Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan shares recollections from Glitterbeat’s Hidden Musics series
By Ian Brennan
Songlines
August 20th, 2026
In 2014, Chris Eckman, the co-founder of Glitterbeat Records, reached out to me about a new series called Hidden Musics for his label which had started up the previous year. I’d just returned from recording Vietnamese war veterans in Hanoi. It seemed a fated fit. Now, more than a dozen albums and a decade-plus later, the series is still going. The latest, by the Oman Bagpipe Singers, touches an incidental theme in the series: music from yet another nation now scarred by war. Below are reflections from across these years making the series.
Ustad Saami
Karachi, Pakistan
Ustad Saami is reportedly the last living vocal master of a 49-microtone ‘surti’ system. Some of his students reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in working with him. That, at age 73, his music had never been widely released was shocking. We recorded 100 per cent live over multiple nights and days at his home with his sons, the Saami Brothers, accompanying him. Following Ustad’s 2019 official international debut, God is Not a Terrorist, the master was invited to perform in the UK for the first time. Watching him and his sons mesmerise at midnight with an hour-long WOMAD set comprised of merely a single song before an overflowing tent of thousands was beyond thrilling. A quieter moment the following year spoke even more potently: at WOMADelaide, his singing calmed the chattering of a massive grey-headed flying-fox colony in the trees beside the stage. We were fortunate enough to release two more albums with Ustad Saami: 2020’s Pakistan is for the Peaceful and East Pakistan Sky, the following year.
“Thanks to these records, I’ve become known throughout the world,” Ustad recounted to me following the release of his albums. “Everything has its time,” he philosophised about his late-in-life global acclaim. Saami’s work stands as a prime example of the Hidden Musics series’ goals.
Hanoi Masters
Hanoi, Vietnam
In 2014, Marilena Umuhoza Delli – my wife and the photographer-filmmaker for all of these projects – and I ventured to Hanoi to record with Vietnamese war veterans there. The emotional trauma that many US veterans suffered was profound and had been widely commemorated in anthems like ‘Born in the USA’ as well as more than a dozen film epics such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. It felt vital to hear from those impacted on the conflict’s other side. Revealingly, locals there call it ‘the American War’.
The Hanoi Masters collective is led by zither player Vân-Ánh Võ, of Kronos Quartet. The startling revelation was that beyond the known masters, there was other extraordinary music almost overlooked – even by survivors within her own family.
During the trip, Vân-Ánh shared, “To avoid holding guns and shooting at people, my father signed up to be a musician in the army. He was just an amateur guitar player, but his task was to rush into battlefields right after the two sides stopped shooting and to then play the guitar to cheer up the soldiers in the trenches. Even though there was a high risk of getting killed by snipers, he was convinced it was still better than shooting at people.”
Their 2015 record, War Is a Wound, Peace is a Scar, was our debut Hidden Musics release.
Famo Mountain
Southern Lesotho
As we embarked to record with the Famo Mountain quintet, the newspaper headline placard out front of the hotel read “Another Famo Mass Shooting”. Not the most comforting news when facing a four-hour, winding drive on mountainous and icy roads after having travelled thousands of miles to meet a famo music troupe.
So much violence has occurred between rival music gangs that Lesotho has been called the ‘murder capital’ of Africa. But while there we witnessed nothing other than peace and grandeur, indications of the nation’s more positive nicknames like ‘the Switzerland of Africa’, ‘kingdom in the sky’ and ‘the rooftop’ of the continent. Nonetheless, the songs on Famo Mountain’s 2025 album For Those Left Behind directly address the violence crisis, featuring titles like ‘My Struggles to Survive (I Refuse to Join a Music Gang)’ and ‘Prayer for Peace’.
Just months after we recorded, President Trump started his second term and disgracefully disparaged Lesotho as a country that “nobody has ever heard of” while addressing the US Congress. Famo Mountain’s voices vibrantly rebut such claims.
Bhutan Balladeers
The Bhutan forest
After exiting a taxi in downtown London, the first local that the Bhutan Balladeers met was a man who was plainly struggling – unhoused, perhaps unwell – who accosted them with a hyper-verbal barrage. Two of the three members who’d never been outside of their homeland tried to ascertain if this was normal cultural behaviour in a foreign land or something to be alarmed by.
The environment differed dramatically from their own lush, mountainous and isolated nation where we recorded the 2024 collection of ancient zhungdra folk songs, Your Face Is Like the Moon, Your Eyes Are Stars, amid a hilltop forest with the world’s largest seated Buddha statue keeping watch from just over the ridgeline.
Despite the Bhutan Balladeers’ initial experience upon arriving in the UK, their visit soon improved. After appearing at WOMAD, Zangmo Yeshi from the group concluded, “We have been so thankful for the opportunity to share our culture with the world.”
The band were next slated to appear at this year’s WOMADelaide Festival in Australia, but that dream was waylaid by the attack on Iran mere days before the Bhutan Balladeers’ departure. The musicians were checked in, past security at the airport gate in Bhutan, and about to board when word came through of their connecting flights’ cancellation – just one micro example of the myriad ways that violence disrupts and impacts innumerable innocent others.
Abatwa (The Pygmy)
Kigalia and southwestern Rwanda
Starting in the summer of 2009 and before the Hidden Musics series began, we recorded multiple albums with The Good Ones in Rwanda, Marilena’s mother’s country. Years later we returned to Rwanda to meet the most minoritised of the country’s three historical people, traditionally referred to locally as the Abatwa.
The musicians that we recorded on that 2016 trip are collectively named Abatwa (The Pygmy), a reclamation of the two terms that have often been used against them as slurs. The title of their 2017 album, Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?, was lifted directly from the closing track.
One featured instrument is the eleven-string inanga which resembles a bodyboard and is so long that when turned upright, it stands taller than some of its Abatwa players. Emmanuel and Ange (pictured below) are a husband-and-wife team that trade in eerie harmonies that can make The Cramps sound milquetoast in comparison.
The record’s reception eventually enabled touring opportunities. Sadly, some were ineligible due to not possessing birth certificates. One member, Beatrice – a singer of effortless depth – was 64 years old before she was able to take a plane or venture anywhere other than Rwanda. But this was only partially true. She did leave her country once – forcibly. When she was five years old, she was exiled into neighbouring Burundi as a refugee during Rwanda’s first large scale, inter-ethnic massacre
(1959–61). Incredibly, when Beatrice was finally granted a chance to freely travel abroad and perform in England, a disgruntled airline employee barred her without cause at the last minute from boarding the scheduled overnight plane, apparently due to resentment that the rural singer was experiencing such a coveted opportunity.
Fortunately, after much hullabaloo and further bureaucratic hurdles, Beatrice was allowed on the next night’s flight, arriving just in time to regale the WOMAD festival audience with her unadorned and disarmingly direct vocals.
Saramaccan Sound (Suriname)
Amazon Forest, Suriname
To record with the brother duo, Saramaccan Sound, in Suriname, we rode upriver to a waterside village reachable only by boat. Their music features Robert Jabini’s mournful melodies and tender-tough baritone. Steel strings rust almost instantly in the rainforest, so the mellower nylon-string tone defines the music here. The strongest songs emerged only after we were done recording (or so we thought). The men stayed the night in the village, reuniting with old friends. Most of the 2024 album, Where the River Bends Is Only the Beginning, ended up coming from those off-the-cuff, afterthought moments that took place on the front porch and into the wee hours.
Comorian
Grande Comore Island, Comoros
In Comoros, we had hazarded a 30-mile drive along the narrow main road that took three hours each way due to the potholes and the rain. When we had finally reached our destination, an elderly trio of mandolin, oud and violin, were accompanied by a drummer who was accidentally playing his snare upside-down before being instructed to do otherwise by his compatriots. But as hospitable and regal as the group were, their tarab music seemed watered down.
In Comoros – like in so many other places when going in search of strikingly unique music – often the stronger artist is hidden behind a better-known one. In this case, a slick operator named Hassain led us to a second Hassain, also a non-musician, who connected us with
a third musician who was quite good. And it was he that, ultimately, introduced us to his friend and mentor.
That person, Soubi (and his partner, Mmadi), turned out, at last, to exude the nonchalant disobligation and sly watchfulness that almost always points to the truest voices. The musicians took turns playing homemade, double-sided eight-string ndzendze (zithers), simultaneously plucking both sides masterfully. Soubi also played a 12-string gambussi lute.
The Comorian duo’s 2021 album, We are an island, but we’re not alone, was recorded at various outdoor locations throughout Grande Comore Island, including inside the only shelter found at one point – the stripped shell of an abandoned car that acted as both a resonator and the world’s largest repurposed microphone stand.
Khmer Rouge Survivors
Southern Cambodia and Phnom Penh
Thuch Savang – whose face was irreparably damaged during the Cambodian genocide – specifically composed the piece ‘My Life as a Victim of War’ for the Khmer Rouge Survivor’s 2016 release, They Will Kill You If You Cry. Despite calmly listing a litany of horrors that he’d been subjected to as a child including being separated from his mother, and his father and grandmother being killed, he chillingly concluded with…
‘I make this story short for you,
but if there is more time and if
there is a next time,
I will tell it all
to the end.
There is so much more.’
Thoch improvised the melody accompanied only by a compatriot scratching a slab of wood. When Thoch was through, a silence fell upon those gathered, lifting only after many minutes had passed.
Oman Bagpipe Singers
Along the Arabian Sea, Oman
In Oman, descendants of the ‘other’ oceanic African slave trade – the one to the east – continue to live in the region that hosted the main port. Centuries on, al-mudema (‘sailor songs’) musicians continue to sing in Swahili dialect and feature music that combines African rhythms and local bagpipes. These descendants are referred to as the Zanzabari (or sometimes locally as Khal people). They sing the songs of those who were brought forcibly by ship centuries before.
Rather than qurbah bagpipes being appropriated from Scotland or introduced by the British colonisers as is commonly assumed, archaeological records – such as a Hittite slab dated circa 1000BC – reveal that the instrument was possibly first found in the Arabian peninsula more than two thousand years prior to its appearance in England. Group leader and seashell conch player, Nabhan Al Alawi, 50, told me, “Our music’s heritage is to spread peace.”
Between the 2025 recording of their Oman Bagpipe Singers: Songs of returning and leaving and its release this summer, America attacked Iran, destabilising the entire region.
Taa!
Rural Botswana
The Taapeople’s language, Taa, possesses 112 sounds (some say even more), the most of any language in the world – including many ‘click consonants’ produced with the teeth and tongue. In comparison, English has approximately 44 sounds, Italian a mere 32. Sadly, there are only around 2,500 Taa speakers left and the language is officially classified as ‘dying’.
One of the amazing surprises while recording the Taa! Ensemble’s 2023 Our language may be dying, but our voices remain collection was unexpectedly meeting many shamans, most of whom were elderly and two blind. Family members that had gathered said that they’d not heard the shaman’s songs in decades. All of these singers accompanied themselves on homemade mbira ‘thumb pianos’. If not for the microphones, their voices were all but inaudible. Their breath, though, was visible – rising like signals on the frigid desert air.
Parchman Prison Prayer
Near Mississippi’s blues crossroads
Those that are marginalised exist in every nation, even the largest economy in the world. Mississippi has the second highest incarceration rate in America, at more than six times that of the state with the lowest. Mississippi is also the poorest state in the nation and has the largest percentage of African-American citizens, which tragically is more than mere coincidence.
Parchman Prison is Mississippi’s oldest prison, houses its death row and has a troubling history of discrimination and exploitation descended directly from the Jim Crow era. Prior to COVID, new scandals rocked the facility due to housing and food conditions that closely resembled those that we’d witnessed at Malawi’s Zomba Prison in 2013, which at the time was ranked the poorest nation on earth. More than a decade after being at Zomba Prison, I ventured to Parchman, Mississippi to record a Sunday prison service, having no idea what music would be there. Unexpectedly, two Parchman Prison Prayer albums resulted – Some Mississippi Sunday Morning (2023) and Another Mississippi Sunday Morning (2025) – and attracted international acclaim from the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times.
The prison’s chaplain, Ron Olivier, conveyed to me afterwards, “I think that those moments that the men shared recording, they were not looked at as an inmate. They were looked at as musicians. They’re used to being seen as just a number rather than as somebody. They kept telling me afterwards how grateful they were for the experience.”
The Parchman Prison men’s voices can reach places that a thousand statistics and theses never could. By their demonstration that someone who’s trespassed and been vilified can nonetheless have so much tenderness and beauty within to share, these performances alone could stand as evidence at a parole hearing.
+ Five tracks from the Hidden Musics series are included on our compilation. Oman Bagpipe Singers’ Songs of returning and leaving is the latest release in the series
