Asian Dub Foundation

(UK)

There are bands that weren’t just born to play music. They were born to challenge the world with it. Asian Dub Foundation emerged in the early 1990s in South London, at the intersection of multicultural neighborhoods, squat houses, sound systems, anti-racist activism, and migrant youth who refused to remain silent. Children of the British South Asian diaspora, they grew up amid the reggae of Jamaican sound systems, political hip-hop, militant dub, combative punk, and cultural memories brought from India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. From this tension emerged one of the most explosive and politicized musical languages of recent decades.

It all began in a music workshop linked to the Farringdon Community Music House, a community music education centre in London, where young people from diverse backgrounds learnt to transform social experience into artistic creation. It was there that Deeder Zaman, Dr. Das, Chandrasonic, Sun-J and Pandit G crossed paths. The band’s name was already a manifesto: ‘Asian’, because they refused to be invisible; ’Dub’, for the Jamaican heritage of deep bass and sonic resistance; ‘Foundation’, because they wanted to build something lasting from the margins.

From the early days, Asian Dub Foundation rejected any decorative notion of multiculturalism. Their music was a direct confrontation. Jungle, drum’n’bass, dub and ragga fused with Indian tablas, incendiary guitars, scratches, spoken word and seismic basslines. Their concerts quickly became legendary: physical, chaotic, political, almost insurrectionary. Somewhere between rave and street protest.

Albums such as Facts and Fictions (1995), Rafi’s Revenge (1998) and Community Music (2000) defined a distinctive aesthetic: dance music with a historical consciousness. They spoke of police brutality, structural racism, European fascism, colonialism, surveillance and social exclusion without ever losing the collective impulse of celebration. Songs such as ‘Naxalite’, ‘Free Satpal Ram’ or ‘Fortress Europe’ continue to sound alarmingly relevant on a continent that insists on erecting physical and mental borders.

But the Asian Dub Foundation was never just about anger. There is a deeply communal idea in their music: the dance floor as a space for gathering and resistance. The bass engages the body, but also stimulates thought. Like The Clash before them, they understood that popular energy and political consciousness need not go hand in hand.

Over more than three decades, they have collaborated with artists as diverse as Sinéad O’Connor, Iggy Pop, Radiohead, Chuck D and Primal Scream, composed soundtracks for silent films and continued to reinvent their musical vocabulary across electronic, dub, rock and South Asian music. Without nostalgia. Without submission.

Live, Asian Dub Foundation remain an electric force. There is something urgent and unruly about the way they take to the stage. The beats surge forward like urban protests, the basslines vibrate like sirens and the vocals burst forth like slogans. At a time when music so often shies away from conflict, ADF remind us that dancing can also be a political gesture. And that sound, when born on the streets, can still shake things up.

Groundation

(US)

Reggae was born of a wound. It sprang from the barren soil of Jamaica, from bodies that crossed the Atlantic in chains, and from generations who learnt to survive by transforming pain into rhythm and oppression into prayer. But the music that pain produces knows no geographical boundaries, and that is precisely what The Groundation did: take that flame off the island, feed it with other fuels, and return it to the world with an intensity that Bob Marley would surely recognise as his own.

Groundation was formed in 1998 on the campus of Sonoma State University in northern California, as part of a jazz programme. Harrison Stafford, its leader and vocalist, was studying jazz when he formed the group. The son and grandson of jazz musicians, he grew up listening to Count Basie with the same ease with which he discovered the Wailers.

This convergence of worlds was neither an accident nor a pose: it was the raw material for something genuinely new. Between 1999 and 2001, Stafford taught the first accredited course on the history of reggae at a Californian public university because, for him, before playing, one had to understand. And he understood so well that he helped redefine what American reggae could be.

The name ‘Groundation’ comes from a Rastafarian ceremony celebrating the connection to the earth and one’s origins. A perfect synthesis of what the group would come to represent: music as ritual and consciousness.

In 2002, the album Hebron Gate catapulted Groundation to international fame, and France, almost immediately, became a second home for the band. Since then, they have built a discography that blends traditional roots reggae with jazz improvisation, funk rhythms, dub effects and Afro-Cuban and Latin influences, always with the social consciousness that is the hallmark of roots reggae: the struggle for justice, criticism of greed, and the call for unity. Over the years, they have collaborated with legends such as Don Carlos, The Congos, Apple Gabriel and Israel Vibration, deliberately bridging the gap between generations.

In 2025, Groundation released their 11th studio album, Candle Burning A musical journey that does not dwell on the negative, but embraces the light, the fire and the life that burns within us. The album features collaborations with Alpha Blondy, Mutabaruka, Thomas Mapfumo and Mykal Rose. A council of sages from the African and Caribbean diaspora gathered around a message of serene resistance. Recorded on analogue tape at the legendary ICP Studios in Brussels, the album preserves the raw energy and organic sound for which the band is renowned, as if resistance to the digital were itself a political act.

In 2026, the group performs at Med in Loulé with the power of the classics and the freshness of those who have never surrendered to inertia. Each concert is a sonic ritual that spans genres and generations, from the purest roots to jazz improvisation, with the emotional intensity of those who make music a cause.

Sérgio Godinho

(PT)

Sérgio Godinho has no genre. He has a universe. His songs have countless lives. Countless arrangements. They inhabit the bar and the library, the road and the public square, all at once. They are lyrics that linger in the memory, melodies that linger in the ear. And live, all of this takes on a different dimension: he is one of those rare artists capable of making a large venue feel intimate. Godinho is, therefore, a cartographer of emotional landscapes, where each song is a different port of call, but the Portuguese language is always the point of departure.

In recent years, Sérgio Godinho, with the superb band Os Assessores and other collaborators, has been revisiting his live repertoire, deconstructing and reimagining classics such as ‘Liberdade’, ‘Os Conquistadores’ or ‘Homem dos Sete Instrumentos’, as if each concert were a laboratory of arrangements and moods.

Over time, he has incorporated jazz, urban rhythms, electronic textures, and echoes of Brazilian and Atlantic music, always keeping the lyrics at the centre: stories in song form, with characters, unexpected angles, and an irony that never strays from tenderness.

Recent recordings, such as the live project Sérgio vezes três, show him engaging closely with the audience, blending acoustic delicacy, rhythmic drive and a constant willingness to tune into the moment and reflect on it from the stage.

There is a generosity in his stage presence, a selfless dedication, which transforms the concert into a long and necessary conversation between him and his listeners.

In times of fast-paced noise and short memories, Sérgio Godinho and the musicians accompanying him remind us that a song can be a place of love (Às Vezes O Amor is still very much alive), of encounter, reflection and dance all at once. It is urgent to see him on stage because every concert is a living lesson in how Portuguese music engages with the world without losing its accent, opening windows onto other sonic landscapes without closing the door to home.

In 2026, he arrives with the energy of someone preparing a new album of unreleased songs where that mature sonic identity—between chronicle and dream, between wound and celebration—is renewed once more, fuelled by decades on the road.

LURA

(CV)

24th October of 2024. Angélique Kidjo, the greatest diva of African music, celebrates 40 years in the business at the Gulbenkian Auditorium. Lura is the special guest at this show, where she commands the stage with her charismatic presence in ‘Carnaval de São Vicente’. In a rousing finale, singing Miriam Makeba’s iconic ‘Pata Pata’ in duet, she spots Anabela in the audience and brings her up on stage to bring this celebration of African music to a triumphant close.

Lura is fire. She is volcanic blood. A magnetic presence on stage. She dances with joyful fury, shares neighbourhood stories, and draws the audience into the Creole circle. She is Lisbon, Paris and São Vicente. She is morna, fado, coladeira, funaná, the rebellious drumming of the diaspora, Afropop, bossa nova, a plural identity so well reflected in the album Multicolor (2023). An album that includes a duet with Kidjo (Cetam), where Cape Verdean traditions emerge with new textures, painted in new shades, as if each track were a different island in the same emotional archipelago. Amidst messages of self-esteem such as Preta (an echo of Black Lives Matter).

A teenage backing singer in the 1990s, Lura shot to stardom with In Love (2002) and burst onto the scene with Di Korpu Ku Alma (2005), on which Na Ri Na became a global anthem of Creole joy. Seven albums on, Lura represents one of the most luminous ways of singing of the Cape Verdean diaspora, with respect for her roots and the courage to reinvent them. At a time when identities intersect and are questioned, her music shows that one can belong to many places without losing one’s centre.

When she pays homage to Cesária, the ‘sodade’ is real; it has weight, texture, and the distinct scent of an absence that cannot be resolved.

At the MED Festival, she marks a career spanning 30 years of activity, during which she has travelled the world many times over with a wealth of experience.

Dikanda

(PL)

Central Europe knows all too well the weight of borders. Szczecin, a Polish city on the banks of the Oder, was for centuries a place of passage, conquest and the reconstruction of identity: German, Polish, and everything that lay between the two. It is on this historically unstable ground that Dikanda was formed in 1997.

The name says it all: dikanda is, in a Central African language, the word for a family that has come together on the road. Vocalist and accordionist Anna Witczak-Czerniawska, alongside guitarist Piotr Rejdak, began by playing on the streets of Europe, improvising songs to fund their travels, until the jam sessions evolved into a permanent band. This is precisely the spirit of the group, which lives and works as a small, loving community, where each musician adds their own emotional geography to the group’s sonic map.

Their first album, Muzyka czterech stron wschodu (‘Music of the Four Corners of the East’), released in 1999, was a statement of intent: to catalogue the soundscape of the East with the seriousness of an ethnomusicologist and the passion of someone who simply cannot stop dancing.

Dikanda’s frame of reference is, therefore, the East in a mythical and anthropological sense. A place that extends far beyond geographical boundaries: the Balkans, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Africa, the Gypsy world of the Carpathians.

Dikanda does not sing in Polish, nor in Macedonian, nor in Romanian, nor in Arabic. Or rather, it sings in all of these and in something else that does not exist in any dictionary. One of the most distinctive traits is the creation of made-up words in the song lyrics, creating a language of their own called dikandisz, the language of emotion and the heart. It is neither a trick nor a gimmick: it is the honest admission that there are feelings no existing language can contain, and that the only possible answer is to create a new one. At a time when identities are closing in on themselves and difference is frightening, they propose the opposite: a language that nobody speaks but everyone understands.

The result is music that communicates beyond linguistic boundaries: those who do not understand the lyrics grasp the gesture, the vibration, the urgency, with songs that oscillate between frenetic dances and hypnotic ballads, passing through irregular metres typical of the Balkans and Eastern scales full of tension and brilliance.

Sangue Suor

(PT)

Some music is born of a place. And some music is born of a need.

Portugal has a long-standing relationship with rhythm. From the percussion of the batuques that crossed the Atlantic to the taut skins of festival drums and bass drums. It is a country that holds within its body what it cannot express in words. At a time when almost everything fits onto a screen, three musicians decided to insist on the opposite: on weight, on matter, on the physical encounter with the instrument.

It all began with a number: 106. The years of existence of the Theatro Circo de Braga, celebrated in April 2021 with the commissioning of a commemorative track. Rui Rodrigues, a veteran of projects such as At Freddy’s House, OSSO and Ângela Polícia, proposed something unusual: a percussive moment shared with other drummers. He invited Ricardo Martins, whose extensive career includes Pop Dell'Arte, Jibóia and Filho da Mãe, and Susie Filipe, of the Moonshiners and SIRICAIA. The resulting track was called Sangue & Suor.

The three come from different backgrounds: rock, experimental music, theatre, the street. But they recognised themselves in the same hunger for sound. This was followed by artistic residencies in Leiria, far from the pressure of the stage, in search of a language they had not yet explored together. In 2023, they released O Salto, produced in partnership between Theatro Circo and Omnichord Records, featuring six tracks and guests who map out a vibrant and diverse Portuguese scene: Surma, Selma Uamusse, LARIE and Cabrita. Names that open up the trio’s rhythmic universe to melodies, synthesizers and electronic textures, in a dialogue between organic percussion and processed layers.

Sangue Suor’s sonic identity is a rare beast. Three drum kits arranged like a small army, polyrhythms that could just as easily evoke dance as trance, a nightclub as a shamanic ritual.

The resulting sound is restless and crosses boundaries between the experimental and the danceable, between fury and meditation, between chamber jazz and electronica, between Portugal itself and the diaspora.

Sangue Suor arrive at Med with a well-established repertoire and a rapport on stage that only time can create. That which remains after giving everything.

Tangomotán

(FR)

From the very beginning, MED has been a festival that has always embraced music from beyond the vast Mediterranean basin. The fourth edition in 2007 closed with a performance by the Argentine group Bajofondo Tango Club, led by guru Gustavo Santaolalla.

Nineteen years on, MED welcomes a new electro-tango collective that evokes these and other fond memories, such as those of the Gotan Project.

Tangomotán is a Parisian quartet, formed in 2016, which reinvents tango as the music of today: a visceral fusion of Argentine tradition, classical European training and danceable electronic beats. It is augmented tango (and not electrotango), as they like to point out.

Comprising accomplished musicians with classical training from the conservatoires of Paris (CRR, CNSM) and Gennevilliers, such as Blanche Stromboni (double bass), Marion Chiron (bandoneon), Robin Apparailly (violin) and Leandro Lacapère (piano), this ensemble transforms the stage into a laboratory of living, accessible and electrifying tango.

Tangomotán’s sound blends traditional tango, featuring bandoneon, violin, piano and double bass, with electronic elements (such as loops and distortion). Building on traditional melodies, they amplify rhythms and improvisations, echoing the pioneers of electronic tango, yet with a working-class and humanistic touch, always centred on dance and the genre’s vibrant energy. The album Motán (2024) and the more recent L’Étreinte (2026) are the most complete demonstration of this alchemy: music that knows where it comes from and isn’t afraid of not knowing where it’s going.

Live, they dress the bleu de travail for a raw and authentic look, giving themselves over to visceral performances of improvisation and acoustic-electronic fusion. From intimate venues to major festivals, they mesmerise with infectious energy, transforming every concert into a modern, universal milonga.

For Tangomotán, tango is not a genre of the past, closed in on itself; it is a living language, capable of absorbing the present without losing its character.

Lalalar

(TR)

Istanbul is a city that never sleeps. Over the centuries, it has been the capital of empires, a crossroads between East and West, a living repository of civilisations layered upon one another like geological stratification. But today’s Istanbul is also something else: a metropolis of twenty million people living under mounting political pressure, where young people breathe art as if it were a matter of survival. It is from this melting pot that Lalalar emerges. Not as an export product, but as an urgent cry from within.

The name is in itself a declaration of intent: lala was, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, the tutor of princes. The wisest man at court. But in modern Turkish, the word has also taken on the opposite meaning: the clown, the fool, the one who takes nothing seriously. Lalalar lives precisely in this tension between the sage and the jester, between the archive and subversion. Formed in 2019 by Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Barlas Tan Özemek and Alican İpek, three veteran musicians from the Istanbul scene, the band arrived late to the party, but arrived with a bang: with the maturity of those who already know what they mean and the impatience of those who have no time to waste.

In 2022, their debut album Bi Cinnete Bakar (‘On the Brink of Madness’) propels them onto the European radar with a force no one expected. The Swiss label Les Disques Bongo Joe, the same one that hosts such diverse voices as Meridian Brothers or Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, immediately recognises what it has on its hands: something that doesn’t fit on any shelf. In 2023, En Kötü İyi Olur (‘In the Worst Case, It’ll Turn Out Fine’) fulfils the promise and expands the vocabulary: lyrics about politics, rebellion, narcissistic personalities, love triangles and the eternal struggle against the hypocrisy of power.

Lalalar don’t practise fusion in the touristy sense of the word. What they do is stranger and more honest: they delve into Anatolia’s legacy—the saz, ancient polyrhythms, the legacy of 1970s Turkish psychedelia. They run it through the high-voltage current of punk, industrial electronica, funk and 1980s new wave. The result is bewildering and irresistible: cinematic, hypnotic, fat basslines; dirty, electric beats; guitars that coil like snakes, sounding at times like surf music, at others like Anatolian rock; samples that give a nod to both old Turkish cinema and video game culture.

The vocals are at times declamatory, almost rap-like, at others hypnotic and repetitive, creating slogans and images that stick in the memory. The songs are constructed like collages, full of snippets, effects and abrupt cuts, yet there is always a rhythmic thread that keeps the body moving. It is music that respects the song but thinks like a DJ: always on the lookout for the next surge of energy.

LALA TAMAR

(MA)

The Mediterranean is a sea of layers. Over the millennia, civilisations, languages, religions and deportations have been deposited within it. Among all the stories of encounter and loss that its shores hold, few are as harrowing as that of the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. They took medieval Castilian with them, blended it with Moroccan Arabic and Hebrew, and created a language that for centuries survived only in the mouths of women, in songs sung in homes and courtyards. That language is called Haquetia and was almost dead when Lala Tamar discovered it.

Her full name is Tamar Bloch. She was born in Galilee, Israel, to a Moroccan mother and a Brazilian father, which means she grew up with Maghrebi Arabic, Hebrew and Portuguese circulating in the same household, without any of these languages seeming more legitimate than the others. Lala is a Moroccan honorific meaning ‘lady’ or ‘girl’, and in this choice of stage name lies a declaration of loyalty to her maternal roots.

The music that saved her came late, in her twenties, when she stumbled upon the ethnographic recordings of Moroccan Jewish women singing in Haquetia, kept in the National Archives in Jerusalem. There she realised that her voice did not come solely from the present: she was the heir to a chorus of grandmothers, aunts and neighbours, whose melodies were waiting to be reincarnated.

What she did next was worthy of an archaeologist: she patiently transcribed the recordings, studied classical Moroccan musical tradition for years, and learnt to play percussion and the guimbri. This stringed instrument of Gnawa origin, made from camel skin, and she became the first artist to record a contemporary album in Haquetia. Her self-titled debut album, released in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, is a manifesto of hybridisation between the deep-rooted traditions of North African women, Gnawa, Andalusian and Sephardic music, dancefloor pop production and contemporary electronic beats.

For Lala Tamar, her music is not just entertainment: it is an act of cultural preservation and reinvention, reminding us that memory can also sweat, twirl and laugh. And because, when she takes to the stage, the past ceases to be the past. It becomes beat, breath, a future in motion.

Tulipa Ruiz

(BR)

Tulipa Ruiz is one of those artists who bursts onto the scene like a splash of colour in a grey room: a singer, songwriter and illustrator, she has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Brazilian music, bringing to the stage an urban, emotional and fantastical Brazil, full of creatures, twisted loves and resilient joys. At the crossroads between MPB, pop and a certain tropical psychedelia, her universe is at once intimate and expansive, domestic and cosmic.

Born in São Paulo and raised in Minas Gerais, Tulipa grew up surrounded by music: her father, Luiz Chagas, a legendary guitarist with Vanguarda Paulista, and a home where records, drawings and words circulated freely. Music, at home, was not a choice: it was the air she breathed. Before establishing herself as a singer, she worked in newsrooms, did design and illustration, and cultivated her eye and ear. It was only later, as an adult, that she began to perform her songs on small stages, as if slowly testing a secret. This late blossoming lends her work a curious maturity: it feels like a debut and a synthesis at the same time.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Efêmera’ (2010), a debut album that immediately put her on the map of new Brazilian music, followed by ‘Tudo Tanto’, ‘Dancê’ and other works that earned her awards, collaborations and a fanbase spread across the globe. Throughout this journey, she has shared studios and stages with names such as Metá Metá, Criolo, Céu and Marcelo Camelo, among many others, weaving a network of connections and exchanges that also serves as a map of the contemporary scene. His influences range from the giants of MPB (Gal, Caetano, Milton) to international pop, alternative rock and childhood songs, filtered through a humour and sensibility all his own.

Tulipa coined the term ‘forest pop’ for herself, inspired by a childhood spent amidst the countryside, waterfalls and guitar circles. Half São Paulo, half Minas Gerais, this tension between the urban and the organic runs through all her work. Her voice is at the heart of it all: a striking timbre, with pronounced vibrato, capable of shifting from whispers to shouts, from tenderness to defiance, without losing her identity. Her influences are as unconventional as she is: Gal Costa and Joni Mitchell, Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono, Manoel de Barros and Robert Crumb.

In 2022, Habilidades Extraordinárias revealed a transformed artist: recorded on analogue magnetic tape, the album flirts with rock, soul and funk, featuring experimental and combative lyrics, in close dialogue with São Paulo’s independent scene. The duet O Recado da Flor with João Donato unexpectedly became one of the master’s final recordings. A farewell that is also a passing of the torch.

Tulipa Ruiz embodies one of the most fertile strands of contemporary Brazilian music: the ability to speak of intimate and collective themes with lightness, depth and charm. At MED, so-called ‘forest pop’ takes shape: the songs expand, breathe, take on a new rhythm, and her voice becomes even more magnetic. Because, for her, the stage is a sacred place, one of power and experimentation.