 This video is about less mainstream music and what in the Anglo-Saxon world is called world music. Open yourself up to music from other cultures. It does automatically mean traditional music. In France there is a lively rap scene. In North Africa they have their own contemporary music, as they have in Israel. For all the tracks there is a link to YouTube so you can easily get the first impression. For full enjoyment, please play the CD or stream it from lots of streaming services. Let me first start with a fantastic British album from 1971. In my young years, my then girlfriend and me sung a number of tracks from this album during the 600 year city rights festivities of my birth town Wurden, the Netherlands. I accompanied us on guitar and we were dressed in period-correct clothing, including tights for me. So the album will always stay with me. The girlfriend did not, by the way. The Welsh singer and songwriter Mary Hopkins had a great hit with those were the days. It even kept Hey Jude by the Beatles from a number one position for three weeks. In 1970 she represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest and became second. Year later the album I mentioned here was recorded. Tony Visconti, that produced Bowie, McCartney, Gentle Giant and T-Rex, amongst others, also produced this folk-oriented semi-acoustical album. It includes songs by Rolf Martel, Kat Stevens, Gallagher and Lyle, amongst others, but the track I want to mention here is Martha, composed by Harvey Andrews. Andrews is a singer songwriter, pretty much oriented on American folk but also toured for a year with the Dutch Art Rock band Focus. Martha portrays a sad woman that will feed upon your despair to quote a line from the lyrics and to quote another line, like a vulture Martha hovers high, waiting to pounce upon your shattered dreams. Hopkins' heavenly soprano voice, the twelve-string guitar, strings and double bass makes it a joy to listen to, which in fact goes through the entire album. France had always maintained a strong national cultural scene. Cultural protectionism to preserve the French language, for instance. The word computer was not accepted, so the French talk about l'ordinateur. And of course the film noir is quite famous. The French-speaking part of Belgium can be seen as part of that culture, think of Jacques Brelle. So we start off with a Belgian hip-hop artist. Stromay is the artist's name of the Belgian Paul van Haver. He was born to a Rwandan Tutsi father and a filmish mother. His father was killed in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, which brings us directly to the track Papa Ute, which stems from Papa Uetu. Papa, where are you? He was scouted while working at a Belgian music radio station as a trainee. The music manager was impressed by his work and started to play allure on dance. Reactions were great and even the French president Sarkozy is reported to have reacted enthusiastically. From there on his star rises sky high, but after the release of this album he stopped working only to pick it up five years later. That led to the release of the third album Multitude. Although he is Belgian, he has a unique spot in the French hip-hop scene. Michel Sardoux is a French singer and actor, stemming from a famous artist's family. Both his father and mother were singers and actors too. While studying performing arts, he met Michel Fuguin and they became friends for life. His political and moral points of view were often the basis for songs which made him controversial. His opponents even published an essay named Should We Burn Sardoux. Still he became the best-selling artist in France after Jacques Brel, who was a Belgian like Stromay. The song I play quite often is Le Lac du Connemara. The Connemara Lakes. The Connemara area is a region on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. It is the setting of a marriage between Maureen and Sean, a Protestant and a Catholic, in the Granite Church in Limerick. Sardoux describes the rough landscape as a metaphor for the tension between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland. And at the time of writing, the IRA was very active. Remarkable is that neither Sardoux nor his co-lyruses, Pierre Delanoë, had visited Connemara prior to writing the song, which might be clear from the fact that Limerick is not situated in Connemara. They did visit the area a year later and in 2011 Sardoux was offered the symbolic keys of Clifton, Connemara's capital. Sardoux's friend, Michel Fuguin, is best known for his work with the hippie group of dancers and singers called Le Big Bazaar. One of his songs was translated in English to If I Only Had Time and was made a hit by John Rose. His theatre show, Michel Fuguin, the Le Big Bazaar, had all the features of a 70's show, like for instance a hair. The music is melodic and the lyrics like little poems, like une belle histoire, a nice story. It is about a young man that travels home from his vacation location and a young woman that travels south towards a vacation destination. They meet along the Holiday Highway, have a nice time together to know each other in a cornfield after which they both have to continue their own way. The kind of ships that pass in the night and thus a universal story. Living in France but from Algerian descent, Galed is known as the King of Rye, an Algerian style of folk music. Galed did mix it with influences from Spain, while Arabic is the main language mixed with French. To a western like me, they all sound like Arabic music, but that's due to my limited knowledge. What I do know is that Sarah, the title of the album, is how Sahara is pronounced in Arabic and refers to the great African desert. Aisha is sung in French and is about the theme I heard more often in Arabic and Balkan songs. The man that wants a woman's attention but gets rejected. In this case it's Aisha that rejects the man. I heard this album during my visit to Israel and was fascinated by it. I couldn't get the CD but a part of a track was on my holiday video. So when, after years, I wanted to find the album on title, Shazam helped me to find back the title and artist. The vacation was to visit the marriage of my brother in law and this track was in the video I made of it. I don't speak Hebrew and I now found out it's about a partner asking the other why they can't speak softly anymore, like in the beginning of their relationship. Oops. The album has a very special atmosphere. It surely has Middle East roots but there is also a Spanish rock influence and influences from Turkey and even Indonesia according to the musician. Raishel is a kind of Israeli music ambassador having performed in New York, LA, Sydney, Paris, Vienna, the music friends I'll know less, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Ethiopia, Japan and many others. Just sit down, play the track, or better, the album for tracks differ greatly amongst them and relax. Then to my country. Annika Vargiersbergen was the lead singer for the rock band The Gathering. In 1994 she started a solo career, initially called Aqua Danique but nowadays she performs on her own name and did quite a lot of work with Ayan Anthony Lucasen for the Arian project. By the way, also internationally acclaimed. The offspring of all that can be found on pure air. There are a kind of unplugged versions sung with artists from that scene like Danny Kavanaugh, John Wetton, Sharon Den Adel, Keitman and Marike Jager. Somewhere is a Within Temptations song and Temptations Sharon Den Adel and Anathema's Dana Kavanaugh join in for this song. Another great track on this album is the value of Queens from the Arian album Into the Electric Castle by Lucasen. He joins in together with Danny Kavanaugh. In fact the entire album is pure and intimate and I love it. Music is a universal song to bring across emotions, atmosphere, philosophies and the like. I could have made this video three times as long. Mentioning Spanish and Italian music offers instance about the music by Gypsies from Perpignan, France. And let's not forget classical music. But that might be for a next video on music. Let me know what you think of these videos and of the music described. The next video will be about hardware again though. That will be online next Friday at 5 pm central european time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumb up or link to this video on the social media, it is much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you on the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.