Ëda Diaz

(CO/FR)

Colombia is a country with a wealth of music too vast to count. Vallenato on the Caribbean plains, bambuco in the Andean mountains, currulao on the black Pacific coast, the bolero that arrived from Cuba and never left, and the tango that Medellín has embraced with a devotion that even the Argentinians envy. All this coexists in a land of dizzying diversity that the Western world has, for far too long, reduced to a single image: the cumbia. Eléonore Diaz-Arbelaez grew up knowing there was so much more. She also grew up knowing that this ‘so much more’ coexisted within her alongside Paris, alongside Brittany, alongside European conservatoires and concert halls. And that the only honest way to make music was not to choose, but to be everything at once.

Her stage name, Ëda, is both an abbreviation of her first name and a declaration of uniqueness: that diaeresis over the e that exists in neither French nor Spanish, that belongs to no canonical alphabet, that is purely hers. She was born in Paris, the daughter of a Breton mother and a Colombian father from Medellín. From a very young age, her life has been a constant journey between two continents, two languages, two ways of hearing the world.

Throughout her artistic career, Ëda has explored choirs, electronic experimentation and hybrid bands, eventually arriving at her own unique universe, which encompasses bambuco, bullerengue, cumbia, vallenato and other Latin American rhythms, reimagined with synthesisers, drum machines machines and an almost cinematic sensitivity. In her music, one hears both the echo of the mountain peasants’ voices and the shadow of Bristol’s smoky trip-hop, French alternative pop, and a certain kind of electronic music that relishes detail and space. Each song is an exercise in reconciliation: between tradition and futurism.

Ëda Diaz’s sound is a body in constant flux: the double bass, laden with effects, traces bass lines that resemble underground rivers; above, the voice oscillates between a confessional whisper and ritual chant, in Spanish, French or somewhere in between where the languages meet.

In 2024 she released the album Suave Bruta, a perfect title for the music it contains: soft and raw at the same time, just as Ëda herself described her identity: ‘two rich and complementary aspects that I have always seen as opposites”. The double bass is the insistent pulse upon which everything else unfolds: raw salsa, electrified currulao, Colombian dembow, old-school bambuco layered with synths, ghostly boleros. The influences are stated without hierarchy: Björk and James Blake alongside Miles Davis and Juana Molina, García Márquez and Pablo Neruda in lyrics that speak of love, death and the torments of the modern world. Samples of the noise from a hairdressing salon, of tropical birds, of classic Latin American melodies cut up and pasted together. A production that evokes both the city and the savannah simultaneously, elegant and raw, introspective and undeniably danceable.

Ëda Diaz brings to Med a vibrant portrait of a mixed-heritage generation, which no longer sees itself reflected in rigid boundaries and invents other ways of being.

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.

Tó Trips & Fake Latinos

(pt)

Portugal has a complicated relationship with its own Latin identity. It is Latin in language, history and temperament, yet has always felt somewhat on the fringes of the other Latin nations, more restrained, more nostalgic, more averse to the exuberance that Brazil, Colombia or Cuba display without a second thought. It is in this uncomfortable space, between what we are and what we deny being, that Tó Trips has always lived: a guitarist from Greater Lisbon who never settled for Lisbon, who always had one foot in and one foot out, and who chose to name his new band after a contradiction: Fake Latinos.

With this new quartet, he opens a new chapter where music is ‘dissidence’ against the obvious, a journey between what we were and what we are yet to be. Joining him on this latest journey are Alexandre Frazão on drums, António Quintino on double bass and Helena Espvall on cello. A band that evokes the sonic migrations of the Portuguese-speaking world, from Brazil to Cape Verde, via Spain and Latin America, celebrating cultural fusion as a living force.

Tó Trips has nearly four decades of experience on the guitar. A rare case in Portuguese music of benign resilience and constant inventiveness. He began with Amen Sacristi, then moved on to Lulu Blind and Dead Combo, the band he founded in 2003 with double bassist Pedro Gonçalves and which, for sixteen years, created instrumental compositions marked by rock, the blues and Portuguese tradition, with influences extending to Africa and Latin America.

In 2025, whilst on the road on yet another imaginary musical journey dubbed Club Makumba, he released Dissidente as a quartet with the Fake Latinos. The name is a nod both to Portugal’s peripheral Latin heritage and to the condition of being an outsider within the tradition itself. The album has sixteen tracks and a map stretching from Havana to Alfama, from the East Village to the Tagus river, from Chet Baker to Jack Kerouac, whose voice appears on a loop in one of the songs, talking about roads and escapes whilst the music unfolds slowly in the background. It is an album of places and ghosts.

Med is a place Tó Trips knows well. Having performed there solo, with Dead Combo on two occasions, and with Club Makumba in 2025, he now returns with yet another chapter in this long refusal to stay still.

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.

Dima Libre – Labess Trio

(DZ/CA)

In 2003, Algeria was a country recovering from its most recent wounds. The civil war of the 1990s, which claimed between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand lives, had left deep scars on society. Many left. Some took with them only a guitar and the certainty that there was something to be said that their country of origin was not yet ready to hear. Nedjim Bouizzoul was eighteen when he emigrated to Quebec with his mother and sisters. He arrived in Montreal in the summer of 2003 with no money, no network, no plan. Just a rough voice and an instrument in his hands.

The beginning was humble to the point of poetry: Nedjim started playing in the Montreal metro to earn money for food. The city, however, has ears, and other professional musicians on the local scene soon took notice of him. Collaborations multiplied. He soon realised that exile is not experienced in the singular: ‘exile, when lived intimately, is in the plural.’ From this understanding, the band was born, and with it, the name. Labess means, in Algerian Arabic, ‘all is well’. It is what you say when someone asks how you are, regardless of how you really are. In these two small words lies a whole philosophy of joyful resistance.

Labess’s music is what happens when Algerian chaâbi —the music of the working-class neighbourhoods, the music of Nedjim’s ‘older brothers’ in Hussein-Dey —meets Gypsy rumba, flamenco, the gnawa sounds of the Maghreb, the Afro-Latin rhythms of Colombia and the cosmopolitanism of Montreal. Nedjim sings in Algerian Arabic, Spanish and French, sometimes within the same song, sometimes without warning which language comes next, because exile is also this: the impossibility of inhabiting a single language. His voice is deep and committed, possessing that quality of someone who has never sung to convince anyone, but simply to ensure that what needed to be said was not silenced. The krakeb, the metal castanets of the gnawatradition, intertwine with clarinet, trumpet, guitar, bass and percussion in an orchestra that is, in itself, a map of the world.

Before arriving in Québec, Nedjim lived for two years in Colombia, where the rhythms resonated with the memory of the first African slaves exiled to Latin America, where the Spanish and Arabic guitars share roots deeper than the atlases suggest. That Colombian immersion was kept in reserve, and emerged in 2021 with Yemma (“mother”), the fourth album, dedicated to the woman who sacrificed everything to give him wings.

Labess arrives at Med in the midst of celebrating 20 years on the road. The latest album Dima Libre (2024) fuels an even more collective show. The concert is conceived as a journey: from childhood in Algiers to exile in the Americas, to a present in which the band asserts itself as a pan-Mediterranean and transatlantic voice. On stage, it is living proof that, in a world of borders, music remains a place where ‘everything is alright’.

Sarab

(SY/FR)

By 2011, Syria had ceased to be merely a country and had become an open wound on the world map. The revolution, the civil war, the exodus of millions – all this unfolded whilst Climène Zarkan was living in Paris, the daughter of a Syrian father and a Franco-Lebanese mother, having been raised in Damascus until the age of twelve before returning to the French capital. She grew up between two languages, two cultures, two worlds that history sought to tear apart. When she decided to sing in Arabic in a city that does not speak Arabic, she was making a political choice as much as an artistic one: a refusal to let die what the language carries within her.

Sarāb means ‘mirage’ in Arabic, and there is a whole poetry to this choice of name: something that can be seen but not touched, that seems real yet is not, that appears in the desert as a promise and vanishes as we draw near.

In 2018, Climène Zarkan and guitarist Baptiste Ferrandis met in Paris. They began as a duo performing songs composed by Climène’s father, Bachar Zarkan, a renowned Syrian lute player. They soon realised that what they had on their hands was more than just a two-person project. They expanded to six musicians: Thibault Gomez on piano, Timothée Robert on bass, Paul Berne on drums and trombonist Robinson Khoury. All are central figures on the Parisian experimental jazz scene. Sarāb was formed.

The collective began to be described as jazz. They rejected that. Is it World music? They shrugged. The truth is that their music is a collision: post-punk and Arabic poetry, maqamāt and analogue synthesisers, Climène Zarkan’s voice at times whispering, at times howling through a megaphone, rhythms that teeter on the brink of breaking. The lyrics draw on the Syrian poet Maram al-Masri, the Libyan-Sudanese writer Muhammad al-Fayturi, and Zarkan’s own voice on exile and memory: ‘there are words in Arabic that I no longer recognise’ and singing them is the way to reclaim them.

The self-titled debut album, released in 2019, featured reinterpretations of traditional songs, many about love, but also the haunting Tiri, about Palestinian freedom. In 2021, Arwāh Hurra (‘Free Souls’) revealed a band already functioning as a genuine creative collective, with each musician bringing their own perspective to a shared vocabulary. In 2023, Qawalebese Tape, a filmed EP born of a deep immersion in the millennia-old traditions of Egypt and Syria, bordered on the sacred: music that seems to have arrived from another time, dusted off cassette players and yellowed postcards, infused with contemporary influences.

Earlier this year, Sarāb released the most ambitious and devastating album of her short career: Mīt Warde / Cent Roses (‘One Hundred Roses’), a tribute to all the martyrs and the disappeared of the Syrian revolution and to their families. Recorded in a Parisian studio renowned for seminal rock albums, the record is, in her own words, ‘a visceral sonic odyssey where maqamāt, political commitment and the power of rock converge’. Ten tracks including ‘CEASE FIRE NOW’ and ‘Electric Yasmin’. Titles that need no translation. Climène Zarkan does not sing about Syria: she sings Syria, with all its destroyed beauty and its stubbornly living memory.

Med therefore welcomes a band in a state of grace and fury at the same time.

RITA VIAN

(PT)

MAZGANI

(PT/IR)