Pete On the Corner has a distinct party groove blending a heady mix of percussive house, deep disco and dirty funk. He traverses the eclectic underground laying down that good time feeling for the floor. As a regular at european festivals, beach bars and in the clubs of East Africa the sounds of his travels influence his cosmopolitan residencies and his diverse label.

Pete plays and releases exceptional music that pushes boundaries. Linking local scenes
globally his imprint On the Corner is renown for it’s personal connection to Worldwide scenes and innovates at the edge of leftfield electronics, deep jazz and percussive house music.

Jesper Jarold and Anton Kolbe have previously been heard as members of Fontän, Tross, Uran Gbg, Ultra Satan and other exciting Gothenburg-based projects. As Kanot, they glide out on a psychedelic safari through dark waters. Funky drums and amazingly meaty bass playing form the basis, while the air swirls of saz-sounding guitars and ghostly voices. Theirs is a mostly wordless soundscape, but on several songs the duo collaborates with Lindha Kallerdahl who contributes some rather trippy vocals. Song by song, the journey continues deeper into the unknown.

Straight out of Planet Bi_ttt_ch come Italo Bitches. During their journey through the cosmos, they picked up a distant waveform, a radio channel playing Italo discofrom the 80s. This meeting ignited the spark that turned into a neon-colored shimmering party in outter space. The two  members Anna Törnqvist and Mira Aasma worked out some synthy arpeggios and very catchy rhythms, as well as vocals smooth as buffalo mozzarella. Hit after hit was created, many of them feathered on the debut album Bitch Life. After a few more singles and gigs both as a live band and as DJ’s, Italo Bitches are finally ready to take control of Club Clandestino. 

With powerful singing and hypnotic rhythms from metal castanets, gnawa is usually described as a kind of trance blues whose origins are believed to be found among slaves brought to Morocco from sub-Saharan Africa. In our time, gnawa has been mixed with hip hop, dub and rock. And not least jazz.

Majid Bekkas formed his first band as early as the mid 70’s and has since established himself as one of the foremost modern gnawa musicians on oud, guembri and vocals. He is also one of the genre’s superspreaders to the west through his collaborations with jazz legends such as Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders. The current group Magic Spirit Quartet was formed when Bekkas played with trumpeter Goran Kajfeš and drummer Stefan Pasborg at a jazz festival in Rabat. Soon Jesper Nordenström was added on keyboard and the quartet began recording together. On the album Magic Spirit Quartet, the group delves into several traditional songs in an experimental fusion jazz spirit. It sounds large and ethereal at times, with tonal figures floating just beyond reach. Other times the group sounds dry and tight, with funky rhythms and riffs topped with krakrebs and echoing trumpets.

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She was previously the singer in Skuldpadda, a band that released two albums and several EPs where influences from Neu and My Bloody Valentine were combined with Swedish West Coast pop sensibilities. After the group disbanded, she would spend nights in front of the computer learning to produce on her own. Inspired by artists such as The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Kills and Tess Parks, Michaela Åberg created what would become her first solo EP Merry Crisis. The songs are in a minimalist style similar to that of Skuldpadda, but the atmosphere is darker and almost gothic, while the lyrics delve deeper into stories of betrayal, breakups and relationships. The tracks often begin softly, almost like an ASMR whisper, but grow into a disarray of distorted guitars, organs, crackles and mud. 

Namna consists of two musicians known for their curious exploration of the borderland between jazz, folk and improvisational music. Harpist Stina Hellberg Agback has previously collaborated with Laleh, El Perro Del Mar and many others. Leo Svensson Sander, who plays cello and keyboard, has performed with The Tiny, Matti Bye Ensemble, Skogen and Fire! Orchestra. As Namna, they make music with elements from improvisation, ambient minimalism and classical chamber music. Their self-titled debut album consists of ten (almost) instrumental fantasy worlds, stripped-down compositions as calm as a pond in a summer forest. Harp improvisations sparkle while the cello casts a dark shadow towards the fluttering synth horizon. Like the fleeting memory of a dream, it sounds familiar and completely new at the same time.

With lyrics out of the Quran, East African polyrhythms and Indian melodies, the taarab was a product of the international trade with spices and slaves on Zanzibar. For a long time it was the music of the ruling classes, performed exclusively by male musicians.

But at the beginning of the 20^th century, the taarab was revolutionised by the singer Siti Binti Saad. Her version was an improvisational music of popular appeal, with lyrics in both Arabic and ­Swahili. As the first female superstar of the genre (“siti” means “lady” in Arabic) she also paved the way for coming generations – one of them being her great granddaughter Siti Muharam.

While many contemporary artists swaddle their neo-taarab in thick layers of synth strings, she instead opts for a subtle rejuvenation of the old songs on her acclaimed album Siti of Unguja – which has been praised in international press and was named album of the year by Songlines. Her impassioned voice is accompanied by ­traditional percussion and virtuosic oud playing, but also by Western instruments like double bass and ­baritone saxophone. Lyrically her social ­criticism is poetically ornate, like in for example Kijiti, that unveils a story of a murder trial where the ­colonial power punished the witnesses instead of the killer.

The golden age of Turkish rock music reincarnated – in the Netherlands! If you enjoyed compilations with redisco­vered Turkish 60s and 70s recordings (Istanbul ’70, Psych Funk A La Turkish, etc), you won’t be able to resist the whip-cracky rhythms, trance inducing ­microtonal synthesizers and electric saz solos of Altın Gün. Two of the group’s six members have their background in Turkey, but were not even born yet during the ­heyday of stars like Selda, Barış Manço and Erkin Koray. It was these figureheads who created the soundtrack for a new urban Turkish identity with equal parts of Anatolian folk music and ­western ­psychedelic rock, funk and disco.

Since its spectacular concert at Clandestino ­Festival 2018, the group has released two albums and in 2019 they were nominated for a Grammy for Best World Music Album. On their third album Yol, we meet a band whose sound has ­developed during months in lockdown. With more synths and drum machines, ­emphasis has moved more towards disco than psych­rock. Meanwhile, many of the songs are taken from archaic sources,  like on previous albums: Folk melodies from the Ottoman Empire, from ­Anatolia and the Balkans.

Out of Umlazi township in Durban comes Menzi, one half of Infamous Boiz – renowned pioneers of the gqom genre. While his music has conquered dance floors all across the world he has also built a reputation at home as a party organiser and as a producer for a long line of South African artists. But above all he has continued to challenge and develop gqom music in an ever darker direction, with futuristic sounds and synth lines that make John Carpenter’s Halloween sound like a lullaby in comparison.

Anita Kevin is a dj, producer and model based between South Sudan and Uganda. She grew up in a refugee camp in Turkana, Kenya and after having partaken in a workshop for aspiring musicians she adopted the name of the region as her disc spinning alter ego. For Turkana the dance floor becomes a battlefield where tensions between oppression and emancipation are played out. The building blocks of her tight sets are made up of electronic underground, hard dance, non-normative techno and heavy grooves from conflict-ridden shadowlands.

Balani Show is a genre of street parties in Mali based around sound systems blasting ­electronic beats and balafon samples. Inspired by Ivorian coupé-décalé and Congolese soukous, Dj Diaki reinvents the style born out of these parties. With a laptop, a microphone and a drum machine he conjures up a whirlwind of rhythms in ­friction with one another – the result is ­anything but predictable. The tempo is so high that the beats merge into vibrating notes. His debut was named album of the month in The Guardian, and gave him the nickname “Le President”.

This artist, dj and producer from Kampala begun their career with dj sets at secret queer raves and by organising Plastic anti-mass – a series of club nights focusing on female and queer ­artists breaking with normative body ideals. Gqom, vogue and techno are linked up with East African traditions and industrial noise to form an orgy of rhythms as dark as it is joyous.

Maarja Nuut is a singer, violinist, electronic artist, and composer whose work spans a vast range of rich musical worlds. Classically trained and an alumnus of several prestigious music institutions, she’s since delved into a number of disparate genres: Hindustani classical music while studying in New Delhi, Estonian archive sounds and dance, ethnomusicological re- search, and, more recently, the outer limits of looping and electronic sounds. Fuelled by her instincts and curiosity, such exploration comes from an inner need, and a desire to probe each world’s musical language, techniques, and expressional qualities – elements she swirls into her own, mesmerising art.

Restlessly creative, Nuut has always been interested in storytelling and what the past can tell us about the future; for her, myths provide connection points to the modern world and soci- etal upheaval. Since the release of her solo record ‘Une Meeles’ in 2016, she’s received widespread critical acclaim alongside numerous awards, and has toured the world several times over as a solo performer. Known for her compelling, often hypnotic live performances, she’s also collaborated with a number of artists such as Sun Araw, the Estonian Chamber Choir Sireen, Kristjan Järvi, Kiya Tabassian and Hendrik Kaljujärv AKA Ruum among others.

Astrid Sonne started practicing the viola at the age of six. By the time she was a teenager she moved from Bornholm to Copenhagen with the aim of attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music and embarking on a career as a classical musician. But gradually her urge to create original music overtook her interest in an orchestra seat. With no previous ­experience in digital music production she began feeling her way forward on the computer, and bit by bit a new soundscape emerged. There are warm, organic notes, in the form of choirs and strings; but also a ­digital ­coldness, with creepy tentacles of sound ­probing deep into one’s ears. Somewhere inside the ­computer-generated fracas the polyphony of a symphonic composition can still be detected, as though Beethoven spoke to us from the other side of the singularity. At ­Clandestino Festival she will be performing with a live trio.

She has been called the perfect mix between vikings and Berghain: in the music of Sara ­Parkman, traditional melodies meet heavy beats, Hildegard of Bingen, and raw violin ­playing. Christianity merges with ­antifascism while tradition and ­revolution join hands in her work. Among her many ­notable ­collaborations are Fever Ray, Bob Hund and the folk cabaret Fäboland with ­Samatha ­Ohlanders. Sara ­Parkman’s three studio albums have all been met with rave reviews and she has twice received accolades at the Swedish gala for Folk and World Music, as well as the 2020 ­culture award of the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. That same year she co-­curated the Clandestino ­Festival where she and her band also served up a ­magical performance to the 50 people allowed due to pandemic restrictions. That concert was recorded and released as an lp by Clandestino Institute.

Ebo Krdum is a singer & songwriter, an actor and an activist. His music career began when he played “mouth drums” and sang on the streets of Darfur in his youth. On a home-made guitar, he eventually learned to play, inspired by the king of Afroblues, Ali Farka Touré. Today he lives in Stockholm and has been named Newcomer of the Year at the Folk and World Music gala along with his band Genuine Mezziga.

His songs deal with social and political issues affecting his homeland Sudan, in a ­variety of rhythmic and melodic forms of African Blues and soul music. Ebo Krdum’s most important sources of inspiration also include Mariam Amou, Boubacar Traoré and Oumou Sangaré, among others. His deep, pure and natural voice, combined with his unique guitar technique, takes audiences on a journey of peace, justice, resistance, revolution, freedom and love.

Alogte Oho Jonas grew up in northern Ghana where the sounds of frafra gospel choirs bellow out from many a church. Later, in his twenties, he found himself in the capital Accra, where he struggled to get his singing career off the ground. A violent car crash nearly put an end to all his ambitions, and while he slowly recovered he felt grateful just to be alive. This feeling he poured into what was to become his breakthrough hit: Mam Yinne Wa, which combined his childhood gospel roots with reggae inflections. When the German record label agent Max Weissenfeldt visited Ghana he was immediately drawn to the satin tenor of Alogte Oho, backed by the choir The Sounds of Joy. He signed them to his label Philophon, and when time came to hit the studio the group had been further augmented by a funky rhythm section and tight horns.

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Gnawa is the name of an ancient Sufi trance music. As a teenager, Yousra Mansour, the singer of Bab L’Bluz, was fascinated by these hour-long rhythmic improvisations. She travelled around Morocco to discover how a new generation of musicians were working to open up this style to new expressions. 

Some years later she met Brice Battin, a French musician based in ­Marrakech. He had long been experimenting with a polyrhythmic concoction of jazz and gnawa music. Together they learnt to play the guembri and the awicha – two ­traditional types of lute – and explored how these instruments could be used in the manner of a bass and lead guitar in a rock band. This became the backbone of their debut album Nayda. The title means “awakening” and points to an ­artistic and social emancipation movement among young, urban ­Moroccans. The lyrics, variously in Darija, Sudanese and English, deal with everything from transcendental love to frustration over injustices across the African continent. The album won the Songlines Award for Best Fusion 2021. Since its inception, Bab L’Bluz has grown to a quartet which, in addition to ­traditional lutes and qraqeb castanets, mixes in flutes and Indian tabla drums to create funky, psychedelic gnawa blues for the 21^st century.

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Their intention was to make heavily groovy Electronic Body Music in the spirit of d.a.f., but ­something went awry. Sure, they’ve got the ­primitive synth sounds and hard marching drums. But at the same time, the Gothenburg trio Vanligt Folk’s music is so far out weird that it reaches far beyond nostalgia for black-clad fans of 80’s synth. Influences from dancehall and dub mix with punky chaos and a drummer playing frantically with both shoes and head instead of sticks on occasion. Themes such as nationalism, racism and the significance of the hambo dance for the Swedish working class of the 20^th ­century can be found in lyrics as bizarre as they are ­brilliant – like a fever-induced nightmare in a Roy ­Andersson film. Last year, Vanligt Folk released the album Allt E’nte, a record that the group sees as a response to the demand for politicization of ­musical expression: “We’re hoping that Allt E’nte is as out of date in 200 years as it is today”.

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The American composer and ­multiinstrumentalist Lea Bertucci works with a combination of performance and multi-channel sound installations. Alto saxophone and bass clarinet are her go-to instruments, but flutes, organs, and field recordings also play important roles. Often sound itself is the object of her explorations: the agitated air that crashes in waves against our bodies. Like in Metal Aether, recorded in a former military base in France and consisting of pulsating sound patterns, drones and high frequency brass squalls. 

In the spring of 2021 she released A Visible Length of Light, an album that emerged out of a turbulent year in the usa. The beauty of the ­American ­landscape – beaches, mountains and prairies – is reflected in the compositions. Is that the wind rushing across a deserted field, or the composer ­blowing ­tunelessly on a flute? But you can also hear the cities, desolate in lockdown, or as scenes for revolt and chaos. The feeling of alienation in one’s own native country hangs like a shadow over the music.

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One of Iran’s most important musicians and composers, Kayhan Kalhor was born to Kurdish parents in Teheran and already as a thirteen-year-old found himself playing in the National Radio and Television Orchestra. At the same time he was studying Persian radif music, as well as Kurdish and Turkmen folk music. 

At the age of seventeen his career was abruptly interrupted by the Iranian ­Revolution. Alone, with nothing but a suitcase and his favourite instrument – a kamancheh – he escaped on foot all the way to Italy. Four years later his ­parents and his brother were killed in an Iraqi bomb raid. It would take years until Kayhan Kalhor addressed the tragedy in public, instead he let the music speak about the atrocities.

He resettled to North America, where new musical meetings and opportunities unfolded. Together with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma he won a grammy for the collaborative project Silkroad Ensemble. He has also written film scores and worked with the kora master Toumani Diabaté, the Kronos Quartet, and the New York Philharmonic.

Kiya Tabassian is a setar player and ­composer. At age 14, he emigrated with his family from Iran to Quebec. He studied ­composition, while also continuing his self-education in ­Persian music. Later, he co-founded Constantinople, an ensemble that draws from the ­heritage of early music from the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Numerous musical groups and institutions have called upon his talents as a ­composer, ­including the Orchestre symphonique de ­Montréal, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne and the European Broadcasting Union. He has also composed for documentary and feature films.

Ahmed Ag Kaedy grew up in the desert town Kidal in the north-eastern corner of Mali. As an 18-year-old he travelled to Libya to practice shooting and grenade-throwing in the hope of becoming a rebel in the emancipation battle of the Tuareg people. 

At the training camp young men would gather in the evenings to play music late into the night, and gradually his belief in armed struggle was replaced by a need to express ideas of peaceful resistance in a new, personalised kind of desert blues. When he returned home he did so with a guitar instead of a machine gun. Ahmed Ag Kaedy founded ­Amanar and began singing about the struggle of the Tuareg. The group had just started to take off and had won the prize for best band at the Festival au Desert 2011 when Islamist extremists took control over the region. They destroyed Ahmed Ag Kaedy’s guitars and threatened to cut off his fingers. He escaped to Niger and then to Bamako. But the conflict also led to a growing international interest in the music of the Tuareg – and in Amanar. Since then fans in both Africa and Europe have followed the band’s strife to nurture and to develop the musical ­heritage that was first made internationally famous by ­artists such as Tinariwen and Terakraft.

In Brazil there is a well established notion of ­“cultural cannibalism”, i.e. that history is devoured and regurgitated in ever new reincarnations. In the case of Kiko Dinucci we can tell that he has taken big bites out of both choro and bossanova, as well as nibbles of hardcore punk and mouthfuls of the music and the earth religions of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Previously he could be heard in the band Méta Méta, but his latest release is the solo album Rastilho. It is a stripped down but intense collection of songs with choirs and samba rhythms, put to tape with an analogue warmth that brings 70s tropicalia to mind. Kiko Dinucci plays as though the guitar were a percussive instrument, in a style as complex as it is raw. 

The ideas for Rastilho started to form in 2019 as Dinucci was recovering from double wrist surgery. From the hospital bed he watched on the tv how the world seemed to be spinning out of control. The Amazon rainforest stood ablaze, while the new president behaved downright sadistically towards Brazil’s most marginalised. The anger and the sorrow grew to form the sense of resilience and resistance that characterizes the album. He is also looking back to other dark times in his country’s history. Like in the song Dina, which tells of the guerilla fighter Dinalva Oliveira Teixeira who was killed by the junta in 1974.

With repetitive rhythms and serpentine ­guitars, desert blues has become a beloved ­phenomenon across the world. But compared to superstars like Tinariwen and Ali Farka Touré, Etran de L’Aïr come across as a rowdy party gang. ­According to themselves, this family collective is a ­“wedding band for people with no money”. A listen to their debut album No. 1 ­confirms this ­assessment: Three guitarists all seeming to aim for distorted solos simultaneously; the drums clattering along like a mad machine; vocals that appear cracked and distant. Desert punk ­perhaps, or a The Velvet Underground of the Sahara? When the album was recorded, under the desert skies, a spontaneous party erupted, hence the applause and enthusiastic shouts caught on tape. The group formed in Agadez, capital of the Aïr region of Niger, and a key ­caravan crossroads for ­centuries. It was 1995 and the band was equipped with nothing but an acoustic ­guitar and a calabash upon which they kept rhythm with a sandal. Electric guitars and drums were introduced later and new members were added as the family grew.

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She had been alternating for years between the life of an underground rap star and working as a presenter for a hip hop-oriented tv show. But when she made contact with the ­electronic music label Nyege Nyege in ­Kampala, MC ­Yallah’s music career finally took off in a big way. The label quickly fell for her tight, ­quadrilingual flow (English, Luganda, Kiswahili and Luo) and booked MC Yallah for the launch of the Nyege Nyege Festival in 2015. Since then she has ­performed in each incarnation of the festival and built an ever increasing audience, in Uganda and beyond. 

The ep Kubali from 2019 is a mix of ­futuristic “conscious” hip hop, grime and punk, that resulted from a collaboration with the French producer Debmaster, aka Julien Deblois. Based in Berlin for the past ten years, he has established himself as one of the most interesting lab rats of contemporary electronic music. In his ­productions creaking techno synths react osmotically with Indonesian gamelan music, cut up pan flutes and bizarre vocal fragments. Nyege Nyege asked him to send audio files en masse, and many of his most potent compounds ended up on MC Yallah’s blistering ep – a ­meeting of minds that continues on the upcoming album.

Trumpeter, bandleader and composer Goran Kajfeš has gathered some of Sweden’s foremost improvisational musicians in the project Subtropic Arkestra. In recent years, the eclectic jazz collective has both won a Swedish Grammis award and been hailed internationally by audiences as well as the press, for example in Uncut, Mojo, Wire, The Guardian and Jazz Journal for their The Reason Why trilogy. On the three albums, the group draws influences from Turkish psych funk, Nigerian afrobeat and cosmic jazz à la Sun Ra, before diving into Archimedes’ bathtub and finding Swedish experimental rock from the 70s. At Clandestino Festival, Subtropic Arkestra continues to explore new horizons along with fine guests on stage:

Gothenburg-based vocalist Avin Omar, re-­nowned for her magical alto voice, has been heard interpreting Kurdish folk, Arabic ­classical and traditional music, as well as Turkish and Greek folk music. She is an active member of the groups Samara Ensemble, Bosphorus Ensemble, Tro Deng and Kompani Pergamos.

Also contributing is Amanda Werne, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Gothenburg. Under the name Slowgold she has won a Swedish Grammis award, duetted with the ­legendary Freddie Wadling, and released six albums, of which the latest – Aska from 2020 – carries echoes of melancholy American harmon­icas, folk pop and The Cure-esque post punk.

Emerging from a number of different band constellations in the small but vital metal scene of Nairobi, Duma is the brainchild of vocalist Martin Khanja and the guitarist/producer Sam Karugu. They had both long been rebelling against established genre boundaries, but it wasn’t until they moved to Kampala in Uganda and formed this band that all the pieces fell into place. They experimentally concocted their eponymous debut, and thus created their own genre. How to describe this monster of an album? With machine gun ­percussion, growling vocals, swooping synths and electronic noise, Duma creates a hybrid of black metal, hip hop and singeli – the frenetic dance music from Tanzania.

The lyrics deal with the day to day life of the band: love, hate, partying, and to be young and broke. But there is also Pembe 666, consisting of paragraphs from the Book of Revelations, sung in Swahili. And Lionsblood, which tells of a rite of passage in the Maasai culture: young men ­venturing out into the wild to kill a lion and smear themselves with its blood. The theme is turned on its head in the video for the track, where unbothered youths sip on a red liquid next to a ­swimming pool – in Kenya, lion’s tears is a synonym for liquor.

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Tolga Büyük, the founding member of ­Islandman, grew up among the sounds of the Anatolian psych rock of the 70s. His first idol was Barış Manço, known for morphing Turkish folk music with electric guitars and melismatic synths. At the age of seven Büyük started playing saz, the “Turkish guitar”, which he says has shaped his sense of melody and of which echoes can be heard no matter what other instrument he picks up. Curious about his own musical roots, beyond the vinyl records of his childhood, he embarked on a journey which was chronicled in the short documentary Islandman and VeYasin Search for Ancestral Sounds in Turkey. In the film we see him jam with Turkish rock legends and travelling bards. Among the Anatolian mountains he learns about yörük music and traces its roots to Tuva in Siberia, where a shaman blesses his saz in the smoke from a burning juniper tree. 

The latest album from Islandman is called ­Kaybola, a Turkish word that can be translated as “getting lost in order to find something beautiful”. In it, samples from the journey crowd together with Bulgarian choirs, digital dub, clarinet funk and electropolitan romance in the vein of Air. In a live setting Islandman reserves a lot of room for improvisation, and exactly how the concert turns out depends on the room, the audience and the vibe.

Rami and Hasan Nakhleh grew up in the Golan heights. Like many others in the Israel­occupied territories they have never owned a passport, instead they are using a document called ­‘Laissez passer’ to be able to travel. ­Laissez ­Passer is also the name of an album they released in 2017, influenced by both desert blues and reggae. 

Since then the brothers have shifted the focus of their music, back to the Lebanese and Egyptian electronic disco of the 80s. Hasan Nakhleh nostalgically recalled a simple ­keyboard with oriental scales he used to have in his childhood home. He tracked down a ­second hand ­instrument of the same type and that became the start of their latest album Migrant Birds. It is smooth, sparkling, and filled to the brim with pining melancholy. Most of the tracks are built on funky disco with microtonal synth melodies – sometimes the album feels like a Levantine ­mirror work to Daft Punk’s Random Access ­Memories. But Tootard’s most important ­influences derive from the Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, who, alongside keyboardists like Ihsan Al-Munzer, introduced Western disco and funk to classical Arabic tonalities. As the title Migrant Birds suggests, freedom is a ­recurring theme: the dream of moving freely across physical borders and walls, but also across those invisible barriers that limit one’s way of being and loving.