Last year, I wrote a long profile on local singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari's hemisphere-spanning path to recording her solo debut alongside the L.A. indie demimonde and traditional musicians in her troubled ancestral home of Afghanistan. But outside of an unexpectedly noisy and raucous live set at the New Los Angeles Folk Festival and a video for her song "We Came Home," few shows and little new material surfaced in 2010.

Hopefully, this new remix of her track "Be Gone Taliban" from the percussion-mad producer Butchy Fuego indicates an even more interesting second wind this year. Fuego tears the droning original to ribbons and rebuilds it with cheap snare hits, jaundiced electro groans and vocal sampling that makes Delawari sound like she's reading a dream diary through a fuzzy wiretap. M.I.A. may be hawking her "ViCKi LEEKX" mixtape, but this is an on-the-record document of another politically volatile artist thriving in a radical update of her sound.

-- August Brown

Photo: Ariana Delawari. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

In 2007, the Silver Lake singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari traveled to her parents' home in Kabul to record parts of her debut album, "Lion of Panjshir," as Afghanistan was under fire from Taliban-sympathizing suicide bombers. Under the watch of armed guards, she played her brand of California folk-rock with local masters of Afghan instruments, and found an unlikely helping hand from director David Lynch in mixing the record, which came out in October on Lynch's label. Read the full story, today's Column One, at this link.

-- August Brown

Photo by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times