Album: Lo'Jo, Cinéma el Mundo (Harmonia Mundi)

The globalist attitude behind Lo'Jo's bohemian Franco-Arabic funk is perhaps best epitomised by the title "La Marseillaise En Créole", a musing upon national identity that pushes beyond boundaries of race and genre.

On this album, songwriter Denis Péan's careworn ruminations stretch as far as the elegant cumbia of "Deux Bâtons" and the bowed-string sonorities of "Vientiane", while "African Dub Crossing the Fantôms of an Opera" extends the band's earlier excursions into Africa, accompanied by Tinariwen. Robert Wyatt lends vocals to the title track, one of several elegantly stumbling waltzes whose rhapsodic violins and wheezing reeds bear out Péan's idea of "sounds harvested in their moment of grace".