Playlist: LGW24 curated by Arooj Aftab

Sunday Oct 27th 2024

Each year, Le Guess Who? invites trailblazing creatives to curate their own dedicated programs, highlighting their inspirations, emerging acts and fellow like-minded artists, with an emphasis on discovery and exploration.

Three years after her last Le Guess Who? performance, Brooklyn-based singer, composer, and producer Arooj Aftab is back as a performer and curator. She now introduces her curated program with a personally compiled playlist with favorite tracks of the artists she invites to Utrecht.

Curated by Arooj Aftab Festival news

Shortly after coming to Utrecht in 2021, Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani woman to win a GRAMMY, thanks to her record ‘Vulture Prince’. The playlist she compiled for Le Guess Who? includes music from her newest record, 'Night Reign'.

Also on the playlist are surrealist blues poet aja monet, whose poems are centered around themes of Black resistance, love and the inexhaustible quest for joy; Egyptian singer, composer, and music producer Dina El Wedidi; Bedouin Burger, made up of Syrian vocalist, composer and musician Lynn Adib and Lebanese underground pioneer, music producer and multi-instrumentalist Zeid Hamdan; and nationally adored Mauritanian musical star Noura Mint Seymali.

Furthermore, you can explore Jaffar Hussain Randhawa, Pakistan's most senior clarinetist; Zsela, who, with her raw, vulnerable and forceful music, established herself as a singer-songwriter of cavernous depth; acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and neo-soul movement igniter Meshell Ndegeocello; American composer, vocalist and gifted storyteller Sheherazaad; and Brooklyn-based trombonist, composer, and quartet leader Kalia Vandever.

Note: Arooj Aftab's curation also features DJ, audio producer, and presenter Nooriyah, who erases boundaries and rules in dance music, and DJ Lynnée Denise, whose work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. They are both not included in the playlist as their music is not available on Spotify or Apple Music.

Tune in below. The playlist is also available via Apple Music.