Welcome to the eighteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
This month we whet our appetite for wide-ranging musical traditions via Rosalía’s visceral – and very human – new album, then we go to Paris to find out about a theft from the Louvre that generated more clickbait than the French Crown Jewels.
Lastly, we continue with art as a theme in Prague, where the city’s cheekiest sculptor created a witty memorial to the country’s “rock ‘n’ roll president.”
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For your sense of the universal | Rosalía pulls the entire world into her symphony
Melodies with the power to transport us to a different state are a truly wondrous thing. Perhaps even rarer is music that invites us to step into a world beyond our own.
Rosalía’s brand new album, LUX, does far more than take listeners on a whistlestop tour of musical traditions like flamenco, Japanese rap, and Portuguese fado. The Catalonia-born singer and songwriter took almost three years to create this intensely-researched work of art which has her singing in no less than 13 languages, with each track referencing a different female mystic, prophet, or saint.
“Mysticism is the inspiration,” she told NPR shortly before the album’s release on 7 November 2025. “I think that if I could have fit the entire world in a room, in a record, I would have done it.”
It’s an extremely ambitious record that’s divided into four movements and accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra from start to finish. The New Yorker described its German language lead single, Berghain, as “essentially a three-minute opera, complete with an orchestral overture.” It also has a cameo by avant-garde singer and composer Björk, who pierces the symphony with prophetic urgency to say “The only way to save us is through divine intervention.“
In a word, LUX challenges us. Rosalía described it as a “human album,” rejecting the use of AI – and, apparently, much digital production at all. Instead, she learned to sing enough bars in Ukrainian “to evoke the fervor of Olga of Kyiv, the tenth-century ruler who massacred the tribe responsible for killing her husband,” and dedicated a year to writing an Italian aria – and then training her voice to sing it.
It’s the fruit of Rosalía’s voracious appetite for a beautiful big world around her. Yet, at the same time, it feels like a door to her inner landscape. “I exist in the world and the world exists within me,” she said in the NPR interview.
“I feel like hopefully my love is plural and it’s infinite. The same way I’m here and everything can be here – and how can I explain this in a song? And I tried. That’s what you can find in La Yugular [her ‘love letter to Arabic’]. My favorite art, it’s where it’s a little bit blurry – the personal and the universal.”
For anyone with a creeping sense that individuality and passion and beauty are being dulled in the name of efficiency, this album is a tonic. It’s “an antithesis to today’s era of digital slop and disposable media,” wrote Dazed.
Without doubt, it’s a dense piece of work. But that probably won’t stop you from singing along in the mumbled lyrics of languages you don’t speak, but that you’re suddenly compelled to look up.
? Find out about the voice note Rosalía’s grandmother sent in response to the album’s release in this NPR interview, read this New Yorker piece about the extent to which the album “transgresses the limits of pop music,” and watch this enlightening video series about “the languages in Lux and the saints they pertain to” on Instagram or Youtube. Here’s a link to another album by a musician with the power to transport you, from the second edition of Senses. Listen to LUX on Apple Music or Spotify.
For your sense of hype | The Mona Lisa makes the front page
When eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels were stolen from the Louvre last month, it wasn’t the first time the museum had been robbed.
In 1911, the theft of the Mona Lisa captivated the public and made the portrait’s enigmatic subject a media darling.
According to this entertaining new Instagram Reel, it had spent years tucked away amongst hundreds of other non-descript Renaissance paintings until then, and the artwork isn’t mentioned in any of Leonardo’s notebooks.
Today, 80% of the Louvre’s nine million or so annual visitors trek through the museum with one goal: to see the Mona Lisa.
? Watch the Reel here.
For your sense of change | Art that changes nations
Twenty-odd years before Václav Havel became the Czech Republic’s first democratically elected president, he called one of Prague’s most important experimental theatres his artistic home. It was at Divadlo Na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade) that the playwright and dissident premiered some of his most famous works, many of which got him in serious trouble with the communist authorities.
On her new VoiceMap tour, Prague local Vera Nemochovska reminds us that “words written in small theatres can change entire nations.” We also get a peek into “the theatre world’s creative chaos,” through the whacky and somewhat surreal bronze plaque by David Černý that marks it.
Černý created the plaque in homage to the late Havel. It’s one of several artworks by the self-proclaimed “artist of civil disobedience” which grace – or, some say, disgrace – Prague’s public space.
? Hear the endearing story about how Havel’s commemorative plaque was funded, and browse the whole tour to find out more about the “pure Černý genius” that’s scattered throughout the capital.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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