Born in 1961 in Mali, Issa Bagayogo is a skilled player of the kamele n'goni, a traditional lute-like instrument. Bagayogo deftly melds Malian instruments and song structures (long, repeated musical phrases over which singers and players improvise and choruses chant--the best-known performer of this music is Ali Farka Touré) with dub, trance, and electronic elements. He does so effectively that, as with his debut album Sya (1999), the result feels like a fully-integrated merger of the two traditions rather than the shotgun marriage that "world music" can sometimes seem like.

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