New Sounds produced a podcast with a selection of music from Afghanistan, putting a different light on the troubled nation. Among the selected are Homayun Sakhi and Quraishi with their rubâb music, folk poems of Afghani women, the Hazara tradition by Hamid Sakhizada, and adapted music from the Khorasan region by the duo Badieh. Much of the music comes from musicians who have fled the country to Europe or North America.

Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan made a selection of 14 global music artists, who weren't nominated for Grammy. Some of them are Mulatu Astatke - “the father of Ethio-jazz”, OOIOO - Japanese noise/post-rock quartet, Russian throat-singers Huun-Huur-Tu, Palestinian rap collective Da Arabian MCs featuring distinctive sound, The Good Ones - Rwandan folk...

LA-based collector Jonathan Ward released a new 100-track compilation, 'An Alternate History of the World’s Music', focused on music recorded across the non-Anglo world, and beyond popular music, between 1907-1967. There's Crimean Tartar Orchestra, as well as music from the Persian Gulf, the Okinawa islands, Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico, etc. Ward is a collector of old 78rpm records who started his website Excavated Shellac in 2007, posting up a recording every day, which means this is just a glimpse into his collection. Guardian's Garth Cartwright calls it "the best album of 2021" (it actually came out in December). Bandcamp sells digital copies for $35.

American Recording Academy is changing the name of its best world music album category to best global music album, reflecting a change, rather an evolution in the world. The renamed Grammy will be announced on November 24 and given in February 2021. The Academy sees the new term as "a more relevant, modern, and inclusive", symbolizing "a departure from the connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American’ that the former term embodied while adapting to current listening trends and cultural evolution among the diverse communities it may represent”, Billboard reports. This year's Best World Music Album winner was Celia Angelique's 'Kidjo'.

PopMatters has chosen "ten particularly phenomenal albums from across the globe", the ones where "artists ask their audience to leave behind insular worldviews and try to understand new perspectives". They chose Nigerian blues guitarist Mdou Moctar, Izraeli pop-trio A-WA, afro-pop by Ekiti Sound, tropical pop by The Garifuna Collective, Afro-Cuban singer Angélique Kidjo, Turkish rock and […]

Pat Thomas, the 72 year-old “Golden Voice of Africa”, has published new album 'Obiaaa!' (meaning "everybody"), this week, a "living, breathing testament to a music that is very much still alive and being championed by those who have spent their lives perfecting its craft", Guardian says in review. Overall feel of the album - "joyous […]

The London paper decided not to use the term "world music" anymore, since they deemed in derogative, instead all the music that isn't western popular music is "global" now. So, their latest Global album of the month is 'Parted Plains' by the American sitar player Ami Dang, and it's the chosen one for August because […]