Folk /
Region, Music, and Practice Vol.1
"It is not only an album, but also a complete documentary of an event. We combine cassette and CD into one album so that one may review the unusual art project from different aspects. It also includes a precious booklet about everything said on the talks. Each track in the album is heard for the first time. For the project, Lao Dan and Mamer created brand new works. Mamer even began a new band named Mask. One remarkable song that didn’t be recorded is Water Flows sang by Wu Tiao Ren’s Mao Tao in…
There Is No Hunger in Your Shame
Tip! Builenradar is the new moniker under which Belgian visual artist and musician Wouter Vanhaelemeesch performs his damaged post-apocalyptic bikerfolk. Previously known as Urpf Lanze, he’s been producing trance-like guitar boogie that takes inspiration from disparate influences since the early 2010s. Builenradar plays in a self-developed unorthodox style with a resophonic guitar on his lap and a voice ranging from messy grunts to eerie whistling and absent murmurs. Once, after Vanhaelemeesch o…
Distances
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* "Brilliant new instrumental fork-bending from the always amazing Elkhorn, presented here in a quartet setting I had not heard before. The basic band remains Drew Gardner on electric guitar and Jesse Sheppard on acoustic, but as often seems to happen with these guys, there are a couple more faces in the studio. This time it's two drummers. One is Ian McColm, a Virginia tub monster who has played in many excellent situations, including a 2012 Feeding Tube duo casse…
Maison Rose
*2022 repress.* An album such as this obviously owes a lot to the atmosphere in which it was recorded, which we can imagine was magical. We know it took place in Fromentel, Normandy, in a farm converted into a studio by the producer Jacques Denjean, known for his work with Dionne Warwickor Françoise Hardyas well as having been a member of the Double Six. It was also at Fromentel, that Denjean would record two fantastic albums with Albert Marcoeur. When Emmanuelle Parrenin followed in his footste…
Funeral Folk
Funeral Folk is a musical collaboration between Sara Parkman and Maria W Horn. Together they explore the rituals of grief and the musical phenomenology of death through their respective crafts and influences. Sara Parkman is a violinist, singer and composer focused on Swedish folk music. For her latest release Vesper, she has been diving into her Christian heritage - the sacred music that has been a part of her family traditions for several generations. Maria W Horn is a contemporary composer em…
Via Lattea
Via Lattea is the new recording project of the music and performance research ensemble Enten Hitti. The work takes inspiration from research on the “feminine” and from the matrilineal transmission of life. It is the result of various research trips to the places where the culture of the “sacred female” took shape over 4000 years ago: Cyprus, Crete, Turkey, Ireland, South Africa, Indonesia … The historical and geographical suggestions have been freely reinterpreted and transformed into musical pi…
In New York
Moroccan Jajouka master Bachir Attar meets American experimental musician Elliot Shrap for a live jam of drum machines and traditional Moroccan instruments in 1990. Bachir Attar's career spans five decades and represents the transcendental sounds of Jajouka, a small Moroccan village situated between Fes and Tangier, known for its unique mystical sound. Fans include William Burroughs and The Rolling Stones with which Bachir recorded with in 1989. A year later Attar collaborated with the prolific …
Het Vuil Volkske
Ghent-based wanderer Benoit Monsieurs has been exploring the many routes paved by the primitive folk guitarists of legend and is now carving out his own path as Venediktos Tempelboom. These seven tracks straddle the Eastern and Western codes that so infused the hazy Americana pioneered by the John Faheys and the Robbie Bashos of this earth, with the always-haunting Flemish landscape unmistakably lining the contours.
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…
A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth
Tip! In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic…
After the Bend
*300 copies limited edition* 'After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM’s 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, an album noted for “an astute synthesis of ‘library music’ and solo acoustic guitar,” and “a seamless blend into the uncluttered and airier side of classic 1970’s giallo,” After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth—of strings, outdoor recordings, …
De Dreit Nien
The Jericho project is fully in line with the approach of the La Nòvia collective from which it originates, a hub for like-minded musicians reinventing regional folk repertoires, marrying traditional French song with minimalism via the use of drone. Jericho is just one of many available permutations of La Nòvia members, with the line-up including Yann Gourdon, Clément Gauthier, Jacques Puech and Antoine Cognet – you could say it’s La Nòvia’s flagship, or super-group. There are no dramatic stylis…
The Story Of Valerie
*2022 repress* The discovery of a cassette of Carola Baer's early 90s private home recordings was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. Made as a one off mixtape of newly recorded songs, and given away to a long-since forgotten recipient, this cassette was found in 2017 at a Goodwill "bins" location in Portland, Oregon. These chaotic, by the pound thrift stores contain 1000's of unsorted items in constant flux, which are only available for the public to buy for a limited time before…
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.
Kleine
* 2022 stock. Edition of 300* Kleine was released in 2002 on tape only. Though it was recorded over the course of five years, this is probably their most coherent output – the record starts with mostly acoustic parts, mixed with more psychedelic parts. Towards the end, the more direct songs merge perfectly with the tape and drone experiments. On this record, Karin and Jeffrey get support from an impressive list of guest musicians: Alastair Galbraith on violin, B’Eirth (In Gowan Ring, Birch Book)…