Folk /
老来难 = Old Man Blues
*2025 stock* Born in 1945, Guo Yongzhang has performed zhuizi, a traditional Chinese style of narrative singing, for half a century. An artform whose history spans over a century, zhuizi originated in Henan province. Its main musical instruments are the zhuihu, a two-stringed bowed lute, and the zhuibang, a wooden percussion played with foot tapping. Almost completely blind, Guo Yongzhang is known for his peculiar, resounding yet smooth vocal style. He sings with deep feelings and great verve. L…
互念暗语 = Hu Nian An Yu
2025 stock Ben Bo Er Ba & Ba Bo Er Ben（BBB & BBB）is an ever-changing, fascinating duo. Quirky Pipa and spiritual flute are the backbone, the two artists also randomly utilize all kinds of instrument they like, wandering freely in the musical realm, breaking and reconstructing the atmosphere. Their music may be a spell, a password, or perhaps a tongue-twister: ben ben bo bo, bo ben, bo ben bo, ben ba, bo ba, bo ba... Feel free to carry on “ben bo”ing.
Zhuizi Selections
This studio album is recorded after Guo Yongzhang performing on the 5th Tomorrow Festival stage.
Real Essence
2015 release ** Limited edition of 900 hand-numbered copies. "Real Essence is an album made with the acoustic Tricanta Veena, recorded in India, in the spiritually dense hours before dawn. The music of this great comeback by Paolo Tofani is not only for lovers of Indian music. As if Robbie Basho had lived in India, it is influenced by the East and the West. A new music, syncretic and deeply rich in inner peace, recorded with an impressive sound, like a hi-fi demonstration, without any tricks or …
World Behind Curtains
2012 release ** “While guitarist Yair Yona was first lured into the world of acoustic fingerpicking by a Bert Jansch CD that he found in a London shop, the Takoma school is his foundation. Like Steffen Basho-Junghans, he’s embraced this fundamentally American style on its own terms, learned its language inside out, and still made music that’s true to an upbringing on the far side of the Greenwich Meridian.” Recommended if you like: John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, American Primitive Guitar,…
Los Jaivas (El Volantín)
First official vinyl reissue of the now classic 1971 album. Produced by Transamericas in collaboration with the band from original master tapes, in a fully analog process at recording studios in María Pinto (Chile), London and Haarlem (Holland). Los Jaivas (“El Volantín”) is the first LP by Chilean rock band Los Jaivas, one of South America's biggest names in the fusion of folk roots and psychedelia during the 1970s. Los Jaivas were born in the city of Viña del Mar, with their five members deter…
Ghost Ship
Four years after his rock juggernaut Puritan, Chris Brokaw delivers Ghost Ship, a landscape meditation (at sea) for vocals and electric guitars.
I set out to make an 8 song statement like 'Desert Shore' or 'Raw Power', but it became a 9 song...something else. I've described it to friends as 'Twin Peaks-ish' but that feels only part right. The songs were written on a 60's Teisco Del Rey electric guitar, set up by the Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gaug…
Boom Town
2008 release ** "Based in Jyväskylä, Finland, Keijo Virtanen (1951-2022) was somewhat of a legend in the whole finnish psych scene (on the same level as Pekka Airaksinen - in fact the two have collaborated before). He’s been working on music for ages but his work has only been starting to get attention during the last few years. This artist’s music is unlike any other, it is often based in ambient and drone and incorporates weird traditional folk instruments from around the world just as much as…
Mibu
From Tsugaru, the birthplace of Kazuki Tomokawa and Kan Mikami, to Osorezan, Itako, Nebuta, Kesho Jizo... Mutsu's Orpheus (minstrel) Furukawa Mibu, who sings about a magical institution to connect this world to the next, left this superb work in 1978! Shocking analogue LP reissue!
Mibu, who is also a poet, deceives the dead in order to live the memory of his younger brother (Mibu), who died at the age of three. The song becomes a prayer and a cry, dancing wildly in this world and being sucked in…
It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best
Karen Dalton's 1969 debut is finally back in print. 2024 reissue features all-analogue mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, direct from the original analogue tapes. Housed in an expanded gatefold jacket with liner notes by Brian Barr
Loaded
2025 stock Loaded is the fourth studio album by American rock band The Velvet Underground, released in November 1970 by Atlantic Records' subsidiary label Cotillion. It was the final album recorded featuring Lou Reed, who had left the band shortly before it's release. In 2003, Loaded was ranked 109 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
After All Is Said And Done
Synod was a band that performed at concerts and dances, festivals, colleges, private parties, conferences and other venues from 1971 through 2013. They toured incessantly in the early years, traveling from Chicago in Illinois to New York, South Carolina, Georgia, Nebraska and seven other states. They performed at Chicagofest, Summerfest and everywhere they could find a stage. The recordings in this collection represent some of the 12 recording projects they did, primarily between 1972 and 1984.
Metamusik Festival Berlin ‘74
Carrying on from recent archival releases from masters of Indian classical tradition such as Kamalesh Maitra and the Dagar Brothers, Black Truffle is pleased to present a previously unheard recording of a concert by Pakistani vocalist Salamat Ali Khan. Born to a musician family in Hoshiarpur in the northwestern state of Punjab, Khan moved with his family to Lahore in Pakistan after the 1947 partition of India, becoming a child musical prodigy. Khan was a master of the kyhal form of Hindustani cl…
Amoskeag
2025 Repress Every song on this album taps into raw, rich veins of sound that are simultaneously dense but easy to enjoy; vintage and modern; new yet timeless. The album kicks off with a monster track entitled "Stratton-Eustis" - one of those complex yet flowing tunes that makes you think overdubs were involved or the player has grown an extra set of limbs. Then there's "Kenduskeag,” a raga-esque group recording in an abandoned New England Conservatory building with Ethan WL and the long standin…
The Time Has Come
Offering some of her first original compositions, ‘The Time Has Come’ was a break from tradition in more ways than one for Anne Briggs. Where previous recordings displayed the unaccompanied melodies of her voice, this album - originally released by CBS in 1971 - brings additional instrumentation in the form of guitar and bouzouki. The result is that her vocals are not submerged but heightened - the plucked strings providing the perfect foil for her crystalline inflection.
‘The Time Has Come’ i…
Tre Storie Per Chitarra
The Italian composer Riccardo Komesar take his place in the vast panorama of instrumental guitar music with this debut album released by Torto Editions and Ramble Records: divided in three mid long tracks, “Tre storie per chitarra” is a condensed of contemporary lyricism and emotional soundscape: the mellow and distinctive fingerpicking is the drive of the journey, waving in circular patterns and evolving in the whole structure. His personal playing style is developed on a nine strings guitar, w…
Lightnings Over Crimson Hill
2005 release ** Dark folk in the style of the Death In June albums "The world that summer" and "Wall of sacrifice".
Tumblack
A massive speaker-smashing release, decades overdue. It's been bootlegged - shamefully so, many times over the years - but finally we present the first ever officially licensed reissue of this truly special Afro-disco-not-disco LP from 1979. A favourite of Harvey, Antal, Young Marco and, er, every great DJ to ever play deep records ever, basically. It's not hard to see - or, indeed, *feel* why.
Gem after gem of relentless, irresistibly funky gold, it's an incredibly revelatory album with endless…
Rádha - Kršna (Písně Lásky / Songs Of Love)
2007 release ** "Ecstatic and silent mantras in the traditional sense, with only acoustic instruments, so as to preserve their deep spiritual impact."