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Why do we cringe when we hear the label “world music”? Or more precisely, why has that label fallen out of fashion over the last few decades? It’s probably a combination of economic, artistic, and cultural sensitivities that’s taken an otherwise innocuous coupling of words - world and music - out of the lexicon of music critics and the catalogues of record shops. On the economic side: the distributors, purveyors, and producers of this genre have a recorded history of gatekeeping the economic gains that these world artists were raking in. The most fortunate (read: least exploited) of these artists of the global South have existed as celebrated satellites of the “real” music industry, artistic voyageurs from cultures whose intricacies the West does not comprehend. These artists land for a few hours or days in cities all over Europe and North America, take the stage in garbs they only wear on stage, and sing in a language that often only they understand. 

Don’t get me wrong, these concerts are a lot of fun all around, but against the backdrop of economic disparities between the West and, say, Africa, these artistic exchanges have a lot to contend with. It is also against this historical backdrop that notable exceptions stand out in pleasant relief. There are artists that are heading in the opposite direction: from the West to the world. Not so much artists of world music but artists making worldly music. Piers Faccini’s career has traced an interesting and wholly unique arc of what worldly music emerging out of the Ameri-European folk tradition can look like.

Ballake Sissoko and Piers Faccini - Photo by Sandra Mehl

Ballake Sissoko and Piers Faccini - Photo by Sandra Mehl

Ballake Sissoko and Piers Faccini - Photo by Sandra Mehl

Ballake Sissoko and Piers Faccini. Photos by Sandra Mehl.

Born in London to Italian/English parents, Faccini was musically reared on the city’s sprawling offerings of the British folk tradition. On paper, his career seemed destined to stay within this tradition, making music inspired by the cultural material that he was native to. Instead, Faccini embarked on a musicality that feels most comfortable within the margins of cultural intersections. Interestingly, his cultivation of an international ethos led him to leave London—one of the most international cities in the world. His travels in Europe and Africa yielded a self-discovery of the folk traditions that lie beyond what has been curated by the record labels of the West. Along this journey of discovery, Piers has been collaborating with African talents across the continent with notable highlights including the likes of BKO Quintet (Bamako Today), Abdelkebir Merchane (“All Aboard” from Shapes of the Fall), Ballaké Sissoko (Djourou). His creative relationship with Sissoko - the Malian master of the kora and globally celebrated musical mind - started over 20 years and is now reaching its zenith with the release of their first full-length collaboration, Our Calling. 

On Our Calling, Faccini and Sissoko establish a transcultural musical dialogue that resonates deeper than the mere gimmick of cultural exchange. It is a dialogue that spans and contrasts folk traditions, yet congealing into melodic gestures that feel wholly incorporated. At its surface, the album is fairly unambitious, in fact quite familiar to anybody who has been keeping up with the proliferation of Malian Mande music through the vectors of Sissoko, Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Toure and such. But its elements of surprise and delight — and there are many — lie in not being able to quite tell where Mali ends and Italian, British, and American folk idioms begin. Here, Faccini is a thorough mixologist, not merely garnishing his acoustic guitar with impressions of kora microtonality. Our Calling is the result of Faccini’s journey to the other, towards the accumulation of a foreign musical currency that has as many denominations as the one he is coming from. Sissoko is likewise a master collaborator, whose legacy of cross-pollinations has travelled as far as the Persian Trio Chemirani (Invite, 2011), South Africa’s Derek Gripper, and the French cellist Vincent Ségal—to name a few.

The album breaks out at a sauntering pace, and throughout keeps the steady jog of Faccini’s self-styled crooning vocals alongside Sissoko’s accelerating flourishes on the kora. Undulating instrumentals are in a tug of war with deeply effusive lyrics that paint images of migration, intersections, and arrivals. On songs like “I Wanted to Belong”, a steady rhythmic drive is established on kora, with Faccini firmly and confidently in the passenger seat. Elsewhere, in songs like “If Nothing is Real” the two collaborators glide gently past each other in opposite directions, two bright vessels flying the same sail. Then in the middle of the album, we find ourselves in the backseat of a slow moving carriage with Faccini wobbling along a country road and singing “Ninna Nanna”, a traditional Italian folk song out of left field. Here you’ll find one of those delightful surprises as the song makes an abrupt sprint halfway through, but now it’s the kora struggling to keep up with the rapid flourish of Faccini’s Italian staccato lyrics (the opposite of this tempo change can be heard on “Three Times Betrayed” from 2011’s My Wilderness). 

Perhaps as a gentle nod to the notes that are still ringing from his 2021 album Shapes of the Fall, songs like “Go Where Your Eyes” bring us back to the deeply introspective and beautifully strained musicality that Faccini has been fermenting for the last two decades. Yet, the more muscular — more tympanic, more Mediterranean — instincts of Faccini’s music make brief cameos in songs like “Mournful Moon” and “North and South”.

Despite this album’s many high marks, its most interesting melodic lines can be traced outside of the recording booth. Mainly through the arc of Faccini’s recording ethos across his last few albums, most of which have been released on his own all-encompassing label, Beating Drum. This ethos can be summarized in two words that have been making appearances in his lyrics over the last decade: all aboard. His is the outlook of an artist that sees people not borders, cultures not countries. He sees open waters where others run out of creative land. While the aforementioned economic and cultural disparities cannot be bridged in a single album — and that is not the mission of this album ─ Our Calling is an artistic call to assembly; a gathering of ten beautifully crafted songs sailing towards a home that might not yet exist.