New Arrivals
Texas Blues Working
Featuring the 6 tracks from the original release, along with an additional brand new amazing track. The original edition on tape received some fantastic reviews, so its great to finally have this out on CD, as it really is a superb recording. which came out around one of Christina's most amazingly active recording periods, self releasing fantastic discs like Masque Femine, Two Nights Film and A Blossom Fell as well as Kranky releasing Original Darkness in 2008. Texas Blues Working feature…
Captain Wedderburn's Courtship / The Dowie Dens O Yarrow
A split single to be listened and heard (and more importantly, bought) with the compilation Whar the Pig Gaed on the Spree. Tradition-minded singers Alasdair Roberts, Karine Polwart, and Drew Wright do the honors. A-side: "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" performed by Alasdair Roberts and Karine Polwart B-side: "The Dowie Dens o Yarrow" performed by Drew Wright
Alan Lomax In Haiti
Harte Recordings, together with the estate of Alan Lomax, and in collaboration with The Library Of Congress and the The Association for Cultural Equity, present Alan Lomax In Haiti -- a chronicle of Lomax's 1936 Haitian recording expedition for the Library. This 10-CD box-set, in the modern tradition of those lovingly created by Revenant and Dust-To-Digital, is curated from over 50 hours of field recordings by the pre-eminent Haitian scholar, Gage Averill. Besides the CDs, the set contain…
Redlight
"Portland, Oregon's Grails are another new band that fall into the developed post-everything niche sparked off by the likes of Godspeed at the end of the last millenium. Made up with members of Jacki-o-Motherf*cker and Holy Sons, their sound takes in the quiet/loud formula but peppers it with dense layers of Violin, Piano and twilight instrumentation. The band have already sparked off the interest of the Swans' Michael Gira and Neurosis guitarist/vocalist and label co-owner Steve Von Till - thou…
Empty The Sun
BOOK + CD: A novel by Joseph Mattson featuring music by SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. Available in First Trade Paperback Edition with CD soundtrack and as a limited edition vinyl LP soundtrack with Large Format Book. “Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles.” Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson’s Emp…
Sarod recital / live in Peshawar
Three beautiful extended ragas recorded last year in Peshawar: "Asad Qizilbash is the only Sarod player in Pakistan since 1992, keeping this traditional instrument and its music alive. Asad was born in 1963 to the famous violinist K.H. Qizilbash, who was responsible for closing the gap between western and eastern classical music. After attending a concert performed by his future Master, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Asad decided to devote himself to the instrument. Today, Asad Qizilbash has the honour t…
Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Tr
Based on four years of fieldwork throughout the state, the Florida Folklife Program released the two-album, 27-track LP Drop on Down in Florida: Recent Field Recordings of Afro-American Traditional Music in 1981. The album was intended to highlight African American music traditions for a statewide public audience, particularly blues and sacred traditions. When the Folklife Program sought the opportunity to produce an expanded reissue of the album that would include previously unissued field…
Luck In The Valley
Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few 'takes' and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, 'I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs without overworking the material, but at the same time creating memorable accompaniments on the spot.' Several of the so…
Ragged And Right
This slab of gripping sound was brought about by Jack Rose's exuberant love of lowdown music. Inspired by the Mordicai Jones/Link Wray 3 Track Shack sessions, the idea for this collaboration was germinated while Rose was traveling through the heartland on a tour with D. Charles Speer & the Helix in spring 2008. Musicians used to the road are familiar with the phenomenon wherein a certain tape or recording becomes the thematic soundtrack to the tour at hand. In this case, daily doses of 'Scorpio …
Alienacustica
'Alienacustica' is a superb collection of works by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) as you have never heard before. Forget all MCIAA's noise records... this is a totally different affair: starting from January 2006 they have released 3 unusual, completely acoustic works, all in limited and sold-out editions: a soloist split lp, a private art edition cd-r, and an out-of-print cd. The different approach to these works shows another side of the Opalio brothers' musical universe: all…
Catch My Shoe
"Vinyl version of the 25th classic release from Dutch pioneers, The Ex. Absolutely essential."
Maidenstone E.P.
"A previous member of the band UN, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) is now one of the epicenters and key collaborators of the North American free-folk movement, along with such luminaries as Jack Rose, Charalambides, Ben Chasny and the Jewelled Antler Collective. With her hypnotic, echoey church bell chanting, Burke possesses a power-filled vocal sound that harkens back not only to those other polar queens of disaffected freakout psychedelia Nico and Barbara Manning, but she is also akin to and i…
Have One On Me
Destined to be one of the top album of the year, finally Joanna Newsom releases her first album since late 2006's Ys, making up for lost time with a disc for 2008, one for 2009 and one for today. Featuring Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan from Joanna's Ys Street Band, Have One On Me is an extravagantly packaged (and extravagantly nicely-priced) collection of fantastic new Joanna Newsom songs -- her most colorful record to date.
Acoustic solo percussion-vol.3
Following his two previous 7“s with ‘acoustic solo percussion’ (see Vital Weekly 687 and 706), here is the third volume. Like before it’s hard to believe its percussion music. But this time we get a detailed notes on the proceedings: side E has ‘two cymbals bowed together with one cello bow’ and side F has ‘a snare drum rubbed with a ring of styropor and two cymbals bowed together with a cello bow’ (and made me wonder how many hands Wolfarth has?). Oh, did I mention ‘no overdubs, electronics and…
Films
"Filmmakers often try to make a great film by making it feel heavier than film is by nature. Rudy Burckhardt seems happy if he can make his feel lighter. That does leave him unique, and he succeeds in it too. There is no distortion of image or sound. Its magic invention - including the later dream-weight - is new and inscrutable. It is a film that changes when you watch it again, it has many surprises I haven't mentioned. Take it as a wonderfully touching dream and as an amazing marvel of…
relax most of your muscles
a blurry midlife crisis for all children of the revolution! the A side of this psychedelic bumcrack is filled with 10 locked grooves, all vocal, some different panned brainbubbles, featuring one loop of Dennis Tyfus' personal alarm clock. All of these sounds played simultaneously at the 'Relax most of your muscles' Dennis Tyfus' solo exhibtion at Be Part in Waregem, Belgium, providing a non stop soundtrack that coincided with large paintings and around 20 film loops and drawings which cre…
Refuse This Gift
The third album Refuse This Gift from Bear Claw is one of two records that ended up being part of a double whammy of releases from Sickroom Records just recently for me. Paired up, at least in my mind, with the excellent Conformists record (which you can find a couple posts below) Bear Claw gives a bit more of a traditional spin on the Chicago math/noise-rock sound compared to their label mates. With their third album Refuse This Gift the band hasn’t deviated all that much from their pr…
Hosting Myself
Jean-Claude Jones (electro acoustic bass, live electronics). This solo bass album is a distillation of my language, the articulation of my voice on my instrument. It is free improvised music, focused on energy and the moment. This project incorporates electro-acoustic sounds and noises, groovy rhythmical games and sporadic forays into melody.
Rosa De Sangue
Digital version in a heavy mini LP style cover with exact reproduction of the original artwork, and a full color foldout mini poster insert with new liner notes by Lula Cortes. Edition of 1000 copies." "First ever reissue of this Brazilian private press monster rarity. Originally custom pressed in 1980, Rosa De Sangue is the closing chapter of the amazing Recife psychedelic movement that flourished and centered around the work of Lula Cortes, beginning in 1973 with the release of Satwa, and the …