Bristol has a long record of producing music that sounds as though it were made in a damp basement by someone who has seen through everything. Lucian Lacewing makes his in a bedroom, a smaller room with a better view of the ceiling, and this four-track mini-album is the sound of a man lying on his back and watching the plaster turn into weather.

Concept albums have a reputation for grandiosity. They tend to arrive wrapped in gatefold sleeves and self-importance, ready to explain the cosmos to a public that only wanted a decent tune. Massimo Donelli and Paolo Rossi have made something far rarer: a concept album with a beating heart and a conscience, and, best of all, restraint. *Adorati Spiriti* asks large questions in a quiet voice, and it is all the more persuasive for it.

Guitarists who dream in orchestral colour are rare enough. Guitarists who can persuade Vinnie Colaiuta, John Patitucci and the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague to dream alongside them, on a debut single, are rarer still. NOR.BE has managed it, and "All For You" announces him not as a hopeful newcomer but as a fully formed voice who simply hadn't been heard yet.

Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.

Twenty-nine minutes, one afternoon, four musicians and a voice that refuses to be tidied up: that's the whole conceit of Syna Awel's Live Acoustic Session, and it turns out to be plenty. Strip away the studio gloss from a record and you usually find out fairly quickly whether the songs were ever more than production. Here, the opposite happens. "Isem-is Amazigh" opens the set sounding less like a performance than a summons — Mahir Bostandzija's percussion arriving like a heartbeat remembered rather than counted, Anis Agrebi's oud curling around Syna Awel's phrasing the way smoke curls around a lamp. You sense immediately that nothing on this session was rehearsed into submission.

Few instruments carry as much unspoken history as the nay. Reed cane, no mouthpiece, no keys — nothing between the player and the note but breath and intention. On *JASAD* (Arabic for "Body"), Bethlehem-born virtuoso Faris Ishaq turns that austerity into a manifesto, and the result is one of the most quietly commanding solo instrumental records to emerge from the Levant in years.

There is nothing tentative about "Bejamalen." From the first bars of Syncop Orchestra's arrangement, Maestro George Kolta announces his intentions plainly: this will be a work that refuses to choose between East and West, between the concert hall and the zawiya, between reverence and spectacle. It succeeds, and it succeeds without breaking a sweat.

There is a particular kind of ambition that announces itself not through volume but through lineage, and Rootless — the Glasgow-based collective who have made a virtue of being from everywhere and nowhere at once — wear theirs like a second skin. Their new single, "Dam Mast Qalandar," takes on one of the most over-recorded, over-sampled, near-untouchable pieces in the qawwali canon — the song Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan turned into a kind of devotional Big Bang — and dares to ask what happens when you run it through a Roma fiddle and a Glaswegian postcode. The audacity alone deserves a hearing.

One of the more quietly radical acts a musician can commit is to return to their own work and find it unfinished — not flawed, but incomplete, as though the original recording captured only half of a conversation that was always meant to be spoken in more than one voice. Elana Sasson has done precisely that with this reimagined version of *"in between"*, the title track from her critically acclaimed 2025 album, and the result is not a revision so much as a revelation.

Picture two Italians who have spent years accumulating instruments the way other people accumulate regrets — methodically, passionately, and with total disregard for shelf space. Alex Baccari and Marzia Di Cicco, the intercultural duo who trade under the name Koradan, have arrived with a debut album that is less a collection of songs and more an act of civilisational archaeology, conducted in real time, with eighty-plus instruments from five continents and the focused intensity of people who have absolutely nothing to prove and everything to share.