Folk & Traditional / All styles

WRWTFWW & MEG Museum (Geneva) are very happy to announce a new album by famed Japanese percussionist Midori Takada, Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter, her very own rendition of "Nhemamusasa", a traditional work emblematic of the musical repertoire for mbira of the Shona of Zimbabwe. Recorded in a live setting and played with instruments conserved in the collections of the MEG Museum. Liner notes include: An interview by Midori Takada A point of view by Zimbabwean scholar, musician and act…

**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…

*2022 stock* The set is a 34-song anthology of Early Recordings From Iran painstakingly restored from 78s at Abbey Road studio in London "Ravishingly beautiful, achingly precious songs and instrumentals, ranging from two performances by the Royal Court Orchestra in 1906 — with futuristic, overlapping trumpets and exquisite clarinet improvisation — through to a hauntingly soulful Hafez setting by Moluk Zarrabi of Kashan, from 1933. There are eight selections from more than three hundred recording…

this now deleted compilation concentrates on Fahey’s best work from his later years(1964-83) at Takoma, presenting many tracks new to CD. Also included are three tunes from his long-lost and unreleased Takoma album, "Azalea City Memories", as well as a long work, ‘The Fahey Sampler’, rare and unheard for many years

* 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.

Music of Southern Laos, subtitled Provinces of Champasak, Attapeu, Sekong and Saravan. One part of Akuphone's collection of Laotian music. Includes liner notes in English, French, and Japanese and a download code. Akuphone presents a collection of recordings of various musical practices from the Laotian provinces of Champasak, Attapeu, Sekong, Saravan, Luang Namtha and Phongsaly. These documents are a perfect introduction to the traditional music of South Laos minority groups. Popular modern mus…

* Small repress available* We are celebrating our tenth release by bringing the label full circle, right back where we started from. We're excited to announce that we've once again worked with the Gania family of Essaouira to bring you another reissue of the music of the undisputed King of Gnawa music, the late Maalem Mahmoud Gania. It feels like the perfect time to release this spiritual music, specifically played to heal and to cure us of our ills, as the world is in the grip of a viral pandem…

* Tip! * Matir Gaan is a collaboration between young Bengali migrant, Mohammed After Hussain and Italian electronic artist, Andrea Rusconi (aka Paq). The resulting album delightfully combines the ancient folk songs of Md After's homeland with Paq's cosmic synth exotica.Mohammed After Hussain escaped Bangladesh in 2015 and arrived in Italy in 2017 after a long and dangerous journey across the Mediterranean from the violence he found in Libya. In Italy he found safety and hospitality as an asylum …

2015 repress. ...Ethnic Music Classics: 1925-48. This series of archival 78 transfers was originally released in 1995 on CD only. Now for the first time on vinyl, a deluxe gatefold presentation and limited edition pressing. Reissue produced by Hisham Mayet (Sublime Frequencies) in conjunction with Yazoo Records. Compiled here are many of the greatest performances of world and ethnic music ever recorded. This volume represents a trip around the world, stopping at each port to sample one of that c…

William Farley’s 1986 documentary portrait of the Indian classical figure, who considered by many to be the godfather of drone. Featuring interviews with Terry Riley, Mariam Zazeela and La Monte Young.

*2022 stock* First ever vinyl reissue of rare and sought after Swedish psychedelic / progressive / folk underground treasures from the early 1970s. From Swedish folk to epic full tilt fuzz guitar jams it’s all in here. Originally released in 1972 on the obscure Swedish Gump label with many talented musicians of the time on board. Led by Mats Glenngård on guitar and fiddle, the album shows an interesting musical transition period before he joined the legendary Kebnekajse. One time only limited pr…

The fifth Sublime Frequencies volume in Laurent Jeanneau's amazing documentation of vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers, this CD focuses on ethnic minority groups of Southern China. Presented here are 17 tracks of supremely infectious vocals and folkloric instrumentals played on a wide variety of local traditional instruments. The centerpiece of this collection is the 13-minute "Do Djui Atsei" (track 5), an absolutely epic male and female group choral vocal piece which is imp…

* 2021 Stock* It was—and is—almost impossible to categorize Vera Sienra’s musical style, but we’ll try: wistful songs with the world-weariness of Fado, and the pulsating sadness of the bossa nova. Her powerful and unique tone of voice, plus the softness of her guitar, have always been an unmistakable trademark. Listening to the songs of Vera’s debut album (from 1969), few people believed that those mature melodies were created by the beautiful and timid blonde who could be seen on their black & …

She had been part of a traditional "antique folk" movement in France in the late 60's & recorded 8 albums w/musicians from this scene before this last album, recorded in '76. Certainly, the avant garde edge lurking beneath the simple folkiness puts in mind the explorations of Brigitte Fontaine w/her sometime musical voyager Areski. Her music has its own deeply ethereal quality, & the album itself has its own magic spell to cast that renders comparison w/other albums unimportant in the end.

The much anticipated second album from Astrid Øster Mortensen. New in Gothenburg, the Denmark-born Astrid started to frequent the Discreet Music shop in the summer of 2020. Coincidentally, around the same time Gustaf Dicksson was looking for a Danish vocalist for his upcoming Blod album Missväxt and one thing quickly led to another. Not only did Astrid contribute with vocals for said record but one day she handed us a master of her own music that completely floored us. The recordings eventually …

“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

Café Türk, an inimitable Turkish-Swiss band formed in the 1980s, whose genre-bending sonic palette draws from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Western Europe. The group’s frantic trajectory connects Switzerland and the Turkish city of Kars with a background story as rich and unexpected as their sound. After three decades since they disbanded, Zel Zele Records have collaborated with Turkish crate-digger Grup Ses to give the music of Café Türk a new lease of life. This eponym compilation features origin…

Compiled by David Murray. Luk Thung: classic & obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside features fourteen outstanding funky performances of Thai country groove music from the 1950s and early 1960s. All previously unreissued, carefully transferred and mastered from the original 78rpm records of collector Dave Murray and presented with detailed full color liner notes by Peter Doolan.

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.

Sound Miracle Recordings presents a collection of thirteen ancient pieces of primitive flamenco music from the 1930s onwards. Flamenco music has been admired throughout the world for centuries. Fascinating unique, esoteric and mysterious, alloy of fire and witchcraft. Flamenco is much more than that. It has something of folk, something of sacred music, something of "blues": it is a unique music in the world, born of many factors and opposite and antagonistic elements, like its country of …

Hannah Zhalih Mickunas is a multidisciplinary artist currently living on the Northern California coast. After a first album recorded for eilean rec. in 2018, she comes back 3 years later on Laaps with her second LP, "They Call".

* 2022 stock. Edition of 200* Before embarking on a European tour, Boduf Songs and Jessica Bailiff re-worked one of their older songs in totally different versions. Boduf Songs presents a stripped own but electric and heavy version of decapitation blues, originally a vibrating and pulsating track. Jessica Bailiff brings a new take on Lakeside Blues, heavily relying on keyboards.

* 2022 stock* This record is a collection of rare and unreleased material, mostly recorded between the release of her second and third album. As such, it can be seen as the missing link between the rather droney second record, and the starker Jessica Bailiff record. This is more than ,,just’’ a collection of older material: this records explains why it took her so long to finish her third record: she was also working on these gems which form a regular full length on their own. Songs like Your so…

Zar: Songs for the spirits is the second production of independent micro-label JuJu Sounds. The project focuses on building bridges between musicians from marginalised communities and niche audiences from around the world. The mission of JuJu Sounds is to revive valuable musical ecosystems, not just to sell exotic products.

Tip! * 250 copies limited reissue** Mono Egypt is a compilation of field recordings of various musical cultures from contemporary Egypt. It is the result of several years of work with musicians from the Eastern Desert, Nubia, the Nile Delta, Cairo and the port cities of the Suez Canal. This album is the fruit of dozens of recording sessions conducted in private homes and gardens, on riverbanks and rooftops, at the back of bars, in the desert, and in many other unusual places. Professional artist…

**80 copies limited edition** Salmoni is an acoustic duo formed by Filippo Gillono on acoustic guitar and Zevi Bordovach on harmonium. In 2019 they started a cohabitation in Turin with other musicians from the experimental scene of the city. Their common devotion to Robert Wyatt leads the two musicians to start playing together, at first with out any precise aim, but after a while an interesting sound and new compositions emerged. So begins a musical research to reach a spontaneous, instinctual,…

Chaoui is a genre of Berber music that originated in the Aurès region of Algeria. It is a mixture of Saharan and Atlas mountain music marked with dancing rhythms and is part of the oral living tradition of the Aurès region. The first recordings on magnetic tape date back to the 1930s when Aissa Jermouni’s music was introduced and published internationally. Over the years, Chaoui has given birth to various sub-genres. The genre was popularized in the 1930s and 1940s, and still generates a strong …

Hassan Wargui is a self-taught musician, composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and an expert in the songcraft and poetry of the Tachelhit speaking Amazigh tribes of the Anti-Atlas mountains in the south of Morocco. He was born in 1985 in the rural community of Issafen, which lies between Taroudant and Tafraoute in the Anti-Atlas mountains of Southern Morocco. His music draws from the deep well of Amazigh, or Berber, cultures that have long been suppressed across North Africa after the reg…

Musician and composer Sahba Sizdahkhani serves as a unique crossroad of East meets West. Influenced heavily by both 1960’s spiritual free-jazz and Persian Classical Music, he channels the fire-energy and longing for connectivity these two stormy histories represent. At age 12, his self-proclaimed “aha moment” occurred while listening to The John Coltrane Quartet for the very first time. He was hooked and immediately began studies on jazz drum set and classical snare drum.As the years passed, how…

Six Organs mainstay Ben Chasny has become one of the high shamen of the US psychedelic underground, disseminating his hairy vision between at least three bands and a couple of genres over the past decade. His umpteenth album begins with a sonic white-out called Waswasa – a thrilling myocardial infarction of guitar more in keeping with another of his bands, Comets on Fire, who are, in fact, on board here. How Chasny tells his sprawling, incandescent guitar solos apart, we may never know; t…

Few albums define a genre as succinctly as Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance does for psychedelic folk. Not even landmark recordings by Pearls Before Swine or Skip Spence can stand up to the sheer madness of Finn’s sole LP, originally released in 1970. After moving to London in 1967, Finn busked around town for a couple years before entering Camden’s Chalk Farm Studios, best known for producing a string of reggae hits. Pass The Distance, however, would become more than a solo-acoustic project. Back…

** 300 copies ** Kath Bloom is a quietly legendary artist. From her early work with Loren Connors, to her appearance in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise, to international tours, and accolades from some of music’s biggest names, Bloom has truly had a stellar career. Yet she somehow still alludes widespread notoriety, culling instead a cult following of dedicated fans. In 2017 she began collaborating with guitarist David Shapiro, who is known for his work under solo moniker Alexander, …

Killer compilation -- selections from an HMV run of more than 400 78s -- recordings made in Uganda and Kenya from the mid‐1930s to the mid‐1950s. Part 2 encompasses this material circa 1952-1957. Three main types of performance are featured (not forgetting a lovely early Kenyan big‐band calypso, as if straight from the pen of Lord Kitchener). Most are minstrelsy, with songs ranging dazzlingly through subjects including loneliness and death, bastards and cut‐off trousers, trains of fire and no‐go…

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Tombak) and Burnt Friedman (electronics, synth) release their second EP YEK 2. "Equipped with one drum only and laser-pattern -- electronics, Mortazavi and Friedman produce delicate, yet archaic, trance -- inducing, transnational dance music with... hints of dust and grain..." --(Freq) Mortazavi and Friedman move hands and faders according to odd cyclical rhythms with incredible accuracy. The extreme dynamic range and rhythmic congruency of drum and electronics merge bot…

Larry Conklin bought his first guitar, a Gibson J-45, in 1970, after he got out of the army. "I taught myself to play. I wrote songs and instrumentals (at that time Bert Jansch was my guiding light). I listened to a lot of people - Leo Kottke, John Renbourn, Django Reinhardt, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson - and especially Rev. Gary Davis, who played only with his thumb and index finger as I did." Larry's first record, Jackdaw was self-released in 1980 and includes beautiful solo 12 stri…

Tompkins Square is proud to release two solo acoustic guitar albums by Rick Deitrick. Gentle Wilderness was released as a private press LP in 1978. River Sun River Moon consists of previously unreleased recordings from the same time period. Deitrick came to our attention via Brooks Rice and Michael Klausman, who compiled Imaginational Anthem Vol 8 : The Private Press, which features Rick's "Missy Christa" from Gentle Wilderness.Ohio-born Rick Deitrick took up the guitar at 16 and decided to appr…

A dazzling display of 12-string melodicism, Arc Minutes is the second full-length LP from once New Englander, now Tokyo-based, instrumentalist Rob Noyes. If one had to pin an influence from the holy trinity, rather than the existential drift of Fahey or the raga-tinged interpretations of Robbie Basho, Noyes excels at Leo Kottke-style dynamics playing huge, bright runs within compact arrangements that explode with exuberance. Since his debut, Noyes has matured with an intense focus and here deliv…

Minimal acoustic melodicism from this NYC mainstay. Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who's who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legen…

Though frequently overshadowed by his contemporary and Takoma Records labelmate John Fahey, the compositions and performances of Daniel R. Robinson Jr., best known by the stage name Robbie Basho, were integral in the development of the American primitive guitar style. Along with Fahey, and songwriter/composers such as Max Ochs, Leo Kottke, and others, Basho helped bring to the masses the distinct form of guitar finger-picking, which blended folk and country-blues with neo-classical composition t…

** 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…