With several stages running across just a few days, WOMEX is not really a programme you can experience from beginning to end. Somewhere between the Official Selection, Special Focus and Club Summit, everyone eventually has to choose their own route through it.
This is ours. From Malagasy trance rhythms and Colombian percussion to Persian kamancheh, Paiwan songs and Vietnamese psychedelia, these are some of the artists that made us stop, listen again and want to hear more.
Claudio Rabe (Madagascar / La Réunion)
Former dancer Claudio Rabe builds music that seems designed for movement. Malagasy tsapiky and salegy rhythms meet rock, electronics and Afro-psychedelia in a sound that can be both raw and hypnotic. Following appearances at Printemps de Bourges, Sakifo and ACCES, he arrives at WOMEX with new album RAVENR and a live show that places trance as much at its centre as song.
Enkelé (Colombia)
Voices and percussion sit at the heart of Enkelé, an all-female Colombian collective carrying the oral traditions of the Caribbean coast into the present. In 2023, they became the first all-women group to win the Congo de Oro at Barranquilla Carnival. Their work stretches beyond performance too, exploring music as a space for memory, healing and peace-building for women affected by conflict.
Espirales (Cuba)
Five graduates of Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte formed Espirales in 2023, bringing together backgrounds in different musical fields. The result sits somewhere between Cuban traditions, jazz and contemporary chamber music. Rather than simply reproducing familiar Cuban sounds, the ensemble pulls them apart and reconnects them, often through works by a younger generation of Cuban composers.
Fabiola Méndez (Puerto Rico / USA)
At the centre of Fabiola Méndez’s music is the Puerto Rican cuatro, a ten-string instrument she has played since childhood. Folk, Afro-Caribbean rhythms and jazz move around it as she explores culture, ancestry and identity through song. In 2018, she became Berklee College of Music’s first graduate to complete her studies with the cuatro as her principal instrument.
Mehrnam Rastegari (Iran / USA)
Mehrnam Rastegari takes the kamancheh somewhere unexpected. Persian microtonal traditions meet psychedelic rock and jazz fusion, shaped by a musician who is also a singer and film-score composer. After moving from Iran to New York in 2022, she first formed a traditional Iranian ensemble before building the electric band heard on her 2025 debut Dislocated Pulse.
Faris Ishaq (Palestine / UK)
Bethlehem-born Faris Ishaq places the nay at the centre of an unusually physical solo performance. Palestinian Tashbib playing meets Arabic maqam, jazz improvisation and Dabke rhythms, while a frame drum attached to his leg allows him to build layered sound without losing the intimacy of a single performer. His latest album, JASAD, takes its name from the Arabic word for “body.”
Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté (Mali)
As the voice of Trio Da Kali, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté has already carried Mandingo music onto international stages, including an acclaimed collaboration with Kronos Quartet. Her recent work is also a deeply personal continuation of family history. After her father, celebrated Malian singer Kassé Mady Diabaté, died in 2018, Hawa returned to the unfinished album he left behind and completed it as Toumaro.
Ivo Dimchev (Bulgaria)
Music has never existed separately from theatre, choreography, performance or visual art in Ivo Dimchev’s world. His songs move between cabaret, pop, electronics, dark humour and territories that resist easy description. That fluidity makes his WOMEX appearance particularly fitting. Alongside his Official Selection showcase, audiences can encounter him through Kristina Nikolova’s documentary In Hell With Ivo in the Film Library.
Jabulile Majola (South Africa)
South African singer-songwriter Jabulani Majola chose the name Jabulile Majola in tribute to the mother he never had the chance to know. His path moved from church music and teenage rap towards intimate Afro-folk songwriting shaped by questions of faith, memory and belonging. His debut album Ipasi, released in September, continues that interest in the ways personal history shapes who we become.
Kaito Winse (Burkina Faso / Belgium)
Kaito Winse comes from a griot family in Burkina Faso’s Sourou region and now works from Brussels, connecting oral history with contemporary performance and experimentation. Tama drum, Fulani flutes, mouth bow and voice sit beside collaborations ranging from noise-punk outfit Avalanche Kaito to electronic projects. The thread running through them is his interest in what ancestral knowledge can still say to the present.
Kasiva Mutua (Kenya)
One of East Africa’s leading percussionists, Kasiva Mutua had to push against strong social expectations to build a career as a female drummer in Kenya. That experience eventually led her to create MotraMusic, a space supporting women through music. Now also a guitarist, singer-songwriter and bandleader, she brings traditional rhythms into songs shaped by storytelling and contemporary East African sounds.
Mai Dhai (Pakistan)
Mai Dhai has spent a lifetime carrying the Marwari songs she inherited from her mother: Sufi devotion, desert stories, wedding music and folklore from the Manganiyar tradition. Now in her 80s, she is receiving growing international recognition after decades of singing. A 2015 appearance on Coke Studio introduced her voice to a wider audience; in 2024, Pakistan awarded her the Pride of Performance.
Nana Benz du Togo (Togo)
Three singer-priestesses, a vintage Korg and a rhythm section partly built from recycled objects: Nana Benz du Togo have created one of the programme’s most immediately intriguing propositions. Vodun traditions collide with electro-soul, homemade percussion and bass produced through PVC pipes, while their songs speak about patriarchy, women’s empowerment and our relationship with the natural world.
Saigon Soul Revival (Vietnam)
Saigon Soul Revival look back to pre-1975 Nhạc Vàng, Vietnam’s golden-era popular music, without treating it as museum material. Classic songs and new compositions are rebuilt through soul grooves, psychedelic guitars and keyboards alongside traditional instruments including đàn tranh and đàn bầu. Their third album, Chốn Ta Về (The Place We Return To), arrived just last month.
Sauljaljui (Taiwan)
For Paiwan singer and cultural advocate Sauljaljui, music is closely tied to the idea of finding a way home. Her powerful voice and rhythmic yueqin playing connect Paiwan melodies and Hengchun folk traditions with sounds absorbed from elsewhere. Her album VAIVAIK won Best Indigenous Language Album and Best Arrangement at Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards, bringing wider attention to a project still deeply rooted in place and language.
Tiganá Santana (Brazil / France)
Tiganá Santana moves quietly, but there is enormous depth beneath his music. The Brazilian singer, guitarist, poet, philosopher and scholar is recognised for his work in Bantu studies and was the first Brazilian composer to write and sing in African languages including Kikongo and Kimbundu. His sparse, atmospheric songs make African language, spirituality and memory part of a distinctly contemporary Brazilian sound.
Taiga (China)
Taiga call their sound “nomadelic” — somewhere between nomadic tradition and psychedelia. The duo, with roots in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, place morin khuur, throat singing and traditional instruments against dub bass, broken beats, ambient textures and trance electronics. Their 2025 album Nomadelic pushes that meeting of ancient and electronic sound even further. At WOMEX, they appear as part of the Club Summit programme.
Seventeen artists barely scratch the surface of WOMEX 26, and that is part of the appeal. This is not a definitive list, but a route into a programme where traditions are constantly moving, being questioned, carried forward and reshaped.
We’ve gathered the artists above into our special DINYA WOMEX 26 playlist – a place to start listening before the stages open in Gran Canaria.
text: sofia Hussein for Dinya
