Stretch Your Ears: Bobi Cespedes, Sevara Nazarkhan

In the 22 years since the release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, its pioneering combination of multi-ethnic musical modes and weird, disassociated funk has become one of the most dominant forms of music in the world. Indeed, you could say it's become world music. By mixing and matching different cultures and genres, and the sacred and the profane, Eno and Byrne, you could argue, replaced true authenticity with its faux double, creating a kind of audio leopardprint wallpaper, but that would underestimate how inauthentic the authentic often sounds.

Take Rezos by Bobi Cespedes (Six Degrees), for instance. The veteran Cuban singer, who is also a high priestess in the African-derived Yoruba-Lucumi religion, migrated to the United States in 1959 and now resides in the Bay Area, where she sometimes performs with the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Her excellent album (her debut as a solo artist) was recorded in Oakland with a hip-hop rhythm section and mixed in Monmouth, South Wales, with an ear to the dance market. Produced by Greg Landau, who has worked with the Peruvian diva Susana Baca, Rezos opens with a slinky drum-and-keyboard break that could have come from Massive Attack's Blue Lines, before Cespedes enters with a Yoruba chant, followed by a James Brown-ish rhythm guitar figure and an Afro-Cuban vocal chorus. Then the reggae comes in. Inauthentic? Maybe, but it's very, very good.

Rezos also contains what must surely be the sexiest groove so far this year: "California" (a celebration of Bobi's adopted home), on which Landau's tres guitar jangles against a two-step percussion beat and repeated chorus, while Cespedes wails and moans sensuously. Landau's sleeve notes invoke Roland Barthes's famous comments about "the grain in the voice", and they fit like a glove. If you like Susana Baca, Cesaria Evora or even Billie Holiday, you should definitely get on with Bobi Cespedes.

Sevara Nazarkhan is a 25-year-old singer and composer from Uzbekistan. Like Cespedes's Rezos, her album Yol Bolsin (Real World) spans different registers and epochs in a way that sounds perfectly natural. Recorded in Tashkent and Paris, and mixed at Real World's studios in Wiltshire, Yol Bolsin is produced by Hector Zazou, who brings a subtle, contemporary Euro-pop feel (yet more disassociated funk) to a few tunes among the repertoire of more traditional Central Asian Silk Route and Sufi songs. Zazou's touch may be too tasteful or New Agey for some, and it's true that there's not yet much grain in Nazarkhan's voice, but it's still a lovely instrument. She plucks a mean doutar (a kind of lute), too.