Six more acts join Womad NZ 2024 lineup

Ukrainian folk music quartet DakhaBrakha will perform at Womad NZ next year.

A Ukrainian folk music quartet, a history-making Pakistani American artist and a Haitian singer who mixes voodoo with rock’n’roll are amongst the acts named in the Womad NZ 2024 lineup so far.

An announcement on Wednesday, September 27 named six acts that will be in Taranaki next year for Womad 2024.

Arooj Aftab, DakhaBrakha, Lankum, Moonlight Benjamin, Rei and Strawpeople are all joining the previously-announced Ziggy Marley in Taranaki next March for the popular festival.

Two of the six acts are homegrown. Rei (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Pākeha) is a musician from Wellington currently based in Auckland who has already clocked up six Waiata Māori Awards and four NZ Music Awards nominations and is making a name for himself in the hip-hop and R&B world.

Electro-pop group Strawpeople was first formed in 1986 and will be bringing 90s electro-pop to the Womad NZ stage.

Grammy Award-winning singer composer, and producer Arooj Aftab is one of the acts coming to Womad NZ 24.

Grammy award-winning, Pakistani-American artist Arooj Aftab is a singer, composer and producer. Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, she and her family returned to Lahore in Pakistan when she was 10 years old. She taught herself to play the guitar and began to develop her musical style while listening to Billie Holiday and Mariah Carey as well as Begum Akhtar.

She moved to the US when she was 19, studying for her degree in music production and engineering at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Since 2010, she has been based in New York and in 2022 won a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance for her song Mohabbat, becoming the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy in the process.

Haitian-French singer Moonlight Benjamin was born in Haiti and grew up in a protestant orphanage, first learning how to sing at church. Often referred to as the Caribbean Patti Smith, Moonlight Benjamin - her real name - moved to France in the early 2000s to continue her musical training, and describes her music as being a blend of voodoo and rock’n’roll.

Irish folk music group Lankum will be bringing their wide range of instruments to Aotearoa with them - in total the group play around 30 different ones, including tin whistles, hurdy-gurdy, tambourines, drums and a concertina.

Ukrainian folk music quartet DakhaBrakha combines the musical styles of several ethnic groups, creating what has been described as an innovative ethno-chaos sound. Using traditional instruments from different countries combined with the quartet’s impressive vocal range, the group are able to create a trans-national sound that remains rooted in, and reflective of, Ukrainian culture.