Music Discovery Digest #7 | Hidden Meridians Edition
5 human-curated world music discoveries from Cyprus to Afghanistan, Turkey to Iraq. Music that crosses borders algorithms don’t even know exist.
Five tracks, five coordinates. Cyprus, Turkey, Afghanistan, Persia, Iraq. Each one a point on a meridian that doesn’t appear on any official map, but that music has been tracing for centuries. Algorithms won’t surface these. They don’t know what to do with a Cypriot band singing in both Greek and Turkish, or an Iraqi refugee whose ancestors came from Kenya in the 9th century. That’s exactly why we’re here.
Buzz’ Ayaz — Buzzi Ayazi (Cyprus, 2024)
Nicosia is the last divided capital in the world. A wall runs through the city, splitting it between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities for over 50 years. Most artists from the island choose a side. Buzz’ Ayaz chose both.
Led by Antonis Antoniou, founder of Monsieur Doumani and Trio Tekke, the band brings together musicians from both sides of the divide. Their self-titled debut album, released on Glitterbeat Records in August 2024, is a fuzzed-out urban soundscape of Anatolian psychedelia, 70s psych organ, dubby electronics, and a growling bass clarinet played by British musician Will Scott. “Buzzi Ayazi” is the opening track and the thesis statement: the word ayaz (a cold, clear wind) is shared between the Greek and Turkish communities of the island. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the whole point.
The album won Best Album at the Transglobal World Music Chart for the 2024-2025 season, beating out hundreds of releases from across the globe. For a debut record from a band most of the world had never heard of, that’s remarkable. But spend five minutes with this music and it makes complete sense. There’s a rawness and urgency here that polished fusion albums never capture. This sounds like a city that has been holding its breath for decades, finally exhaling.
Hüseyin Bitmez — Her Daim (Turkey, 2007)
Not every discovery has to be brand new. Sometimes a track has been sitting in a corner of the internet for 17 years, waiting for the right moment to find you. “Her Daim” is one of those tracks.
Hüseyin Bitmez is one of Turkey’s finest kanun virtuosos, an instrument that sits at the heart of Turkish classical music. The kanun is a flat zither with 78 strings, played with small plectra worn on the fingertips. In the wrong hands it can sound decorative, background music for a restaurant. In Bitmez’s hands it becomes something else entirely. Meditative, precise, deeply emotional.
“Her Daim” appeared on the compilation Istanbul Calling Vol. 2 in 2007 on Elec-Trip Records, a label dedicated to bridging traditional Turkish music and contemporary sensibilities. The track is built on repetition and patience. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced. It rewards the kind of listening that streaming algorithms are actively working against: slow, full attention, no skipping. This is the kind of track that makes you realize what you’ve been missing by letting a playlist decide what comes next.
Qais Essar — Liminal Time And Space (Afghanistan/USA, 2024)
In Afghanistan right now, music is banned. Musicians have been arrested, instruments destroyed, concerts shut down. Against that backdrop, the existence of Qais Essar’s fourth album Echoes of the Unseen feels like an act of defiance, even though it was recorded thousands of miles away in Arizona.
Essar is an Afghan-American composer and one of the world’s leading masters of the rabab, Afghanistan’s national instrument and the historical ancestor of the Indian sarod. He grew up in Phoenix and began studying the instrument as a child, but it was after 9/11 and the surge of Islamophobia that followed that his mission became clear: to give the rabab the space and respect it deserves on the world stage.
Echoes of the Unseen, released in October 2024 on the Worlds Within Worlds label, is structured around the cycle of a single day, each composition representing a different hour from dawn to night. “Liminal Time And Space” sits in that uncertain middle hour, somewhere between morning and full day. The album features collaborators playing dilruba, tabla, daf, bansuri, and santoor, instruments that weave in and out of Essar’s rabab without ever crowding it. This is music with enormous patience and enormous depth. It was performed at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Recital Centre as part of Essar’s 2024 Australian tour. It deserves every stage it gets.
Elana Sasson — Bahari Digar (USA, 2025)
Elana Sasson’s debut album In Between arrived in April 2025 and immediately landed on the Transglobal World Music Chart Top 100. That kind of recognition for a debut record is rare. One listen to “Bahari Digar” and you understand why.
Sasson is a Persian-Kurdish-American vocalist and composer who studied at Berklee College of Music’s Valencia campus, where she met many of the musicians on this album. The record was written in Valencia and recorded in Madrid, which tells you something about how music moves now: a singer carrying Persian poetry and Kurdish mountain songs into a jazz quartet setting, recording in Spain, releasing on a Greek bassist’s label (PKMusik, founded by Petros Klampanis). Borders are administrative. Music finds its own routes.
“Bahari Digar” features guest Kaveh Sarvarian on ney, the ancient Persian flute made from a single reed. When Sarvarian’s ney enters the track alongside Sasson’s voice, something genuinely rare happens. Two voices, one ancient and one contemporary, finding the same frequency. Songlines magazine described her voice as “arrestingly beautiful” and gave the album four stars. It’s one of the most quietly powerful releases of 2025, and almost nobody outside the world music community has heard it yet.
Ahmed Moneka — Dingi Do (Iraq/Canada, 2024)
Ahmed Moneka’s story is almost too much to hold in a single paragraph. He grew up in Baghdad, trained as an actor and musician, learned Afro-Sufi singing and drumming from his family, a tradition passed down from ancestors who arrived in Basra from the East African coast in the 9th century. He became the first Black Iraqi to host a television program. Then in 2015, after appearing in a film about gay rights, he received death threats and was forced to flee. He ended up in Toronto as a refugee.
Kanzafula, released in May 2024 on Lulaworld Records, is his debut album and it carries all of that weight without ever feeling heavy. It’s joyful, physical, magnetic. The album draws on the Afro-Iraqi Sufi tradition of Basra, one of the least documented musical heritages in the world, and layers it with funk, jazz, soul, and rock. His ensemble for the record brings together musicians from Iraq, Greece, Turkey, Sudan, and Canada. “Dingi Do,” featuring guitarist Demetrios Petsalakis, is the track that captures everything at once: the groove, the history, the celebration, the longing.
In 2025, Kanzafula received a Juno Award nomination, making Moneka the first Iraqi artist ever nominated for Canada’s most prestigious music prize. That recognition matters. But the music was already essential before anyone handed it a trophy.
Thanks for reading. If any of these tracks open a new door, leave a comment. I want to know which one.
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