Folk /
Ode To Quetzalcoatl
Repress in vintage-styled tip-on hard cardboard sleeve. Guerssen Records present a reissue of Dave Bixby's Ode To Quetzalcoatl, originally released in 1969. Since its discovery in the late '90s, Dave Bixby's legendary $2000 private press album from 1969 is considered by all serious record collectors as the king in the loner / downer folk genre. After being involved in '60s Michigan folk and garage-rock bands such as The Shillelaghs and Peter & The Prophets, Bixby started playing acoustic guitar …
Kalmykian Archaic and Soviet Folk
Since the beginning of its foundation, Sub Rosa has been interested in ethnographic recordings - among the milestones: the Inuit anthology, the Bhutan recordings by John Levy... More recently, the works of David Toop (Yamomami shamanism) and Ragnar Johnson (Yemen, Ethiopia, recorded in the early 1970s). The time in which the recording is done, it matters a lot because it also captures the air of that Time. On the other hand, the label can only feel it from where they are. It is in this state of …
The Sacred Entertainment, Réak Ceremonial Horse Trance Music (LP
Kasenian réak is a genre of performative art from the Priangan area of west Java, organized during hajatans (life-cycle celebrations) and nowadays primarily held during weddings and circumcisions. The style, known as a seni lungsuran, is part of the greater family of Javanese horse dances, originally known in their most famous forms of jathilan and kuda lumping. Javanese horse dances, which could be as old as animistic Java, may already have been practiced before the eight century, travelling th…
O Meadowlark
**300 copies** "Currently based in the Boston area, Joseph Allred was one of the players we first encountered at 2018's Ten Thousand Incarnations of the Rose festival in Takoma Park MD. Allred's playing had some Basho-esque sequencing that was highly engaging, and the rest of the set was a killer, off-center swathe of string quiver we could not resist. O Meadowlark is Allred's third solo vinyl (there are cassettes as well), and will surely please many heads. Here're Joseph's words on how the alb…
Liberty Rose
A classic album by contemporary psychic blues visionaries MV & EE. The duo spent 40 days and 40 nights under the twisted trees and endless sky of the Mojave desert via a Vermont homestead, freedom and unity. That's where these songs were unformed in dreams, floating off to mingle with the collective unconscious of coyotes and rattlesnakes, before they were re-birthed as smoke signals channeled through shaky hands, an old tele, germanium transistors and a bucket brigade. One of the purest distill…
Albania, There Where the Avalanche Stops
**300 copies** For one week in every five years, two thousand singers, dancers and musicians along with fifty thousand spectators make their way to the small town of Gjirokastra in southern Albania for the Festivali Folkloric Kombelar. In the great castle overlooking the town, they participate in the incredible National Folk Festival of Albania, hoping to attain the highest level of interpretation and win one of the many awards available at the festival… the banner, even. Considering the compara…
Basket of Light
Basket of Light is the most progressive and complex release by the British folk-rock group Pentangle. Traditional English folk songs are reinterpreted with a mix of jazz, pop and rock influences. Everything their previous works promised is fulfilled here. The album opener Light Flight has become their signature song. If there is a prog folk masterpiece then it is Basket of Light. Pentangle proved they could release a progressive, ground-breaking work without keyboards, much studio trickery or ev…
Osharaku
Osharaku is a traditional Japanese form of musical entertainment, featuring mainly voice, shamisen and percussion, with a repertoire of folk and popular songs, performed by farmers and fishermen for local audiences. This compilation, compiled by Riyo Mountains, is the fourth release in the EM Records / Riyo Mountains Japanese folk series. These recordings feature legendary Osharaku masters, recorded in their homes, brilliantly capturing the casual warmth and vitality characteristic of the style.…
Witness Tree
**400 copies** "Vinylization of a self-released cassette issued earlier this year by our favorite Virginia-based guitar player. Witness Tree is a brilliant follow-up to Perry's eponymous debut LP (2018), and expands upon the form-abstractions he first displayed there. Mr. Perry has a firm and solid touch to his string wrangling, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he doesn't seem to feel compelled to resolve all the melodic questions he raises. Perry often stops in a place he finds interestin…
But a Night That Ends as All Nights End When the Sun Rises
Tashi Dorji is a celebrated free-form / improvisational guitarist. Born and raised in Bhutan, but transplanted to Ashville, NC in the early 2000’s. He is a musical force that is in a caliber of his own. The amount of originality in his playing could have only been summoned when one is forced to confront limitations and raise a big middle finger to the ‘status quo’. He is known to focus his attention heavily on tonal qualities over melody. Mellow harmonics that integrate interference of seemingly…
For Octavio Paz
Ben Chasny's last ultra-indie label release before moving onto greener pastures with Drag City is finally available once more on vinyl thanks to Hermit Hut. Originally released in 2003 on the fabulous Time Lag label, we are now safe to bask in it's psych-folk sunlight again and let me assure you it's worth it. Ditching the voice almost altogether (save for a few wails), For Octavio Paz sees Chasny focussing on his primary skill - the guitar. This is a collection of some of his best solo guitar w…
Unpentangled - The Sixties Albums
Long acknowledged as one of the greatest and most influential acoustic guitarists to emerge from the British folk scene, the late John Renbourn is best known to the wider world for his membership of Pentangle, the genre-busting band that he was instrumental in bringing together in 1967. Pentangle’s recordings are widely available, most recently with Cherry Red’s 2017 highly-acclaimed box set Pentangle: The Albums. in 1966. Housed in a clamshell box that boasts replica album sleeves, some very ra…
Philos
Park Jiha’s debut album Communion - released internationally by tak:til last year - drew well deserved attention to the young Korean instrumentalist / composer’s vivid soundworld. The widely acclaimed album graced 2018 critics lists at The WIRE, Pop Matters and The Guardian. Her new album Philos - which she calls an evocation of her “love for time, space and sound” - is every bit as inventive, elegant and transcendent as her debut. While Park Jiha’s music is often contextualized by its kinship w…
End of the Night
End of the Night was conceived based around a simple, yet extremely emotionally resonant concept. Late one evening the musician and myself were listening to records at home. After many hours it got to the point where everything became completely still, the silence permeating the walls, reverberating. We agreed to listen to one more record, but what would it be? What music could answer that existential quandary of the perfect last record of the night at home? I instantly asked him to make me the …
Revolución Electrónica en Música Venezolana
Ultimate space-age exotica trip from Venezuela. In the early '70s, well-known composer and arranger Chelique Sarabia (who penned the famous “Ansiedad” when he was just a kid) decided to record an album of traditional and folkloric songs from Venezuela but giving them a modern touch, using especially developed equipment (M.R.A.A.), based off of the principles of the Moog. Chelique, helped by a team of gifted musicians, employed traditional instruments like the cuatro and the bandola llanera, filt…
Ocean of Colours (A. Cuni Sings a Homage To Pandit Bidur Mallik)
**2019 stock** Amelia Cuni was born in Milan and lived in India for more than ten years learning dhrupad singing from renowned masters (i.e. R. Fahimuddin Dagar and Bidur Mallik, Pt. Dilip Chandra Vedi). She also studied kathak dance and pakhawaj drumming. She received a three year scholarship from the Indian government. Since 1987, she performs internationally and since 1992, she is based in Berlin. Her music is featured on several solo CDs and collaborations. She has recorded for radio and TV …
Malam Minggu: A Saturday Night in Sunda
Akuphone resumes its reissue operations with its latest compilation, Malam Minggu: A Saturday Night in Sunda. This release brings us once again to Southeast Asia, with a stopover in the Indonesian archipelago – to the region of Sunda in western Java. As its name suggests, this collection immerses us in the vibes of Sundanese nights at the turn of the 1980s. During the post-independence climate of the 1960s, Presidents Sukarno and Suharto encouraged artists to renew and innovate traditional Indon…
You Are Tired
**300 copies** You Are Tired features amazing finger-pick style utilising both a calm and destructive mood, the tracks title producing imagery whilst you are listening and to a degree the sounds send you back to a time. similarly to other such guitar luminaries within the same genre such as John Fahey, Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho to name a few. Rob is an extension of their ideas, using his guitar to express meaning and emotion and he does it very elegantly on the opening track. Nightmare Study is a…
The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII
The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII is the debut collaboration between two giants of the New York avant-garde — guitarist Loren Connors and saxophonist/trumpeter Daniel Carter. It's a gorgeous, languorous soundscape distilled from the darkest reaches of blues and jazz. For nearly 17 years Connors has used the Departing series to continue his meditation on Miles Davis' epic "He Loved Him Madly" and expand his efforts to create disappearing music. The duo does just that, vanishing behind decaying …
Shaped by Place
** 300 copies ** "Brilliant new album from Village of Spaces, a combo once described as, 'Dan and his raggle taggle band of hippies' by Michael Hurley, a guy who knows about such things. The Dan in question is Dan Beckman-Moon who, along with his partner Amy Moon Offermann-Sims, is the central core of this constantly evolving, psychedelically-inclined, folk juggernaut. V.O.S. has had many name variations and members in the 17 years since Dan and Amy formed this more perfect union, but all of the…