We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.

The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is.

“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician...

How do we want our fleeting, precious, close-up glimpses of the royals to be? Do we want the mystique, the aura, glamour and transcendence? Or would we rather be reassured that they are, in their way, just like us?

Oumou Sangaré is not a woman to be trifled with – tales of people who have crossed her and lived to regret it abound: one story (of many) has her personally hiring a bulldozer in a land dispute and getting a recalcitrant local official sacked. She looked super-glamorous at Earth in a white dress and blue nails, and her backing singers looked and sounded ravishing in vertiginous heels and 70s hairdos.

The inaugural Aga Khan Music Awards, a three-day event held last weekend in Lisbon, celebrated nearly 20 years of wide-ranging work dedicated to the preservation of ancient and threatened cultures, an impressive programme of educational initiatives, and the encouragement of musical exchange and experiment in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially when the artist concerned turns out to have sold some 14 million albums, though mostly in Europe and N

Great music is often born of “what if”s. What if we played Beach Boys-style songs lo-fi, loud, at high velocity? What if we played indie guitar with a hint of Congolese rumba? What if we added a string section to late-Sixties pop-rock? What if we tried to play disco even though we can’t play our instruments at all? That sort of thing.

It’s not often that music of this kind gets a release outside of Morocco, and Arc Music and the producer/musicians must be applauded for curating such an intense, inside view on the ecstatic release of Sufi music across the kingdom, often drawn from a simple street or domestic setting.