicked off once again with interviews… this time I talked with two bands from last night, Chile’s Kali Mutsa and Kenya’s Sauti Sol [...]
After an early afternoon chat with Portuguese electro-kuduro group Buraka Som Sistema, I wandered downtown to catch a few songs by The White Eyes at the Taiwan music showcase [...]
To be at SXSW is to know you’re missing out on a lot of good music. Fortunately the music you do see makes up for the difference, and very often it’s the unexpected showcases, the things that weren’t on your radar until that very moment, that end up being the highlights of your experience [...]
Janka Nabay is known in his native Sierra Leone as the Bubu King. Nabay fled the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war and he is now in the US, with a new band, playing the music from home.
Kiwanuka’s music is steeped in the earnest soul ballads that dominated radio airwaves in the 1970s.
Susana Baca is a singer-songwriter and Afro-Peruvian activist in Peru. She is now Peru’s new minister of culture. Mirissa Neff reports from San Francisco.
