Some of my favourite tunes this month

Rare & Classic Soul Funk by Adam Kvasnica on Mixcloud

Massoud l'Afghan (1998)

Last winter, when Christophe de Ponfilly's documentary ''Massoud, the Afghan'' was shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, it was hard to imagine a more urgently topical film. Its subject, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Tajik commander who had, over more than 20 years, fought the Red Army and then the Taliban, was assassinated by Al Qaeda suicide bombers on Sept. 9, 2001, in a grisly prelude to the attacks on the United States two days later. In the war that followed, the United States and its allies routed Massoud's enemies, the Taliban, and put together a government led by his allies in the Northern Alliance -- a posthumous and as yet perilously incomplete victory for the soldier known as the Lion of Panjshir.

Mr. Ponfilly's film, which opens today at Film Forum, is of course no less relevant than it was a year ago. Indeed, its release should serve as a timely reminder that, even as our government trains its sights on Iraq, the hardships of Afghanistan, a country nearly obliterated by decades of war, persist. Few Westerners can claim as intimate a knowledge of that war or as deep a connection with the people of Afghanistan, as Mr. Ponfilly. He first went to the country in 1981, to record the Mujahadeen's war against the Soviet invaders, and he returned many times over the next 16 years.

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Read more about Ahmad Shah Massoud and his assanination two days before the attacks on 9/11 here...

Close-up - Abbas Kiarostami

Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.

5 Great Iranian Films

When A Separation became the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award, more people gained awareness of the country’s rich film legacy. Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on Middle Eastern cinema, lists a selection of his favourite Iranian films.

The House is Black (1961), directed by Forugh Farrokhzad

The Cow (1969), directed by Dariush Mehrjui

Close-up (1989), directed by Abbas Kiarostami

The May Lady (1997), directed by Rakhshan Banietemad

Kandahar (2001), directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf


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Tabu Ley Rochereau

The Congolese songwriter, singer and bandleader Tabu Ley Rochereau, who has died aged 76, was one of Africa's most popular entertainers – his work had an appeal that crossed ethnic, linguistic and national barriers. He composed thousands of songs and from the late 1950s his "internationalised" form of Congolese rumba, known as soukous, brought him great fame and fortune.

He came to prominence in the band African Jazz, formed in 1953 in what is now Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by Joseph Kabasele, known as Le Grand Kallé. He popularised the form of local rumba by blending the use of indigenous instruments, rhythms and vocal styles with imported elements, including Latin dance beats, electric guitars and westernised arrangements. The language was principally Lingala, used by soldiers, traders and bureaucrats in a country with more than 250 dialects, although Rochereau also sang in French and Spanish.

During the economic and cultural boom that followed the second world war, several European companies had established record labels and studios, each with their own resident house band turning out seven-inch 45 rpm discs, which sold in large numbers. Rochereau joined African Jazz as a part-time member in 1956. Notable among his colleagues were the guitarist Dr Nico Kasanda and the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango.

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Radiophrenia

Open Call for Sound & Radio Works

Radiophrenia - a temporary FM art radio station broadcasting in Glasgow during April 2015, announces an open call for sound and transmission artworks.

We are seeking soundscapes, spoken word pieces, radio experiments, found sound, innovative approaches to drama and documentary and radical and challenging new programme ideas. The station will be housed in Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts with a broadcast schedule including live shows, pre-recorded features and a daily series of live to air performances. Radiophrenia aims to promote the medium of radio as an art form and encourage experimental approaches to making radio that are not catered for by mainstream stations.

Objekt - Flatland

Widely championed techno/electronica producer Objekt deposits his detailed and complex debut album on PAN. Since 2011 at least, the Berlin resident known as TJ Hertz has been a vital cog in the European techno machine, self-releasing some of this decade's most vaunted white labels, plus 12"s with Hessle Audio and Leisure System - including this year's great split with Dopplereffekt - beside his role as software engineer for Native Instruments. With 'Flatland' he takes the opportunity to scud farther between electro and techno conventions with some proper production acrobatics, modelling a vivid 3D framework viewable from multiple perspectives, imagining "…a world in which any scene can be seen from any angle at once". Entering via the ambient airlock chamber of 'Agnes Revenge', we're given access to a subtly evolving soundsphere of sheer, incremental gradients and whirring mechanisms interspersed with nods to radiophonic experimentation and the melodic charm of '90s Warp styles. The scuttling funk of 'One Fell Swoop' or 'Ratchet' and the keening harmonics of 'Agnes Apparatus' recall classic Plaid, whilst elsewhere the album ranges from knackered techno ('Dogma') to Powell-esque hardwave ('Strays') and Rrose-alike techno churn ('One Stitch Follows Another', 'First Witness') via augmented hip hop ('Second Witness'). It's all certain to spark the interests of the techiest bass heads and IDM fiends around.

School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive

The School of Scottish Studies was established in 1951 at the University of Edinburgh to collect, archive, research and publish material relating to the cultural life, folklore and traditional arts of Scotland. Over the past sixty years, fieldworkers at the School have made thousands of recordings of songs, instrumental music, tales, verse, customs, beliefs, place-names biographical information and local history. Material in the Sound Archive comes from all over Scotland and its diaspora, and as well as being a rich repository of oral tradition it is invaluable for its range of dialects and accents in Gaelic, Scots and English.

The early collectors visited crofting, farming and fishing communities obtaining information on subjects such as the life of crofters and farm servants, the agricultural year, food gathering and preparation, house construction, the herring industry, traditional medicine, animal husbandry, emigration, whaling, religion, weather lore, lifecycle and seasonal customs. Urban life has also been documented and there are recollections of shipbuilding, factory work, transport, housing and street life, schooling, as well as contemporary fieldwork examining the re-invention of customs and use of ‘heritage’. Recordings from the Scottish Place Name Survey, and the Linguistic Survey of Scotland are also available along with ancillary materials such as maps and field notebooks. There is a substantial number of donated collections in the Sound Archive, including various local history projects, among them the notable Scottish Labour History Project which focused on work and occupations in the central belt during the 20th century.