“It’s been a good year,” said Dave, mentioning albums by established names like Tinariwen, Natacha Atlas, Mamadou Diabate. I agreed, thinking of the Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo reunion, and considering, too, the nameless Ethiopians recorded by Olivia Wyatt for Staring Into the Sun and the Scots from Whaur the Pig Gaed on the Spree, these people who were documented once on short notice before stepping back quietly into their lives of private singing. A mass of albums at the end of the year can remind you of infinity, or of endings. New faces have arrived. Two Kyrgyz men recorded 40 minutes of mouth harp. After five years of online posting, Awesome Tapes from Africa released a physical album. Finders Keepers in the UK had its warehouse burned down by rioters, and musicians rallied to help. A short while before the disaster, the label had resurrected a 1976 film soundtrack from Czechoslovakia. That nation has been demolished too. The disc is a relic twice over.

There’s energy surging everywhere around music, this human-made fight to find an approximation of the inexpressible. If we ever find, it then of course there will be no more albums…

So this is a celebration of failure.  David Maine and Deanne Sole

Azam Ali
From Night of te Edge of Day

This is billed as a collection of “lullabies” inspired by Ali’s recent motherhood, but fear not: a kid’s album this ain’t. Persian-born Ali delivers a strong set of tunes featuring her trademark vocals, swooping and soaring through a set of Middle Eastern gyrations, with plenty of echoey, exotic instrumentation—oud, dembir, santour—to spice up the proceedings. If the arrangements are a little quieter than her recent work with Niyaz, they are no less lovely for all that, as the haunting opening to “Nani Desem? attests. The instrumentation is muscular enough too, with plenty of percussive oomph on the likes of “Shrin” and “Dandani”. It’s hard to imagine “Nami Nami” or “Lai Lai” being used as lullabies, unless you want the kid dancing all night—which would be no bad thing, of course.