Folk /
Nancy & Lee
*Gatefold LP featuring a 20-page booklet.* First official reissue of Nancy & Lee's classic 1968 duets album. The definitive reissue with Nancy's participation. Includes bonus tracks "Tired Of Waiting For You" and "Love Is Strange" from the album sessions. Remastered from the original analog tapes by GRAMMY®-nominated recording engineer John Baldwin. Vinyl pressed by RTI. Q&A with Nancy and GRAMMY®-nominated co-producer of the reissue Hunter Lea. Never-before-seen photos from Nancy Sinatra's pers…
Night Spirit Masters
Remastered vinyl reissue of this 1990 Bill Laswell / Richard Horowitz production of local Gnawa musicians, recorded in the Medina of Marrakesh. According to Allmusic.com "a must for fans of both African and Middle Eastern music” and voted one of the "10 essential Gnawa albums” by Songlines. The Gnawa are an ethnic minorityin today’s Morocco, descendents of slaves from West Africa who were brought to Morocco in the 16th century and who (although they quickly converted to Islam) nevertheless broug…
Sophisticated Beggar
*2022 stock* This is where it all began, with a slim volume of poems and psychedelic ditties set to music, backed by a simple Revox machine, and transformed by instrumental turns that display British cult hero Roy Harper's deft guitar work. "Girlie," "Big Fat Aeroplane," and "Legend," while steeped in traditional folk idioms, show hints of Harper's unique songwriting style. His caustic wit and passion are already evident in the wordplay of this 1966 debut. "Forever" is as pretty a love song as y…
Chico Bernardes
Chico Bernardes is a singer, songwriter and multi instrumentalist from São Paulo, Brazil. In his first and self-titled record, 'Chico Bernardes' has arranged and recorded all the instruments, with the support of Gui Jesus Toledo from Selo Risco and owner of Estúdio Canoa, where the recordings took place. Surrounded by lots of coffee and low lights, Chico recorded part of the songs as if he was singing for nobody, in real time. The other half of the record was filled with drums, bass, electric gu…
Compulsions
*200 copies limited edition* 'The isolation of lockdown was challenging for guitarist J.R. Bohannon. In refreshingly vulnerable linear notes, he describes how his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were made worse by the pandemic. But he accommodated by creating Compulsions, a set of solo acoustic guitar improvisations in an American folk style, each recorded during a panic attack.
These slow and melancholy pieces have compelling melodies, which Bohannon used to calm himself. He …
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977
Tip! A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police on…
Finally, His First Album
Tip! At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label …
Straight from the Throat
Tip! In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.
In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualis…
The Music Of Armenia
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* The entire Music of Armenia series began as a musical detour while David Parsons was on assignment for Celestial Harmonies' The Music of Islam (19907) series. Fortunately, for our history—and evolution—the lost arts, musically speaking, of this biblical area which has and continues to travel the path of love, hatred and destruction, only to someday be revered and loved again, is superbly recreated and created anew.
Covering the geographic area of Armenia, as …
The Old Fabled River
Norwegian folk collective Völvur team up with Scotland's very own Alasdair Roberts for an album combining traditional and modern songs in both groups' native languages – to powerful effect.
Rugiada
*In process of stocking* Union Editions presents Rugiada by Trapcoustic. Written and played by Stefano di Trapani in Roma during xmas 2020. Special thanks to Michele Manfellotto and Grip Casino. Inspiration: Jonida e Arion. Mastering by Luciano Lamanna.
Indo-Arabic Variations
Tip! Unique fusion of the Indian and Egyptian music cultures devised by Baligh Hamdi, the most prominent of all modern composers in the Arab-speaking world. Hamdi, who penned dozens of hit compositions for Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Warda and Sabah amongst others, also shaped the future of Arabic music in a way that's difficult to overestimate.
Directed by Hamdi, the renowned Indian sitar player Magid Khan joins the Egyptian musicians of Abdel Halim Hafez's orchestra in re-reading some of H…
Shirley Mastic
**100 copies** "I wrote and recorded these songs over a decade ago. Listening back, I chuckle at the fact that I may actually say the word ‘die’ or ‘death’ in every single song. Considering how metaphorically I attempted to write these lyrics, those two words very literally represent what I was dealing with. Within a four year span I lost one of my best friends to cancer and my dad to a heart attack. As a person in my 20’s that span of time felt like an eternity but in hindsight I can see now th…
Mesourania/Wendy's Wedding
* Edition of 70 copies * Compiling two EP's (Mesourania (2019) and Wendy's Wedding (2016) by Seirios Savvaidis (who also plays in The Dead Ends), one of Greece's best kept secrets. Some mind expanding songs that reflect deep knowledge of traditional Greek music by way of sixties and seventies pychedelia and cosmic folk troubadours. Savvaidis's relaxed Greek vocals make you float all the way up Mount Paggaio.
Dayspring
Released in 1983 on a miniscule run of 300-self-financed LP’s, Dennis Taylor’s ‘Dayspring’ remains a lost masterwork of transcendental instrumental guitar. An important missing link between the 60’s folkloric experimentalism of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the new age atmospherics mined by William Ackerman and Michael Hedges in the early 80’s. Though Taylor’s guitar playing remains crisply unadorned on these 10 tracks, his technique and his compositions stretch beyond the folk roots of the g…
Bizzarrophytes
Carl Erdmann’s Bizzarrophytes was recorded in Roswell, New Mexico, during the final years of the 70’s. A desert-fried haze of buzzing sitar raga, shimmering guitar soli, and lonesome instrumental psych. Erdmann had been galvanized several years prior by witnessing an intimate performance by Ravi Shankar at Austin’s University of Texas. Erdmann spent the next several years with a sitar in the back of his pickup truck - teaching himself the instrument between stints working on an oil field as a ge…
Breslin
“A set of spry, pastoral Aecoustic Guitar and errant Electronic pieces that harken back to libraries by Teisco, Vittorio Marino, and the like, yet mapped in an alien manner unlike any known lanes. Unusual, and uniformly excellent.” - Keith Fullerton Whitman
Opsigno
An important figure of the Argentinean acoustic school, his 4th album released in 2004, which is praised as the best album of his career, is now available on vinyl for the first time in the world! The latest release from SRRD label, which has released albums by Motohiko Hamase, Mono Fontana, Edison Natali, Yoshiharu Takeda and others!Alejandro Franov has been surrounded by music since he was a child, and became a multi-instrumentalist as he should. On this album, he plays a variety of percussion…
Concert 1975
Yasumi No Kuni, long-running Japanese folk group, originally formed in 1969 by the members of Jacks & Teruyuki Takahashi, recorded live just after Fy Fan second album.
Fabric Cordial
Bud Petal is the stage name of musician Eran Asoulin. His music has been described as ‘cerebral art-folk’ & ‘the music Lord Byron would be making had he lived in the 21st century’. Bud is a true outsider, a freak-folk wunderkind who has been compared to Syd Barret & Daniel Johnston. But don’t for a minute think him primitive or naive - Bud is worldly & word-wise beyond his years. He was ‘discovered’ when his self-produced first album was pulled from the trash at a local radio station. A self-tau…