The Blindnote CD (3th CD on the Muziekpublique label), released two weeks ago in the UK, went immediately into Songlines’ ’Top of the World’ selection in the July issue of the UK world music magazine Songlines, and is praised in other magazines and newspapers.

Songlines ‘Top of the World Album’: Their music features a shifting range of intimate solos and delicate ensemble pieces featuring the West-African hoddu, the Armenian duduk, Arabian oud, as well as saz, calabash.

The Financial Times –4 star review-: The trademark sound is Vardan Hovanissan’s duduk, the melancholic Armenian flute, combining with Malick Pathé Sow’s African lute, the hoddu. Talike Gelle from Madagascar sings hauntingly.

Froots : ‘Sensitive musicians, who listen and only play when they can really contribute, hey created a fulfilling string of varied, distinctive and finely formed songs and instrumentals, that draw on all there repertoires and compositions’.

Stirrings: ‘Any mix of six different cultures is going to be hard pressed to find an album’s worth of common ground, but these people manage it with beauty and delicacy and grace’.

Taplas (Wales folk roots and world music magazine): ‘A new band, album and even a label to me, but my oh my, what a wonderful find…. Projects like this all too easily dissolve into a dreadful mish-mash of but this bunch astutely make the most of all those different sounds from around the world’.

And this week Blindnote received the Octave for the best world music band in Belgium. The Octaves are an initiative of the Walloon government, and reward top musicians in different styles (pop, electro, classic….) living in Belgium.

Forthcoming concerts in 2011:
3/7: Brave Festival, Wroclaw (Poland)
25/9: Festival van Vlaanderen Gent (Belgium)
24/11: Global Culture Festival, Maastricht (The Netherlands)