The Sahara desert, the biggest sand desert on our planet, stretches all the way from the Atlantic Ocean along the Western part of Africa to the Red Sea by the shores of East Africa. As deserted as she might seem when staring at the light colored patch on Google Maps, for centuries her dunes have been and still are home to countless of tribes; soil that has proven to be solid ground for conflict but even more so fertile for music. It is this unique mixture of traditional customs, the heartache of a region, and shredding guitar riffs that gives Desert Blues the allure it has now. With bands like Tinariwen and Imarhan taking the Western world by storm, it seems only fair to take a closer look at this mysteriously familiar sound.

Andrei Rusu and Florentin Tudor have known each other since they were in 10th grade. They initiated their Khidja project at their German high school when little else was around. The genre-fluid Romanian artists have shared a very similar unrestrained musical upbringing ever since, of which the traces still resonate into their music today. Influenced by jazz, funk, and African music, Khidja productions sound like fearless experimental excursions from these cornerstone foundations.

Emerging from the cosmic experimentations of krautrock, kinetic energy and the “I don’t care” attitude that is punk, Germany’s underground landscape in the late 70s was increasingly filling itself with acts that put out a range of highly avant-garde, quirky and autonomous sounds. A big factor in all of this was the DIY mentality and a wave of post-modernism that had infiltrated media culture at the time. This freshly built playground now offered up the possibility that everybody could make (cool) music; the stranger the sounds, the more far-fetched the ideas and themes, the better.

These days, AfroSynth almost never gets mentioned without the name DJ Okapi in tow, for it is largely thanks to the latter that this forgotten era of South African pop music continues to see the light of day. His real name is Dave Durbach. Through his AfroSynth blog and a record store specializing in South African music, he has carved out a niche as the authority on this 80s synth-fuelled bubblegum pop. Most recently, he was here in Amsterdam to perform at Strange Sounds From Beyond 2017, where he sat down with Maan Jitski for a little chat.

Every month, George Hysteric takes time away from running the “strange music from beyond” Facebook group to create a playlist for SSFB from the group’s extensive music library. Here are his picks for July.

As the fervent quest for the obscure continues, somehow music from the Arab world has managed to remain largely niche. There are a few people pushing the sound. The Habibi Funk outfit are perhaps the most well known and the Ma3azef show on NTS is definitely worthy of your time. Still, Arabic music has yet to be embraced in the way music from many other areas of the world have been. Many playlists claiming to be focused on the Middle East as a whole end up being almost entirely Turkish (or even veering off towards Iran and India). There is a lot of great Turkish stuff and perhaps that’s part of why the Arabic stuff gets overlooked but there’s more to it than that. Quite simply, searching for Arabic music is far more difficult because the alphabet is different. This might seem trite but it is definitely an obstacle.

Of the countless tracks that make it to the airwaves each week at Red Light Radio, some leave a more lasting impression than others. From month to month, enjoy a sampling of favorite tracks heard on air, courtesy of the team at RLR. July’s picks include music by George Smallwood, Powerman, Cosmetics, Lo Kindre & more

For the 7th entry of our Mix Series, we turn the spotlight on Phuong-Dan, one of Hamburg’s finest selectors. Our editor Lounes Doulache had a talk with him and found out that the longtime resident of the infamous Golden Pudel is specialized in much more than meets the eye.

So here is a topic that has interested me for a long time – the novel ways artists and labels have come up with for music presentation, translating some of the themes or psychology of the release into the package, or the item itself. When so much music of the past 30 years has been presented simply in generic hole sleeves, the unique items in this list are deserving of further examination, whether or not you enjoy the music contained within.

Most people familiar with the underground electronic music scene might know Lena Platonos through the Red Axes Remixes EP that got released in 2015 on Dark Entries Records. For Greeks like myself, her name might remind you of Edo Lillipoupoli (Lillipoupoli Here, Minos 1980), a kid’s radio show that aired from 1976–1980, for which Lena Platonos composed some of the music. It’s only later, to my surprise, that I realized not only did Platonos compose music for my then favorite radio show but also some of the most progressive and cutting-edge electronica to ever come out of Greece.