Although ensembles like the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra satisfy more refined tastes, the heart of Seoul’s of-the-moment music scene can be found in the racket emanating from venues like DGBD, a divvy joint built to resemble CBGB’s, the legendary Bowery hole that spawned the careers of Blondie and the Talking Heads. If you’re looking for a mosh pit, head to Hongdae, the university district; if the dance floor, seek out Gangnam. Whatever your predilection, the songs below demonstrate the profusion of styles that make Seoul a city to watch.

1. Galaxy Express: “Live Planet”

Grinding out tight-fisted, mohawked headbangers, Galaxy Express keeps alive the tough sound of bands like Rancid, the Ramones, and early Husker Du, with a nod to 70s acts (the New York Dolls, MC5) who infused a theatrical sensibility into their music. Earlier this year, Galaxy Express they played the famous SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, where their frenzied, feedback-laced style temporarily overloaded the sound system and nearly blew out the circuit breakers. Their latest album, Wild Days, was nominated for album of the year at the 2011 Korean Music Awards. In “Live Planet,” a 1977 Lower East Side dive-bar riff carries the day over Nirvana-style power drums.

2. Winterplay: “Cannot Forget”

A soothing mix of jazz and pop, Winterplay formed in 2008 and came to prominence when their single “Happy Bubble” provided background music for a popular commercial for washing machines. The single’s popularity through online sales was the entree Winterplay needed to tout their mix of rosy horns, gulping upright bass, delicate guitar work, and dusty vocals from twentysomething lead singer Hye Won. Winterplay, along with Youn Sun Nah (see below), deserves major props for looping jazz inflections into the South Korean mainstream.

3. Youn Sun Nah: “Calypso Blues”

In 1995, Youn Sun Nah abandoned a career in the fashion industry to start a second career as a chanteuse. Although she sang from a young age, she didn’t take an interest in jazz until a friend, deeming Nah too old to become a classical vocalist, suggested it as an alternative. Before long, Nah was performing in Paris, and recently, the French government awarded her the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for significant contributions “to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance.” In “Calypso Blues,” Nah actually beatboxes, using a vocal looping device to turn the pops, clicks, and hums created by her own mouth into the rhythm section to this seductive number.

4. Unjin: “Dernier Vol Pour Paris” (feat. Sandra Meynier)

Nearly 20 years after he began peddling his brand of house beats, Unjin has become one of Asia’s top producers and DJs. In “Last Flight For Paris”, Unjin evokes the late-night, moving walkway, white-tile modernism that the song title suggests. The track settles into a comfortable 130 beats-per-minute groove without getting too carried away with synths. An urgent, low frequency pulse does the trick nicely here, accompanied by some horn and loudspeaker samples. Put your tray tables up for this one.

5. Ahn Trio: “Dies Irie”

On first listen, Ahn Trio’s music can come across as a confection, a sort of melodramatic film score dressed up in the garb of art music. But upon closer inspection, traces of Debussy or Ravel begin to surface and re-inform what we initially mistook for Hollywood tearjerker pop. The trio is composed of Angella Ahn on violin, Lucia Ahn on piano, and Maria Ahn on cello. They write slowly unfolding pieces which make stunning use of counterpoint and harmony — you know, the kind of stuff you might expect from Julliard grads. The Ahn Trio isn’t confined to classical styles either; they’ve written songs with David Bowie and performed with Bryan Adams.

6. The Black Skirts: “Untitled”

The Black Skirts is the one-man indie rock project of vocalist / guitarist / bassist / keyboardist Holiday Cho. Though Korean by birth, Cho immigrated to the United States at age twelve before returning to his hometown. As a consequence of his polyglot formative years, Cho finds it difficult to write lyrics in Korean, but eschews English nonetheless. Cho’s songs are generally meandering affairs. In the first 30 seconds of “Untitled,” Cho leads with a Paul Hardcastle drum machine loop before quickly switching to a 4/4 Red Hot Chili Peppers bounce while offering a nod to the Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. More please.

David Wilezol is a radio producer, writer, and hobbyist musician who lives in Washington DC.

Slowly people enter. A woman with a scarf prays. A man kisses the feet of the crucified Christ. Another woman with a scarf. Another man kissing a glass case of icons. After several minutes, a young priest comes out and faces the templon. He is flanked on each side by beautiful stargazer lilies, and a crowd of about 65 people forms behind him.

Soon he speaks, one Russian voice filling the silence, then bouncing back and forth in rhythm with many voices.

Eventually I change positions, sneaking behind the crowd with my head bowed, like a child past his parent’s bedroom. As much as I try to put myself into the service, the equipment in my hand sets my mind down alternative paths, like when I take two shots from the back of the crowd, one vertical, one horizontal, because I am caught in a confluence — the saints of the past above joining the saints of the present below. The timing of it all amazes me.

Jeff LeFever, 54, has published three books of photography. The most recent is "Corpus Christi."

I have been traveling internationally since 2006 to experience and document the consecrated spaces of Christendom. On this particular day, my intention was not to document a mass, in fact, I usually oppose showing up and photographing a mass or any liturgical event unless invited. I visit these spaces primarily to see how the use of visual art expresses theology and how it interacts with the architecture to aid in identity and reverence.

My time at the Holy Trinity Cathedral came as part of a 30-day trip to Jerusalem in 2009 and was published as a book in 2011. I waited three days to get permission to take photos there. After an hour and a half, I left with 64 keepers. I have done this enough now that I look until I find something that will add to my archive of more than 300 churches, rather than take hundreds of shots, most of which I will not use.

It grieved me when I noticed a few tourists snapping photos with the flash on inside Holy Trinity. I saw them watching me earlier; no doubt they saw some guy with a bunch of gear taking pictures and assumed it was OK to do the same.

These are holy places. As I am often told, “This is not a place to take pictures, this is a place for worship and prayer.” My presence with professional equipment is not meant to degrade or desecrate. If anything, I have a deep appreciation.

The sacred ideas portrayed in churches around the world engage imaginations and offer reflective moments. My desire is to craft images that carry a similar sense of purpose, creativity and sentiment. I look for angles and perspectives that resonate with my soul. I don’t take the standard down-the-nave shot or show all the same elements from different churches for the sake of comparison.

Prior to this project, I found myself detached from my camera equipment. I had little direction, little purpose. My movements with photography were knee-jerk. I took pictures of anything that looked nice. But I was not saying anything.

Now I am more purposed. I have a story to tell, and as I continue to visit church after church to give voice to beauty and sacredness, I am overwhelmed by the visual vocabulary, which often sings louder than my ears can take.

– as told to Brandon Hoops

Despite the listlessness of the waves, the winds off the ocean where the Red Sea bleeds into the Gulf of Aden provide a soothing breeze and I stroll along Rue de Venice, sweat streaming between my shoulder blades, in search of relief.

My pathway lies between the fishing docks and the shipping port. In the latter, blue gantry cranes tower over a container ship. Djibouti’s location makes up for her small size, comparable to Massachusetts, and enables the country to influence vital shipping lanes connecting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Stevedores in faded orange bodysuits load and unload in the shadows of these massive cranes, which bear protesting camels toward a ship headed for Dubai. Cloths wrapped around them like diapers, the terrified camels bellow and flail as they soar across the water, their knobby-kneed legs dangling. This transfer of livestock and goods keeps the port in constant motion and provides a significant number of jobs for Djibouti’s 800,000 citizens.

Inland, dust coats Djibouti with a brown haze but at the seaside is the beauty of a colorful, developing nation in the slow, laboring, throes of progress. A myriad of green, blue, red, and white containers are stacked like building blocks in the port storage area. A narrow minaret, decorated in yellow and green patchwork paint, peeks over the stacks. Crackling static fills the air, then the nasalized Arabic words of the muezzin, “Allahu Abkar! God is great!” rise and swell.

At this call to prayer, all work halts so the men can eat a quick lunch and pray. Women emerge from slivers of shade cast by the billboard of Djibouti’s president and set up shop; orange jugs of tea sweetened with condensed milk, aluminum platters of hardboiled eggs and crispy baguettes.

The men cross the roundabout and squat on the curb, perched like crows, with turbans shading their heads and their hands cupped around plastic glasses of steaming shaah. They face the water to catch the same wafts of thick, salty air that barely sways my peasant skirt.

Between the container/camel ship and the fishing docks bobs a Somali dhow. The boat, like Djibouti, is in progress. Portions of the thirty-foot dhow are painted green, blue, red, and white, the same colors as the Djiboutian flag, which flaps against a crooked wooden pole in the center of the boat. But most of the vessel’s curved planks are bare. A man clings to a ladder hanging over the edge, pounding nails. Now that the camels have quieted, the sound of his hammer echoes, hollow, across the water.

The dhow is a perfect image of a Somali pirate mother ship, but these men aren’t pirates, they are fishermen. They stretch out on tarps and smoke cigarettes, sip Cokes, and chew khat, a leafy mild narcotic. They wave at those of us on shore.

Wide wooden fishing docks jut out parallel to the shipping port. The boats here are smaller than the container ships, their cargo destined for Djibouti Town rather than Dubai. Tuna, red snapper, barracuda, black tip reef shark. Nets and strings are filled with fish caught during a long night at sea, the prospect of a solid meal swinging from hooks. Either the fishermen will sell their catch in the market or to expatriates like me, or they will take it home for dinner.

Pale pink flamingos balance on scrawny legs in the shallows at the far side of the docks. Some bend, their beaks immersed in the water, and others stand straight. They look like unorganized letters of the alphabet.

A low row of mangroves creates a border between land and sea. The trees hold back the desert from encroaching on the flamingos and the port. Or maybe the mangroves hold back the ocean from encroaching upon the desert, that soft, dry wadi where athletes run and nomads herd camel trains, where refugees set up temporary housing, and students take a shortcut from Balbala shanty town to the junior high school.

To the south, where the road to Ethiopia meets the sea, and barely visible over the flatness of the moonscape-like wadi, are the tops of the gantry cranes of Djibouti’s new shipping port, the Port of Doraleh. Here, there are more ships, new jobs for stevedores, larger huddles of women selling tea. Their bright scarves and new port uniforms are brilliant, are signs of hope-filled development against the backdrop of the dusty desert.

I feel comfortably hedged in by these borders of water and sand, flamingoes and fishermen. I wipe sweat from my eyes, wave back at the men on the dhow, and ask the young boys waggling fish at me how much they want for the basket of fresh shrimp at their feet.

Rachel Pieh Jones has written for the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Running Times. She lives in Djibouti with her husband and three children and blogs at djiboutijones.com.

The tourists move with the mindless purpose of ants, shuffling from the snake charmers to the monkey handlers to the storytellers, their cameras a sort of GPS for finding attractive fare to raid in the main square of Marrakesh. My wife and I don’t do well these colonies. There’s too much commotion.

We decide to break away, avoid the directives of the travel guides, and carry about like a run-on sentence. On this hot January afternoon, we end up walking to a part of the city where the buildings crowd in on us from all sides and create a network of small, narrow alleys that have the feel of tunnels through a cave.

It’s refreshingly cold and the moisture that hangs in the air soon takes residence on my skin. The scent of a moth balls competes with some spicy cooking for the allegiance of my nose. The noise of the Djemma el Fna (main square) drifts in and out, muffled by the distance.

There is an intimacy to this place. There are no manicured lawns or car-filled driveways to separate us from the people who live here. We can look into their homes because the windows and doors open up to the alleys. It makes us feel a part of their life in a way.

Soon we pass an alley and I notice a girl, maybe 11 or 12 years old, sweeping water away from a doorway, likely a preventative measure to keep dust out of the house. I love the way the light reflects off the path, and I know immediately that I can capture her in silhouette.

Ervin Bartis, 33, lives in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with his wife and 10-month-old daughter.

I am a pretty social person, but sometimes I don’t like to be around other tourists. If I spent lots of time in touristy places then I end up in a tourist “bubble” that tends to be oriented towards consumption. You spend money like Americans eat fast food, one bite after another until you’ve forgotten how to taste. You take pictures that look like the pictures of the 50 people standing around you.

My goal when I travel is discovery, discovery of a country, a language, a people. That’s why I don’t take photos in the places where I live. I want to have a sensitivity, a fresh eye. At home, I pass the same places every day, I have a routine, I am easily bored.

One of the ways we’ve been able to avoid all the other tourists and photographers and spark discovery is to travel on budget. We stay at cheap hotels. We eat at local restaurants. We go on walks and get lost. This opens up doors and allows for interaction. In small towns or less traveled places, people tend to have more time, they don’t hurry and this allows us to connect with them.

I can’t say traveling or living abroad is always easy. You can get into difficult, even dangerous situations, especially working in the humanitarian field like I do. I’ve been in shootouts. I’ve seen malnourishment. But you take the bad with the good because every region, like every good story, has conflict and tension.

Really, photography is a small piece of what I do. I am an amateur photographer, who never wants to make it a career, fortunate enough to pursue work that I love and that allows me to visit so many different countries. It is a surprising path for someone like me, who comes from a relatively small town in Romania, who didn’t grow up on the internet.

My curiosity wouldn’t let me stay put. I engage with the world “out there.” And when I reflect back, I can’t help but count myself lucky. Every place I’ve been to has shaped me. It would be pretty stupid to travel so much and not be affected by what you see or who you meet.

– as told to Brandon Hoops

Like the book, the museum recounts the story of a character named Kemal and his obsessive quest to preserve the memory of an eight-year romance with a beautiful young woman named Fusun by cobbling together her personal effects along with assorted ephemera from Istanbul in the 1970s, the setting of the relationship. As the novel progresses, Kemal’s memories become reveries, and Fusun’s bric-a-brac displaces Fusun on the altar of Kemal’s heart.

The museum, which is said to be Fusun’s former residence, is located in a red, four-story house on a quiet street in Istanbul’s Cukurcuma neighborhood, a sliver of the Beyoglu quarter aptly known for its galleries and antique stores. No prior knowledge of the novel is necessary (although the book comes with a free ticket). Notes from Kemal, Pamuk’s protagonist, put the pictures, artifacts, and installations into the context of the affair.

On the first floor, on the far wall, there is a framed collection of 4,213 Samsun cigarette butts, some lipstick-smeared, some snuffed out hurriedly, all smoked, Kemal’s note tells us, by Fusun. Like a lepidopterist’s butterfly specimens, the cigarettes have been dated, annotated, and pinned to a sheet of nicotine-stained wallpaper.

By making public and putting brick and mortar to Kemal’s private, fictional reliquary, Pamuk has fashioned a clever, outlandish, endlessly fascinating study into the discrepancies between fact and fabrication. “The whole art of the novel is about readers asking to themselves did the author really live this or did he imagine this?” Pamuk said at the opening on April 28, the day that the fictional lovers first met in 1975. “More or less, I did the same thing with the museum.”

Indeed, the Museum of Innocence unfolds more than just the narrative of Kemal’s idée fixe. Hanging from the wall along the narrow staircase to the upper floors, there are 83 framed cases of Istanbul memorabilia, one case for each chapter of the book. The line between art and artist becomes porous. Pamuk, via Kemal, could be enshrining the childhood he so elegiacally evoked in his memoir, “Istanbul: Memories and the City.”

The top floor is the site of the ultimate conflation, the place where the museum, the novel, and Pamuk (author, curator, Istanbul-native) come crashing together. We find in the room, alongside Kemal’s iron bed, nineteen spiral-bound notebooks in which Pamuk penned “The Museum of Innocence” over the course of several years.

Some pages contain color illustrations, seascape scenes scribbled down from the hotel window where Pamuk worked. Others contain the outline for the museum, right down to the details of the display cabinets.

The room is a striking, if slightly disturbing, testament to the arrant nature of the creative process. A novelist and his protagonist have rarely seemed more kindred. We suspect that for Pamuk, the idea behind the Museum of Innocence has been a longsuffering infatuation, as sweet, necessary, and controlling as Kemal’s reminiscences of his young love.

Brian McKanna’s latest piece for EthnoTraveler was a profile about an Istanbul gravedigger.

The sharp outlines of multistory concrete tenements and red towers of steel disintegrate. Everything in the distance is sliced in half by the low horizontal line of the rickshaw’s roof. In the absence of tall, stationary objects to give perspective, the shoulder-high details of transitory life coming bursting into full, fleeting color, a thousand hues of impressionistic flourish splashed across a soot-smeared canvas.

The rickshaw lurches through an impossible gap in the traffic. We are going 35 miles per hour. I am less than a foot from the woman in the car to my right. Window down, she is refastening a silver bracelet. Our eyes meet for an instant, divide an instant later. In the afternoon, Chennai roads are a maelstrom of close, breath-brief encounters. Nameless, nearly formless, strangers keep whizzing by.

My driver weaves around a large truck. In the bed, men perch atop a gravel pile. We cut to the outside, scraping curb and sidewalk. Pedestrians alight along my left, jostling for advantage in their own, slower stream. My abbreviated view, elided by the rickshaw roof, slices off heads, leaving spectral bodies to bounce before me along the rickety pavement.

So many bare feet. I’ve never noticed it before. Even here, in the city. Some of the barefoot passersby, married women no doubt, sport gold chains around their ankles, a metallic show of status more important than wearing shoes.

The cement walls on the far side of the foot traffic are caked with peeling political ads and movie posters, one pasted atop another, a decade’s worth of fading heroes with bulging shoulders and menacing stares, now curling up and floating to the sidewalk to be scarfed by goats and trampled by all those naked toes.

There is an electric pole directly in our path. My driver, nonplussed but for the bulging vein in his neck, weaves to the right, bullying other rickshaws to brake, to stand down. I can see his expression in the little round mirror mounted in the upper right corner of the windshield. His face is a picture of bellicose concentration. His eyes cut back and forth. He knows the exact dimensions of his rickshaw, knows instinctively which maneuvers will expedite his journey and which ones could accelerate his demise.

He spots a window amid a gang of motorcycles and punches the gas, nearly clipping a taxicab en route. I gasp, involuntarily, as he ditches the taxi and burrows into the thick of motorcycles. I bump knees with a man on the back of one. He barks at my driver, who gives him little more than a sideways glance in reply before plunging ahead.

Congestion. There is a blockage in the road near what looks to be a construction site. Once more, we swerve to the outside, exploding through the spark shower of a barefoot welder, and whip around a stack of corrugated metal.

At last, we reach a stretch of empty road. I exhale and unball my fists. Too soon.

A moment later, we barrel full-bore across traffic and come grinding to a halt on the sidewalk opposite. “We are here, sir,” the driver says. He is as composed as a bellhop, as if we have only just weathered an elevator ride to a hotel lobby instead of a bumper-car race across Chennai. I make my exit. I hand over the 150. “Thanks,” I mutter as he speeds away, “thanks for the ride.”

Chris Watts’s previous story for EthnoTraveler was about weathering a monsoon in a mysterious Burmese village.

Every morning during festival season, thousands upon thousands of Indians make a pilgrimage to its rocky shoreline to celebrate the rising of the sun over their beloved land. I had been told by friends that the ritual was a surreal experience. I had to see it for myself.

I hopped in my car and careened through the empty streets of Nagercoil, where a few locals were up and about, preparing to start the day. The road led out of town into dripping jungle, over winding rivers, and past expansive rubber plantations. With each passing mile, the hard black sky softened to lighter shades of gray.

I reached the edge of Kanyakumari a half hour later. The small fishing town was already choked with colorfully dressed devotees. They moved as a mob toward the roiling sea. I wound through the crowds to the end of the road, the last road in all of India, then abandoned my car to join the migration.

We made our way to the rocky outcropping below town. This is the place where the Indian Ocean meets the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, creating a swirling cauldron of violent water. The people spilled over the sea wall and down onto the rocks. The waves crashed and broke and sprayed a mist of salty foam.

Many of the enraptured onlookers had been traveling for days, arriving from as far away as Rajahstan, Mumbai, and Calcutta. For some, the ritual marks a divine visitation by the gods, a promise that the heavens will continue to shine light upon India. For others, this sunrise gives face to a more general feeling of hope about the future of this ancient and mythical yet rapidly changing country.

The faces around me were fixed on the horizon, staring out past the small rocky island where a statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvallavar stands guard over his homeland. The anticipation and excitement grew as the darkness faded. The near-nervous tension in the air thickened.

As streaks of orange and red began to flash across the sky, bathing the crowd in the mystical hues of dawn, horns rang out. Cheers rumbled through the masses like a tide. Children splashed in the surf. Many pilgrims lit small fires of oil and wax and incense, over which they chanted and prayed and sent smoky offerings into the sky.

Then a sudden hush descended on the pilgrims.

With mouths open and eyes wide, they pointed fingers eastward towards the first razor edges of light rising over the angry waters. When the sun burst out of the Indian Ocean, pouring brightness over the waiting crowds, the celebration recommenced. There was chanting and hollering. Children dancing for joy in the sea.

For the first time all morning, I no longer heard the sound of waves. The sun steadily slid up the sky. A new day began.

Chris Watts’s previous story for EthnoTraveler was about riding a rickshaw through central Chennai.

The wet pavement peels against my canvas sneakers. I’m running late for the sunrise. To save time, I might have taken the funicular tram up to the spectator’s landing at the foot of the Sacre Cœur, but I declined an effortless ride up in favor of walking, feeling the need to tackle the 300-stair climb unassisted. Views are always better when they are earned.

A basilica with several oval-shaped domes, Sacre Cœur sits on a hill, the Butte de Montmartre, and looks over the city from its north-central perch. The sanctuary inside has a breathtaking mosaic-tile Christ above the altar. People would know about it if they went inside, but hardly anyone ever does.

Having reached the top, winded, feeling pathetic, I watch the gazers trickle in from below, gaining the incline so slowly, as if synchronized with the crawling light. A few camera flashes precipitate the coming brightness. Nasal American notes waft my direction, all dipthongs and insouciance, the Europe-curious products of a few generations spent in the New World. Their voices tangle with other morning sounds, the pigeons’ flutter and cluck, the roll and beep-beeping of the fluorescent green garbage buggy. The feeble reflection of light off the buildings shines up stronger now through the mist that still lingers.

“SEXODROME,” screams the sign of an adult bookstore at the base of the hill. Beyond the foreground’s discernible structures stands the Pantheon, on another hill, distant, hazy and regal, the queen of the Latin Quarter, whose Sorbonne has since medieval times afforded France an Olympus of its own.

Facing west, a crow alights on a lamppost. I look up after rifling hastily for my camera, but the bird is already gone. The tourists seem to have disappeared as well. The green-clad trashmen begin to circle around the lower road. One strains over the girded railing, reflective strips pulsing, to sweep up the bargain-beer cans and bottles, the residue of revelry from the night before.

A lone jogger huffs his way up the steps toward the church. He pants heavily and bears a sporty backpack for harder training, chest strap cinched tight. His shoes are colored in the wildest neon riot imaginable, all emeralds and yellows and cyans, shoes better suited for a champion’s feet than the twice-a-week jogger he appears to be. Another bird lands on the lamppost, craning south. What does he scout for?

Below, the African street salesmen shout to one another jocularly, enthusiastic despite the hour and the chill. They hawk bracelets, garish flashing glowsticks, tiny Eiffel Towers arranged in lines on ratty tablecloths. They toil and save, waiting for the day when their families will join them. They do not work in Sacre Cœur’s shadow for no reason. I wonder, can I pray as hard as they?

Now fully illuminated, clouds burnt to vapor, Paris is a shadeless morning miracle. It sparkles as one arching horizon, centuries of gritty human efforts in a cramped, urban mold. American girls photograph their way up the slope, stepping and shooting, stepping and shooting. I think of the people back home with whom I might wish to describe all this, as I sit on a cold granite stair.

Everyone climbs in Paris, from Balzac’s Rastignac to the migrants and joggers on this unremarkable morning. Everyone climbs. The sun, the crows, the hawkers, and the thoughts of undetermined wanderers like me.

Will Fleeson is a press officer at the French Embassy in Washington, DC. He is currently completing a collection of short stories set in Paris.

As a result, Sao Paulo has attracted loads of international attention that has helped to transform the megacity’s creative landscape. Nowhere is the metamorphosis more apparent than in music, where Paulinista musicians trained on native rhythms have incorporated global sounds to produce aural concoctions that sound, all at once, as if they could travel anywhere and yet originate from nowhere but Sao Paulo.

1. Marcelo Camelo and Mallu Magalhaes: “Janta”

Best wishes trying to replicate the emotional magnetism that comes from the simple combination of a man’s voice, a woman’s voice, and the strum of an acoustic guitar. There is a reason why a roar goes up from the crowd upon hearing the first notes of this simple, swoonful ditty from Marcelo Camelo and Mallu Magalhaes, an on-again, off-again indie duo in the vein of Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan and Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. “Janta” is a charming bilingual ballad for the youth of the young century, a song to fall in love with and fall in love to.

2. Sao Paulo Ska Jazz: “Sao Paulo”

Formed in 2007, this seven member group composes ska tunes structurally reminiscent of Sublime or Less than Jake but substitute a more placid, Steely Dan glide for the abrasion of those punk-influenced American acts. Appropriately enough, SPSJ’s track “Sao Paulo” begins with a chorus of car horns, a wink at one of the less alluring features of the seventh largest city in the world. But the band’s music is less cynical than you might gather from the intro. A jazzy cohort of horns and guitars slides through an arrangement of easy seventh and ninth chords, replete with a delightfully plodding half note bassline. More for a warm weather festival than a Philadelphia ska pit.

3. Colors Sound System: “Blunted Funk”

“Blunted Funk” is a fairly solid, if slightly odd, deep house track from the Sao Paulo duo Colors Sounds System. There’s nothing unusual about the percussion, aside from some sexy Brazilian rhythms, but the bassline sops with a goofy wop-wop effect that sounds like Oompah-Loompahs cooked it up during a late night production session. Not that this is a bad thing, especially when the boys from Brazil throw a bouncy lead arpeggio on top of everything.

4. Assad Brothers: “Primeiro Amor”

Guitar heroes beware. When you see the Assad brothers play, it is easy for a certain amount of discouragement to set in. After all, it is not every day you see two men producing a virtuoso classical guitar performance on same guitar at the same time. Trained by a student of Andres Segovia, the great Spanish guitarist, brothers Sergio and Odair have had success as solo artists, but their at their fittest working in tandem, a collaboration which reveals not only their dedication to their craft but the intuitive musical bonds that they have forged by playing with each other since the 1960s.

5. Sao Paulo Underground: “Afrihouse”

Sao Paulo Underground is what I want out of Brazilian music. Well, almost. The band is made up of a few guys from Chicago who moved to Sao Paulo and partnered with some native Brazilians to produce something sonically unique. Raucous toms, timbales, and woodblocks command the action, occasionally allowing the zebra guitar and trumpet into the mix. Yet there’s something very relaxing about it all, a psychedelic jungle warp of jazz fusion harmonies and complex rhythms that produces a catatonic atmosphere which artfully degenerates into an experiment in noise creation that could only be forged in the laptop era. Rolling Stone called Sao Paulo Underground “limitless in its possibilities,” and we’d have to agree.

6. Ruspo: “Vinhetinha Soul Para Crianças”

In “Vinhetinha Soul Para Criancas,” Ruspo is selling a kind of over-the-counter brand of bossanova valium. What sounds like an MPC drum machine half-time beat skips over two simple piano chords and maudlin violins. The fiercest this track gets is some jazz flute and a saxophone solo that breaks up the Portugese crooning, which harkens back to American doo-wop and stripped down R&B stylings a la Bill Withers.

7. Ceu: “Bubuia”

Outside of her home country, Ceu (which means “sky” or “heaven” in Portuguese) is probably the most popular female Brazilian artist in the world. Its not hard to see why. Her sultry soprano voice curves around her words, which in “Bubuia,” fall down into pools of lusty irresolution. Carefully lacing samba and other African rhythms into her work, Ceu has garnered the acclaim of NPR and Reuters; she won a Grammy in 2006. For some, Ceu’s sound might be too adult-contemporary slick (her album was sold at Starbucks), but if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a surprisingly beguiling approach to the human voice.

David Wilezol is a radio producer, writer, and hobbyist musician who lives in Washington DC.

Isaac, the photographer, is a listless misanthrope with a ravenous romantic streak. Call him Fernando Pessoa with a camera. He has been sitting up nights in a boarding house along the banks of the Douro river pondering the poems of Jose Regio: Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. His table is a mess of half-read books and cigarette butts, telltale signs of an artist attempting, to no avail, to conjure the proverbial creative spark.

A corpse awaiting burial seems hardly a better bet, but Angelica (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), she is no typical cadaver. She wears a wedding gown, clutches a bouquet of lilies. Lying on the settee in the family’s cavernous sitting room, she glows with the euphoric light of a pre-Raphaelite painting.

When Isaac (Ricardo Trepa) places his eye to the viewfinder and Angelica opens her eyes and smiles for him (and only for him), we are both startled and assured — startled by the intensity of the dead woman’s delight, assured by filmmaker Manoel de Oliviera’s willingness to risk sentimentality to explore the ineffable, in this case the power of otherworldly love.

Perhaps age is the ultimate distiller of craft. Oliviera was born in 1906. Since the mid-1980s he has made roughly a film a year, a yield that suggests a man in a footrace with time.

And yet “The Strange Case of Angelica” feels neither clipped nor perfunctory. The scenes smolder rather than rage. Many are shot from a single angle, a technique that lends to the film the tranquility of a framed thing, a picture, painting, window swung wide. We find our eyes scouring the screen for minute detail, the Douro lazing in the background, Angelica smiling in a snapshot hung up to dry.

As Angelica’s hold on Isaac tightens, a headlock of the heart that results in creative breakthroughs and emotional upheaval, Oliviera’s reigns on the camera loosen.

In one sublime and childishly imaginative dream sequence, a sequence with the capacity to warm the coldest skeptic back towards world cinema, we float with the couple through the dark blue night, over Regua’s terraced vineyards, down the Douro, and into the light of stars.

Romance, as in the paintings of Marc Chagall, has become a kind of levitation, a narrow portal into another stratosphere. The only bummer about Oliviera’s flight of fancy is that we ever have to come down.

Drew Bratcher is the editor of EthnoTraveler.