Singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi is the voice of a generation — and in her new song, “Lost,” this Tunisian artist makes it plain that the jittery uncertainty that many people are feeling right now is a global phenomenon.

“Lost” is a track from Ensen (Human), Mathlouthi’s first album since her debut, Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free), which was released in 2012. But by the time that the first album was released, Mathlouthi was already an icon: Her song “Kelmti Horra” was an anthem for a generation of Tunisians and other across north Africa.

“I am the voice those who would not give in,” she sang on “Kelmti Horra.” “I am free and my word is free.” She took those lines from the streets of Tunis, during the revolution that led to the ousting of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, all the way to the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2015.

In the ensuing years since that potent debut, Mathlouthi has moved to New York and is releasing Ensen later this month on the American indie label Partisan — a signal of her bigger ambitions, which spanned working with several producers, including Valgeir Sigurðsson of Sigur Ros and her mainstay collaborator, the French-Tunisian producer Amine Metani, and recording Ensen across seven different countries.

Mathlouthi drenches “Lost” in the moody electronic hues that define her new album. She describes the sound of Ensen as having run buzzy North African percussion and other instruments, like the guimbri lute, zukra flute and kick drum as “organic beats run through homemade effects and setups.” Those textures frame the undeniable sweetness and pure potency of Mathlouthi’s voice, which she wields with the precision of a knife.

“It’s a song about loss, about totally missing the control over your dreams, your thoughts, losing your bearings,” Mathlouthi writes in an email to NPR.
The video for “Lost” comes from footage shot last month at the first Wasla Festival in Dubai, an event geared to alternative Arabic music that also featured such other heavy-hitters as Mashrou’ Leila and Souad Massi, both Tiny Desk Concert alumni.

Lyrically, Mathlouthi tends to alternate between plainspokenness and elliptical poetry. The opening line, a simply declaimed “I am lost,” morphs into “As I was listening to the Water / From my dreams came a swan / And straightens his wings / To give me the sweetest birth.” It’s a metaphor, she says, inspired by Patti Smith’s writings.

But it’s facile to compare Mathlouthi to some of the great singer-songwriters she counts as her heroes, like Smith, Joan Baez and Björk (and, from a different sphere altogether, the great Lebanese composer, oud player and singer Marcel Khalife): she is no wannabe. As she evolves into a mature artist, Mathlouthi is a singular voice.

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One of the most joyful shows I’ve heard in years came courtesy of the clarion-voiced Afro-Venezuelan singer Betsayda Machado and her group La Parranda El Clavo, who made their New York City debut at the annual globalFEST festival in January.

They root their often politically pointed lyrics with the sounds of their heritage — including intricate African polyrhythms and percussion, as well as call-and-response singing — occasionally mixed with close harmonies that evoke an almost-R&B feel.

Though she has been based in the capital city of Caracas for many years, Machado comes from a small village of 1,500 people called El Clavo, located near Venezuela’s Caribbean coastline. Like Machado and her bandmates, the town’s inhabitants are mostly Afro-Venezuelans, the descendants of slaves who had worked on the area’s cacao plantations.

For generations, they’ve been able to hold onto certain elements of their African and uniquely Afro-Venezuelan heritage, especially in their music-making. And the music of this band, La Parranda El Clavo, has helped keep their community strong and proud of their traditions. The group has been playing together for nearly three decades, primarily at town festivals, holidays and funerals. But it’s only now that they’ve begun touring North America — and making their singular, passionate and purposeful voices reverberate in the wider world.

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Wanderlust is at the heart of the music The Wu-Force makes and the lives its members lead — but so is its opposite: homesickness. The trio’s members, two American and one Chinese, are all inveterate world travelers who’ve forged unexpected musical connections.

Group founder Wu Fei, raised in Beijing, spent years within the avant-garde music scene in New York and currently lives in Nashville, playing her massive stringed guzheng with both classical and roots music ensembles. She formed The Wu-Force in Beijing in 2010 with Abigail Washburn — her clawhammer banjo-playing American soulmate — and Kai Welch, Washburn’s frequent collaborator on keyboards and trumpet. Each player is a daring experimentalist who’s also bound to preserve her or his native traditions — in the blend, bluegrass meets folk meets West Coast jazz meets Chinese mountain music. It’s a music of borders and of home fires reflecting each others’ lights.

“Paper Lanterns,” from Wu-Force’s self-titled debut EP, is a song of exile and exquisite longing. The lyrics, in both English and Mandarin, give voice to a young female worker who’s had to leave her small town for the big city. She knows her dream of returning will likely not come true, yet she hangs on to hope, and finds strength in even the thought of her beloved sister. Within its musical swirl of Appalachian, Chinese classical and pop sounds, the song borrows a motif, a riff, from the Pixies‘ “Where is My Mind” – the perfect reference point for the psychic displacement of the song’s narrator.

This video, created by Joey Foster Ellis (you might have seen his amazing stop-motion collaboration with rapper Moinina Sengeh, from Sierra Leone), delicately conveys the song’s message in images that will pique the memory of viewers from any background.

The Wu-Force EP is available now.

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President Trump’s executive order on immigration restricting travel to the U.S. for travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries led to a firestorm of criticism, lawsuits and injunctions by five federal judges staying the order. But questions remain about who can and can’t come to this country. Among those caught in the confusion are a number of prominent musicians, whose personal lives — and livelihoods — have been put on hold.

Omar Souleyman is a Syrian singer who in recent years has collaborated with Björk and performed at the Nobel Peace Prize concert. Five years ago, he moved to the southeast of Turkey to avoid the war at home in Syria.

Souleyman has a new album on the way, and he was planning a U.S. tour to promote it. He’s toured the U.S. 16 times before. This time around, says his manager, Mina Tosti, they were planning tour dates in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Arizona, and were in the thick of planning an appearance at the SXSW festival in March as well.

The visa paperwork for this trip was already well underway when the executive order was announced. When Tosti visited the homepage of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara last week, she saw this notice: “‘If you already have an appointment scheduled,'” she reads aloud, “‘please DO NOT ATTEND.’ Capital letters.”

She says there’s an unspoken message behind those words: “You are not welcome. Do not come near us.”

Now that the order is in limbo, Tosti is not sure what to do. Neither is immigration lawyer Matthew Covey, who heads a U.S. nonprofit called Tamizdat that advocates for foreign artists and helps facilitate their visa applications.

“For the arts, it’s really not a resolution at all,” Covey asserts. “Because at least for performing arts programmers, the temporary restraining order is just that. We don’t know when or if it will disappear, and we’ll go back to the ban. So if you’re running a performing arts organization here in the U.S., and you’re trying to figure out who to book for June, July, even for March — there are very few presenters who are going to risk contracting with an artist from one of the seven countries now for any point in the foreseeable future.”

Among those left hanging are some of the world’s top musicians. Kayhan Kalhor is a virtuoso of the Persian kamancheh, a bowed stringed instrument. Kalhor is a four-time Grammy Award nominee and a longtime collaborator of cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Kalhor was born and raised in Iran, but he is a Canadian citizen — and he lives in California. Right now, he’s on tour in Iran. Isabel Soffer was hoping to help him tour the U.S. in May. She’s an American who produces concerts and festivals across the country and works extensively with artists from the Middle East.

“So many of these incredible artists from all over the world are doing this dance,” Soffer observes, “because so many of them have complex lives based around mobility. Where do they belong? Where do they live? What passports do they have? How do they function?”

Mahdyar Aghajani is an Iranian producer and composer best-known in this country for his score for the film “No One Knows About Persian Cats” – a “near-documentary” about Iran’s banned underground music scene.

“Until two years ago,” Aghajani says, “we were considered satanists.”

He’s now based in Paris. Speaking via Skype, he says he still manages a hip-hop collective called Moltafet back home. “They cannot work in Iran,” he says, “because the government is against them, so they’re illegal. They cannot officially monetize their music.”

So Aghajani was hoping to bring Moltafet to the U.S., to reach both the Iranian diaspora here and mainstream hip-hop fans. “And we had so many states [as] part of the tour,” Aghajani says, “and now this thing has put everything on hold, basically, because half our plan is now nothing.”

Aghajani says that as an Iranian artist, he’s already had to figure out how to knock down official hurdles. And he thinks that what he and his friends have gone through can be a model for others.

“The borders, they cannot stop us,” Aghajani says. “Right now, with all this technology, we don’t have to physically be there to do a show. I mean, you’ve got projection to hologram to augmented reality, virtual reality, all these streaming services. There’s so many technologies right now that we have access to, that I think the artists should be creative, like they shouldn’t be scared or hopeless or anything like that. Imagine if I had this mentality — we had Ahmadinejad. I know Trump is very bad and everything, but Ahmadinejad was way crazier, I think!”

For now, attorney Matthew Covey of the organization Tamizdat is offering to prepare and file visa applications, pro bono, for artists from any of the seven countries named in the executive order, no matter what happens.

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There’s a music video that’s been racking up millions of views for the last few weeks — and it comes from Saudi Arabia. NPR Music’s Anastasia Tsioulcas describes the scene:

“There’s this amazing setup. You see women wearing full niqab — so they’ve got their faces covered, their hair covered, clad in black, it seems. And then they burst out in super-colorful outfits and doing all kinds of silly things, playing basketball and riding bumper cars,” she says.

In a conversation on All Things Considered, Tsioulcas tells Ari Shapiro how the visual, inspired by a lesser-known, low-budget clip from 2014, has become a viral sensation. Hear their conversation at the audio link, and read an edited version below.

Ari Shapiro: I don’t speak Arabic, but I know a good tune when I hear one. What do the lyrics say?

Anastasia Tsioulcas: So, that’s where the real interest in this video is. The name of the song is “Hwages,” which means something like “concerns” or “obsessions.” And the lyrics are pretty subversive. They start out, “May men disappear, they give us psychological illnesses / None of them are sane, each one has an illness.

Basically saying, by definition, “Men are mentally ill.” A bunch of Saudi women singing this.

Absolutely.

And what’s amazing is how much this as really taken off across the Middle East: It’s become hugely, hugely, popular. Who are the people behind this?

We don’t know who the women are, but the video director is named Majed Alesa. He has become this viral video machine in Saudi. He now has this platform and he can amplify his message to his millions and millions of followers.

So, at one point in the video, there’s a cut-out of Donald Trump that rises on a proscenium behind a stand that says half in Arabic and half in English, “The House of Men.”

Has there been much pushback to it?

You know, it’s funny — I haven’t seen a lot of official pushback. You see YouTube comments in both English and Arabic saying, “This is not a women’s movement, don’t judge on this, our values are still really important to us.” But you also see a lot of very positive feedback.

Throughout Saudi Arabia, throughout the Gulf, throughout the entire Middle-East, this is getting a lot of play and a lot of conversation. And you can dance to it.

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Last year, Brazil lost one of its most famous musicians: Naná Vasconcelos, who put an instrument called the berimbau on the world’s musical map. It’s a kind of bow with a gourd attached, and it is the inspiration for a new album, MeiaMeia: New Music for Berimbau, by the group Arcomusical.

“The instrument’s history is extremely deep,” says Gregory Beyer, the group’s artistic director. “Cave paintings depict people with musical bows thousands of years ago, but the more recent history shows that the instrument has its tradition among the Bantu-speaking peoples throughout the region of southern Africa.”

Beyer spent time with Vasconcelos before his passing. He says that some of how the late musician mastered and reinvented the instrument came out of necessity.

“When he moved from the northeast to Rio de Janeiro to work specifically with [Brazilian singer] Milton Nascimento, he moved into a small apartment where his drum set was no longer acceptable to his neighbors — and so the berimbau became an ersatz drum set for him,” Beyer says. “He had low notes that would represent a bass drum, high notes that would represent a snare drum … and he put all these things together and created just an incredibly inspired performance style that was like nothing that anyone had heard before.”

Beyer joined NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, berimbau in hand, to talk about the legacy of Naná Vasconcelos and demonstrate how the instrument creates its unique sound. Hear their conversation, and the music, at the audio link.

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