Featuring artists from Morocco to Mauritania and from Tunis to Timbuktu, Desert Blues showcases the soulful and entrancing sounds of North Africa’s Sahara and Sahel regions. Bringing together international icons, rising talents, and exciting new discoveries, the album invites both longtime fans and first-time listeners into a vibrant musical landscape.

The young Egyptian soprano Fatma Said, praised for the luminosity and rich colours of her voice, makes her recording debut for Warner Classics with El Nour. Her enticing and absorbing recital programme crosses cultures, combining art songs by French, Spanish and Egyptian composers with Egyptian folk songs and popular songs from the Middle East. As she explains, “‘El Nour’ in Arabic means ‘the light’, and this album sheds light on how music that has been interpreted many times can be perceived in a different light. The idea is to connect three cultures – Arabic, French and Spanish – and to show how much, despite cultural, geographical and historical differences, they have in common when it comes to music”.

Taken from material released in the '80s by the French Melodie label, these pieces were recorded before N'Dour became a major international star (as the title indicates). As such, he was making music for the home market, which wanted its mbalax sound hard – and that's what he gave them. He was still putting the elements together, but the basic components were in place – the rhythm and that remarkable high griot voice, then at its raw best. It's interesting to compare "Alboury" in this version to the one on Set, several years later. There's a pumping energy here that has become channeled on the later recording – maybe not as focused, but with a flavor of youth that's undeniable. And that energy transmits itself through all these tracks.

Siwane is the synthesis between the talented vocalist Mounia Siwane and some of the most exceptional jazz musicians from Lyon, France. The project is a passionate voyage through time. The compositions, written by guitarist Stani Jardel, are influenced by popular melodies from the Al-Andalus era, the historical, Muslim-ruled area that comprised most of the Iberian peninsula between between 711 and 1492. This is very special music, which mixes the antiquity of the original melodic material with modern, jazz-based language.

Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, professionally known as Dalida, was a French singer and actress, born in Egypt to Italian parents. She won the Miss Egypt beauty contest in 1954 and began a 31-year singing career in 1956, selling 170 million albums and singles worldwide. Dalida earned 45 gold record awards and a pair of platinum records for her sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan, and was the first singer to receive a diamond disc.. A superstar in France and much of the rest of Europe, Dalida enjoyed hit records in three different decades.

Habibi Funk is happy to present a selection of works by Algerian-born, Amazigh artist Majid Soula. With synths, driving drums, prominent repetitive guitar lines, Majid’s music blends the best of Kabyle sounds, disco, highlife and groovy funk into something wholly unique. At the same time for Majid Soula music is a vessel for his political message.

Delving into the deepest recesses of raï, this compilation serves as a tribute to its roaring years, but also as a rejuvenation of the genre in its sulphurous, subterranean version. It seemed like a good idea to dig into nearly untraceable cassettes, thus confirming it’s in the oldest of Oranese pots that the very best of raï is to be found. Just 50 years ago, no one would have believed even a bit in a genre seemingly bound to forever turn round and round in its native Oran, laying low in one of its many coastal road clubs.

Night Reign is the new album from GRAMMY-winner Arooj Aftab, an ode to the night as her primary source of inspiration and a vivid reflection of the creative community she has fostered in her home of Brooklyn, New York. Featuring nine original compositions, three English-language tracks, and an array of guest artists, Night Reign is a perfumed, public garden of renewal, desire, shelter, and love guided by Aftab’s voice – its reach and intensity complementing the sun’s departure.

After he'd been a fixture of the British new wave/punk/underground/alternative scene since the late '70s, 1994's Take Me to God marked Jah Wobble's first major commercial success as a solo artist, reaching number 13 in the U.K. The use of numerous guest musicians (including Can drummer Jaki Leibezeit) gives this a feel of a rotating collective, with Wobble (who plays several instruments here in addition to the one he's most known for, bass) the constant. Quite a few singers contribute, giving this more of a song-oriented feel than some of his other work, some of the more celebrated including Gavin Friday, Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries, Senegalese vocalist Baaba Maal, and top world music artist Najma Akhtar. The 66-minute length of these sprawling excursions almost inevitably means the program will drag at times, according to your musical inclinations. Lyrically, too, it's so varied as to make it difficult to connect with a pronounced attitude or viewpoint, the concerns ranging from the almost indecipherably frivolous ("Yoga of the Nightclub") to the numerous references to God that pepper the song titles. But it's an interesting assortment of tracks combining currents flowing through mid-'90s alternative rock, world music, reggae, club beats, dub, and African pop, adding up to an extremely heterogeneous whole.

Even when paying homage to the Moroccan music she grew up with, vocalist Natacha Atlas can't help but let the multicultural and modern seep in. With bossa nova, Western pop, and just a thin slice of electronica figuring into the mix, the "back to my roots" album Mish Maoul is a rich collection of music that doesn't sound decorated but natural coming from an artist who prides herself in being a musical nomad. Easy to believe a nomad's memories of her homeland would be foggy and sentimental, and easy to believe the modern nomad's soundtrack would sound something like this – only something like this because this is far and away Atlas' most personal album. Suitably, she seems totally in charge of its construction, making interesting production choices with the help of Temple of Sound, Timothy Whelan, and others. For someone who has worked with Transglobal Underground, Art of Trance, and Jah Wobble in the past, the restraint Atlas uses on the rhythmic and ritualistic "Hayati Inta" is surprising and creates an intoxicating tension with only a slight bit of electric guitar revealing this isn't a field recording.