Minimalism, savagery, the raw and the cooked, the primal and the pre-verbal, Elvis’s hips, The Rite of Spring . . . Earth Dances is an original investigation of how music and primitivism intersect – a dazzling journey through music and culture.

With alternating chapters of criticism and interviews, including with Liza Lim and Brian Eno, composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford explores the relationship between primal forms of music and the most refined examples of the art – between passion and control. He looks at the voice, the drum, the drone and the dance, at ‘music that is in touch with something fundamental in our existence, music that seeks and rediscovers the earthy side of our nature, the primitive, the “simple, rude or rough”, and in doing so restores and resets our humanity’.