Sands of Time - Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast 71

Hollywood, and more recently the games industry, have created an orient that never existed, one that is gloriously romantic but which has roots in the imagination rather than the real world. We love it.

We regularly play you real music from the real Middle East but here we've raided the soundtracks of games and films for pieces of music that complement our usual selection of excellent tunes by lesser known artists. They use all the Hollywood musical cliches, harmonic minor scales with semitone shifts to fake Arabian scales (maqam hijaz as default Eastern scale), plenty of hand percussion by musicians who mostly don't really understand Arabic rhythms and copious interjections of wailing female vocals. As I said, we love it.

Nearly all the non-soundtrack tunes this time were found on SoundCloud. There is something of a (non-specific) religious theme to the titles but they are predominantly instrumental.