Mask is an e-music symphony in six movements. Vangelis is near his best on this album. He takes the best from his many different e-music personas and creates huge walls of dramatic and hypnotic sound. Vangelis combines symphonic synths, atmospheres, Berlin school sequences, choral chants, and sweet melodies in this soundscape. The mood shifts from bombastic to triumphant to mysterious to challenging and back and forth and in and out. The atmospheres weave through and around the soundscape, never losing the drama. Deep listeners will be on the edges of their seats. This great CD is like a soundtrack with no film.

Like Greatest Hits of the Kali Yuga, The Best of Krishna Das samples the singer's earlier devotional works, here drawing upon his albums One Track Heart, Pilgrim Heart, Breath of the Heart, Live on Earth, and Door of Faith. A devotee of Maharaj Ji Neem Karoli Baba, Krishna Das has spent much of his adult life making good on his vow to use his singing voice to alleviate suffering in the world. Krishna Das is that most wonderful blend of Eastern and Western cultures; originally a resident of Long Island, N.Y., he studied in northern India as a young man and has since spent decades reinterpreting the sacred music of that land in ways that are pleasant and often surprising. As a man who sounds at times like Waylon Jennings and who is obviously enamored of the "lila" or divine playfulness, Krishna Das seems to enjoy deliberately toying with the unusual and even humorous aspects of the East/West dichotomy, as when on the album One Track Heart he sang a "Krishna Waltz" that sounded more than a little like the old cowboy tune "Get Along Little Dogies." As an encapsulation of his life's work, this Krishna Das best-of collection is entirely devoted to Sri Neem Karoli Baba and through him to the One Deity with a thousand names and as many aspects as there are atoms in the universe.

With his new solo album Djourou, Malian composer Ballaké Sissoko connects with artists from distant horizons. Djourou is the cord that connects me to other people, says Ballake Sissoko with characteristic simplicity. It is a magnificent distillation of that same art: the art of being yourself and being with others. It combines pieces in which Ballake converses, all alone, with his kora, and others in which he takes palpable pleasure in dialoguing with musicians whose contributions come across like declarations of love. Ballaké links with the singer Camille, the band Feu!Chatterton, famous French MC Oxmo Puccino, the clarinetist Patrick Messina, the singer Piers Faccini, Salif Keïta's sacred voice, the gifted kora-player Sona Jobarteh, alongside cellist and longtime musical partner, Vincent Segal. Ballaké is an improviser and prodigy who is still reinventing himself and who takes his art to explore other worlds. Djourou presents the Malian kora players music in all its multi-faceted forms: intimate and universal, singular and plural, solo or in conversation.

Pan flutist Leo Rojas (full name: Juan Leonardo Santillia Rojas) was born in Ecuador in 1984 and is best known for winning the 2011 season of the German casting show Das Supertalent. Rojas moved to Spain in 2000 and then to Germany, living in Berlin with his Polish wife; he often performed as a street musician until a passer-by informed him about the casting show. He became a contestant in the show's fifth season, succeeding to the semi-finals with his rendition of "El Condór Pasa" (best known in a 1970 version by Simon & Garfunkel) and then winning the show with a cover of "Einsamer Hirte," a hit song written by James Last and performed by Gheorghe Zamfir in 1977.

Margot Reisinger has composed, performed and produced contemporary World Music based on a great diversity of cultures. In her unique style she brings together artists from a wide range of ethnic musical traditions with contemporary Western musicians to create a cultural understanding in the universal language of music…

When South Africa was still suffering under the apartheid system in the 1980s, Johnny Clegg & Savuka was the last thing apartheid supporters wanted in a pop group. Their lyrics were often vehemently anti-apartheid, and apartheid supporters hated the fact that a half-black, half-white outfit out of South Africa was integrated and proud of it. Released in the U.S. at the end of the 1980s, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World is among the many rewarding albums the band has recorded. Sting and the Police are a definite influence on Clegg & Savuka, who have absorbed everything from various African pop styles to Western pop, funk, rock, and reggae. The lyrics are consistently substantial and frequently sociopolitical – "Bombs Away" addresses the violence of the apartheid regime, while "Warsaw 1943" reflects on the horrors Eastern Europe experienced at the hands of both communists and fascists during World War II. Clegg and company enjoyed a passionate following at the time, and this fine CD proves that it was well deserved.

It was in Benin City, in the heart of Nigeria, that a new hybrid of intoxicating highlife music known as Edo Funk was born. It first emerged in the late 1970s when a group of musicians began to experiment with different ways of integrating elements from their native Edo culture and fusing them with new sound effects coming from West Africa ́s night-clubs. Unlike the rather polished 1980's Nigerian disco productions coming out of the international metropolis of Lagos Edo Funk was raw and reduced to its bare minimum.

Myrkur is the musical project of Danish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, model, and actress Amalie Bruun. The word translates from Icelandic to English as "darkness." The Myrkur project has become musically fluid and embraces everything from black metal to traditional Scandinavian folk. In 2015 Myrkur's debut full-length, M, was produced by Ulver's Garm, the set also included other personnel from that band as well as horns and strings. The r; traditional folk instrumentation had been added. She toured the globe on the festival circuit before returning to Denmark. She married death metal drummer Keith Abrami in 2018 and gave birth to her first child the following year…