This is from the soundtrack to Emir Kusturica’s 1993 film Arizona Dream. Bregovic wrote several excellent scores for Kusturica, including the 1995 Underground. He has that Balkan knack for combining dark humor with pessimistic fatalism and emotional vulnerability which sometimes yeilds great artistic results. This soundtrack also includes contributions from Iggy Pop and Johnny Depp.

I’m sending this out to Edwin, who asked recently about the Russian choral music in Kate Bush’s Hello Earth. This is not that, but it has a similar mood.

You can buy the Arizona Dream soundtrack here or here.

Today we turn to the sage words of the elders. This comes from the 1993 release Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, produced by Hal Wilner with contributions from Michael Franti and others. This is good July 4th barbecue music, perhaps?

Spare As Annie can be found here. Another very useful recent Burroughs release, better for the purists who prefer something closer to the source, is Break Through In Grey Room, which is here. And then there’s always the excellent Bill Laswell/Burroughs collaboration Seven Souls, which is here.

Language is a virus from outer space!

Here’s another incredible track from WOMAD, one of my all-time favorite cuts from the revered Talking Book series. It comes from WOMAD TALKING BOOK VOLUME ONE: AN INTRODUCTION. Thanks to Tom Schnabel for helping me track this down recently. The Talking Book series was put out in the 1980s, and they have never been reissued on CD. I digitized this from my vinyl copy.

Ben Baddoo is a Master Drummer from Ghana who moved to the UK in 1974 and still continues to teach drumming workshops. There’s more info about the artist here, including contact info if you’d like to take a class. BBC Radio 3 had a great program about Ben Baddoo, and there is an audio archive and more information here.

If you’re interested in African drumming, I can highly recommend this classic book: African Rhythm and African Sensibilty by John Miller Chernoff, which was out of print for some years, but is available again these days.

In 1994 the Senegalese Person of the Century teamed up with the stepdaughter of the Romanticist Pocket Trumpet Revolutionary to produce this planetary pop hit.

Youssou N’Dour has an official site here. If you are in a hurry, check the BBC’s Youssou N’Dour In One Minute. Find this song on 7 Seconds: The Best of Youssou N’Dour, which you can buy here.

German label Trikont (home of compilations of Vietnamese Street Music, Yodelling, and Finnish Tango) recently released the excellent Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country, which features slide guitar twangin’ hits from Bobby Womack, The Pointer Sisters, and even James Brown, among others. It also includes this gem from Andre Williams, which features The White Stripes’ Jack White on guitar.

There are more details and sound excerpts at the Trikont Web site here, which also has more sound clips and excellent overviews of their deep, interesting, far-flung catalog. The CD is available in the US as a pricey import here.

One of the high points of living in San Francisco in 1996 was going to Bruno’s on Tuesday nights to hear the Club Foot Orchestra play the music of Nino Rota. The story at the time was that Rota’s daughter “Nina” had shown up in SF with a trunk of mysterious manuscripts and sheet music and corralled the Club Foot to interpret it all. I have no idea of the veracity of these accounts, but I do know that they put on a good show, which was beautifully captured on their 1997 release, The Club Foot Orchestra Plays Nino Rota, which this track comes from. In its original incarnation, L’illusionista was part of the score from Fellini’s 8-1/2.

The Club Foot Orchestra has a site here where you can buy this CD and others, find out about their silent film scores, or finally get to the bottom of Afro-Stravinsky.

Vlatko Stefanovski is the virtuoso guitarist most known as the leader of Macedonian art-rock band Leb I Sol who were one of the biggest names on the ex-YU music scene in the 1980s, but he has also done a lot of film scoring work. This track comes from the score to the 1997 film Gypsy Magic, directed by Stole Popov.

The soundtrack CD this track comes from is impossible to find in the US (although findable in some other places), but you can get Stefanovski’s 1999 record Krushevo here. The artist has a rich Web site complete with many downloadable mp3s here. Big thanks to Igor Nikolic for first hipping me to this on his homemade Gipsy Music compilation back in 99.

If Kraftwerk had formed in 1989 in London instead of 1970 Dusselldorf, and if they were informed by Guinness and psychedelia instead of sauerkraut and trains, and if instead of a militaristic subtext they had a pan-ethnic global fuzzy vibe, they might sound like Future Sound of London. Incorporating pre-blip-hop rhythms, jungle calls, sound effects, and mysterious cinematic voice samples, the 1994 release Lifeforms is FSOL’s most interesting and fully-realized work. Kate and Vanya always listen to Lifeforms from an old cassette on their road trips through Scotland, which I’m sure is the ideal way to experience it.

The Galaxial Pharmaceutical is an exhaustive unofficial fansite. The Future Sound of London have a mysterious, deep site here. You can buy the double CD of Lifeforms here. There’s also a highly reccommended EP CD with seven remixes, including Elizabeth Fraser of The Cocteau Twins singing.

Harold Budd is retiring at the age of sixty-nine, and as a parting gift is leaving us with one of his finest records yet, the double CD Avalon Sutra. Because he first gained major notice on his 1980 collaboration with Brian Eno The Plateaux of Mirror, Budd is usually thought of as an ambient composer; but his work evokes Romantic Classicism more often than not, and his reliance on the piano sets his music apart from most music usually thought of as ambient. The pieces on Avalon Sutra include several solo piano works like this one, but also several pieces accompanied by woodwinds, and some with strings. The second disc is a 70-minute reworking of “As Long As I Can Hold My Breath”, the piece which closes the first disc.

There is more information and music excerpts at Samadhi Sound, David Sylvian’s label which is releasing Avalon Sutra. You can buy Avalon Sutra here.

Marking yesterday’s exoneration of The Gloved One, today we’re featuring the Hindi version of Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough. Unfortunately I don’t have much info on this track, but it pretty much speaks for itself. Vocals are by Usha Uthup, this is from 2003. If anybody knows more about the Bollywood Freaks, please share in the comments.

You can buy this as a 7″ vinyl single with a track called Bombay Gangstarr on the other side here or perhaps here.