MUSIC

Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic—essential vibes, infinite grooves, riffs that rippled across the horizon—seemed so direct and pure, anyway? What if, they had instead wondered, they went back to the barn where it all began and recut the record that had started it all, on the actual 10th anniversary of those sessions? They decided, at least, to try.

It did not take long for Laura Lee, Mark Speer, and DJ Johnson to know that the idea was indeed a good one, that in holding up a mirror shaped by the past 10 years to their formative set of songs they could feel and hear how they had changed as people and players. The result is The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, 10 entirely new renditions of the songs from Khruangbin’s oldest album, played and sequenced in a way that works for them now without being strictly allegiant to who they were then. Watchful eyes, for instance, will notice that “Bin Bin ii”, a bonus track back in 2015, has moved toward this album’s center. More importantly, attentive ears will hear how liberated Khruangbin sound from any expectations rendered by their own success, how this is once again the sound of three longtime friends deciding how this material might move in real time.

The barn is an essential piece of Khruangbin lore. In 2009, many years before Khruangbin’s early singles started to shape their course or even before they were really a band, they began to head to the barn, bought by Speer’s parents in the ’80s on a modest cattle farm midway between Houston and Austin. They’d been looking for a place to rehearse in Houston when Speer’s parents volunteered the spot and the small house next door—three bedrooms downstairs, dorm-style bunks above, a century-old stove in a small kitchen. The process was so consummately D.I.Y. that, when they convened there in January 2015 to make what would become The Universe Smiles Upon You, Speer and Lee rushed to remove a nest of bees by playing bass and smashing cymbals loudly before Johnson (famously not into bees, mind you) arrived. They made the record for $1,500.

This time around, Khruangbin decided to try a few functional updates. They finally ripped out the plywood dancefloor that had been installed for a wedding nearly two decades earlier but had since become something of a sanctuary for critters that would inevitably destroy any gear left behind. They rented a new floor, then bought silent new space heaters and boxes of hand warmers that they’d stuff into gloves during sessions. The first day was Central Texas paradise—T-shirts in January, the sun shining as they set up their instruments, ran cables, and even recorded the seven-minute version of “Two Fish and an Elephant” that appears here, the rhythm that Lee and Johnson built offering a welcoming group hug for Speer’s flickering lead. But then the cold set in, a cold so gripping that they stuffed bits of construction flotsam into every crack and crevice they could find inside the barn. They moved closer and closer as the four days progressed, as if trying to absorb one another’s radiant heat.

Perhaps, then, that’s why The Universe Smiles Upon You ii feels so warm, as if they were tending a fire simply by playing together. Early into “August Twelve ii,” Johnson watched an eastern meadowlark sing just outside the barn, its song picked up by the microphones. It wasn’t their favorite performance, but they knew it captured the magic of the time and place, the yellow beauty’s melody calling these six gorgeous minutes to order. They are likewise jubilant during this very extended take on “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” applying the lessons about pace, momentum, and dynamics they’ve learned during a decade on the road to start and sustain this dance party. It is an immaculate map of the moment.

Funnily enough, while on tour with this electric trio during the last several years, Speer became fascinated with early European instruments that could sound full without being loud—the viol de gamba, for instance, or the clavichord. He imported that enthusiasm into these sessions, not only often playing acoustic guitar alongside Lee’s hollow-body Höfner bass and Johnson’s brushed drums but also covering instruments in contact mics, so that they sounded close and real. You can hear that pursuit clearly on “White Gloves ii,” a song that has become such a Khruangbin staple they initially struggled with how to remake it here. When Johnson suggested it become “country disco,” though, the track suddenly unlocked. A rural-funk canter buttresses the bittersweet vocals and twilit guitars; the recording makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the center of the barn, head pressed between the bass amp and bass drum as Khruangbin drift away.

In many ways, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii represents the close of Khruangbin’s first chapter, the complete culmination of the music they made when they arrived at the barn in January 2015. During the last decade, they have reached an apotheosis of sorts, their love of Thai pop and heavy dub and American soul and Ethiopian haze perfectly crystallized in a string of splendid records and live shows that have hypnotized massive theaters and festival crowds alike. They’ve repeatedly sold out the United States’ most famous venues, from Red Rocks and Forest Hills to the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City, and they’ve crowned festivals from Glastonbury to Bonnaroo. Paul McCartney plucked them to reimagine one of his songs, while they’ve collaborated with Mali legend and band inspiration Vieux Farka Touré to honor his late father on 2022’s Ali. After more than a decade of relentless touring and recording, their expertly polyglot 2024 album, A LA SALA, helped earn a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Not bad for a band that recorded its debut in a barn of bees and mice for a grand or so.

So, then, what is next? The Universe Smiles Upon You ii provides a point of pause for Khruangbin, a chance to step back from a sound they now know so well and figure out where it may go from here. They talk about woodshedding, about spending a few hours every day with their instruments to see what new shapes they can make. Khruangbin’s splendid next run, then, begins where the first one did, too—in the barn, finding their way into the world through the songs of The Universe Smiles Upon You, second time even more absorbing than the first.

"Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to “I Heard A Voice”. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.

The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerizing intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range.

Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam."

PRAED return to Discrepant, after their 2017’s entry Fabrication of Silver Dreams (CREP44).

Known for their signature blend of Egyptian Shaabi, free jazz and improvisation, the Lebanese duo behind PRAED - Raed Yassin and Paed Conca - now assemble a full orchestra for the second time taking the music to a deeper, rooted level.

Following their 2020 release Live in Sharjah, also under the PRAED Orchestra! moniker, the duo now revisit their unique blend of Arabic heritage and free jazz sensibilities with an album that keeps pushing further into strange and unexpected directions.

The Dictionary of Lost Meanings is just that, seven fully composed pieces and large-scale improvisations, performed by an expanded ensemble of musicians from across the globe. The result is dense and playful, unpredictable but familiar, a record where Arabic rhythms and microtonal melodies collide playfully against electronics, warped vocals and orchestral textures.

It’s less about genre than about memory — like tuning into a radio station broadcasting from somewhere between the past and the future.

PRAED continue to blur the line between popular culture and experimental music in ways that feel both grounded and completely their own.

Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic—essential vibes, infinite grooves, riffs that rippled across the horizon—seemed so direct and pure, anyway? What if, they had instead wondered, they went back to the barn where it all began and recut the record that had started it all, on the actual 10th anniversary of those sessions? They decided, at least, to try.

It did not take long for Laura Lee, Mark Speer, and DJ Johnson to know that the idea was indeed a good one, that in holding up a mirror shaped by the past 10 years to their formative set of songs they could feel and hear how they had changed as people and players. The result is The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, 10 entirely new renditions of the songs from Khruangbin’s oldest album, played and sequenced in a way that works for them now without being strictly allegiant to who they were then. Watchful eyes, for instance, will notice that “Bin Bin ii”, a bonus track back in 2015, has moved toward this album’s center. More importantly, attentive ears will hear how liberated Khruangbin sound from any expectations rendered by their own success, how this is once again the sound of three longtime friends deciding how this material might move in real time.

The barn is an essential piece of Khruangbin lore. In 2009, many years before Khruangbin’s early singles started to shape their course or even before they were really a band, they began to head to the barn, bought by Speer’s parents in the ’80s on a modest cattle farm midway between Houston and Austin. They’d been looking for a place to rehearse in Houston when Speer’s parents volunteered the spot and the small house next door—three bedrooms downstairs, dorm-style bunks above, a century-old stove in a small kitchen. The process was so consummately D.I.Y. that, when they convened there in January 2015 to make what would become The Universe Smiles Upon You, Speer and Lee rushed to remove a nest of bees by playing bass and smashing cymbals loudly before Johnson (famously not into bees, mind you) arrived. They made the record for $1,500.

This time around, Khruangbin decided to try a few functional updates. They finally ripped out the plywood dancefloor that had been installed for a wedding nearly two decades earlier but had since become something of a sanctuary for critters that would inevitably destroy any gear left behind. They rented a new floor, then bought silent new space heaters and boxes of hand warmers that they’d stuff into gloves during sessions. The first day was Central Texas paradise—T-shirts in January, the sun shining as they set up their instruments, ran cables, and even recorded the seven-minute version of “Two Fish and an Elephant” that appears here, the rhythm that Lee and Johnson built offering a welcoming group hug for Speer’s flickering lead. But then the cold set in, a cold so gripping that they stuffed bits of construction flotsam into every crack and crevice they could find inside the barn. They moved closer and closer as the four days progressed, as if trying to absorb one another’s radiant heat.

Perhaps, then, that’s why The Universe Smiles Upon You ii feels so warm, as if they were tending a fire simply by playing together. Early into “August Twelve ii,” Johnson watched an eastern meadowlark sing just outside the barn, its song picked up by the microphones. It wasn’t their favorite performance, but they knew it captured the magic of the time and place, the yellow beauty’s melody calling these six gorgeous minutes to order. They are likewise jubilant during this very extended take on “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” applying the lessons about pace, momentum, and dynamics they’ve learned during a decade on the road to start and sustain this dance party. It is an immaculate map of the moment.

Funnily enough, while on tour with this electric trio during the last several years, Speer became fascinated with early European instruments that could sound full without being loud—the viol de gamba, for instance, or the clavichord. He imported that enthusiasm into these sessions, not only often playing acoustic guitar alongside Lee’s hollow-body Höfner bass and Johnson’s brushed drums but also covering instruments in contact mics, so that they sounded close and real. You can hear that pursuit clearly on “White Gloves ii,” a song that has become such a Khruangbin staple they initially struggled with how to remake it here. When Johnson suggested it become “country disco,” though, the track suddenly unlocked. A rural-funk canter buttresses the bittersweet vocals and twilit guitars; the recording makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the center of the barn, head pressed between the bass amp and bass drum as Khruangbin drift away.

In many ways, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii represents the close of Khruangbin’s first chapter, the complete culmination of the music they made when they arrived at the barn in January 2015. During the last decade, they have reached an apotheosis of sorts, their love of Thai pop and heavy dub and American soul and Ethiopian haze perfectly crystallized in a string of splendid records and live shows that have hypnotized massive theaters and festival crowds alike. They’ve repeatedly sold out the United States’ most famous venues, from Red Rocks and Forest Hills to the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City, and they’ve crowned festivals from Glastonbury to Bonnaroo. Paul McCartney plucked them to reimagine one of his songs, while they’ve collaborated with Mali legend and band inspiration Vieux Farka Touré to honor his late father on 2022’s Ali. After more than a decade of relentless touring and recording, their expertly polyglot 2024 album, A LA SALA, helped earn a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Not bad for a band that recorded its debut in a barn of bees and mice for a grand or so.

So, then, what is next? The Universe Smiles Upon You ii provides a point of pause for Khruangbin, a chance to step back from a sound they now know so well and figure out where it may go from here. They talk about woodshedding, about spending a few hours every day with their instruments to see what new shapes they can make. Khruangbin’s splendid next run, then, begins where the first one did, too—in the barn, finding their way into the world through the songs of The Universe Smiles Upon You, second time even more absorbing than the first.

"Released by VDE/Gallo, a long-established label based near Lausanne, Switzerland, Anthologie musicale de la péninsule Arabique: Poésie chantée des bédouins; vol.1 is a field recording that documents the sung poetry traditions of Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula. Recorded in Kuwait between 1970 and 1972, the album serves as a valuable resource for understanding the relationship between oral poetry and music in the region.

An outstanding treasure trove - some 20 years in-the-works - of vintage pop and chaabi bangers from Egypt and Lebanon via NYC cornershops and offies - aka Bodegas - and mobile phone shops, culled from tape and collated by Gary Sullivan ov WMFU and the blog Arabic Singles Going Steady, for DINTE Gary Sullivan gives the lowdown: “A series of random discoveries in the mid-1990s led me to abandon American and British pop and focus on non-English-language music, predominantly Arabic, for the next two decades. Feeding my ears required biking down to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, or hopping on the subway to Steinway Street in Queens, where I would pop into a handful of the local bodegas and immigrant-run cell-phone stores, some of which offered music from North Africa and the Middle East on cassettes and compact discs. When CDs spiralled into obsolescence in the mid-2010s, I reluctantly made the switch to vinyl, concentrating on 45s and intentionally filling holes not well represented in the digital era – more artists than not hadn’t made the transition from analog in the 1980s. This meant focusing on singles by a lot of artists I’d not heard of, and it quickly became evident just how much of the era – from approximately 1960 to 1974, when 7″ records were all but abandoned in Egypt and Lebanon – had been forgotten. What also became evident was the breadth of popular music issued by even hegemonic titan Sono Cairo. The consensus is that state radio and music publishing ignored traditional folk, shaabi, and other lowbrow pop in favor of the exalted art song we associate with Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Farid al-Atrash. While this active neglect of the broadest Arabic pop spectrum is mostly true, I accumulated a not inconsequential number of what I can only describe as “novelty” records by mostly one- and two-hit wonders. From catchy gimmicks like the “doktor, ya habibi” of Maha’s “Doktor” and the “boom boom boom” of twins Thunai Badr’s “Love Raid,” to the Monty Python-level silliness of Sayed Mandoline’s fake Italian crooning and maniacal laughter in “I Present to You the Mandolin,” these were sounds I was genuinely surprised to hear.= Even more remarkable were the songs recorded in English: Karim Shukry’s celebratory “Ramadan” and Motyaba & Nada’s civil-rights plea “No Black No White” are two of my favorites, and thus included in the present collection. The tracks compiled here are often as beautiful as they are beguiling, but while the intention was to absolutely put together a solid listen, it was also my hope to slightly expand our understanding of Arabic music of this period beyond not just the usual suspects, but also subjects – and treatment of same.”

"Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to “I Heard A Voice”. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.

The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerizing intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range.

Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam."

In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, environmental sounds were recorded in the dense forests of Kerala, India, and

in 2023, in the chaotic wastelands of Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan, where suicide bombings still occur, Peshawar,

where suicide bombings still occur in 2023.

This futuristic Asian music, created by blending traditional instruments with electronics and collage, mysteriously blends with Arab and African elements, evoking the scent of the earth despite being rooted in asphalt—a truly unique masterpiece!