Folk /
Real Essence
2015 release ** Limited edition of 900 hand-numbered copies. "Real Essence is an album made with the acoustic Tricanta Veena, recorded in India, in the spiritually dense hours before dawn. The music of this great comeback by Paolo Tofani is not only for lovers of Indian music. As if Robbie Basho had lived in India, it is influenced by the East and the West. A new music, syncretic and deeply rich in inner peace, recorded with an impressive sound, like a hi-fi demonstration, without any tricks or …
World Behind Curtains
2012 release ** “While guitarist Yair Yona was first lured into the world of acoustic fingerpicking by a Bert Jansch CD that he found in a London shop, the Takoma school is his foundation. Like Steffen Basho-Junghans, he’s embraced this fundamentally American style on its own terms, learned its language inside out, and still made music that’s true to an upbringing on the far side of the Greenwich Meridian.” Recommended if you like: John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, American Primitive Guitar,…
Ghost Ship
Four years after his rock juggernaut Puritan, Chris Brokaw delivers Ghost Ship, a landscape meditation (at sea) for vocals and electric guitars.
I set out to make an 8 song statement like 'Desert Shore' or 'Raw Power', but it became a 9 song...something else. I've described it to friends as 'Twin Peaks-ish' but that feels only part right. The songs were written on a 60's Teisco Del Rey electric guitar, set up by the Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gaug…
The Soul Of All Natural Things
Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms was created in the heart of hippy country, LA’s Topanga Canyon, by a dental hygienist who was inspired by nature and by the cultural revolution going on around her. When Parallelograms was finished, it sounded like a masterpiece, but the label had pressed it so poorly, sales were non-existent. Obscurity beckoned. But in the internet age obscurity can be discreetly transformed into a kind of niche immortality. By 2003, Parallelograms had become a cult album.
Slowly, …
Giorgos Katsaros
Big Tip! Our obsession with underground Greek music continues with 10 ultra-rare recordings of heartbreak and vice from rembetiko legend Giorgos Katsaros. Katsaros, who by some accounts lived to be over 100 years old, carried the old songs of Greece to the Diaspora in the United States, bridging centuries of music in one storied lifetime. Born in 1901 on the Greek island of Amorgos, Katsaros’ was enchanted with the songs he picked up as a kid in the streets of Piraeus and Athens. Encouraged by h…
Tim Hardin 2
Limited LP, Deluxe 180-gram reissue including original artwork & credits.. The second album by folk artist Tim Hardin, released in 1967, Tim Hardin 2 contains his most popular and much-covered composition “If I Were a Carpenter,” most notably recorded by Bobby Darin, whose version peaked at #8 in the US and #9 in the UK in 1966. While not as prolific as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, or Neil Young, the prototypical folk-rocker Tim Hardin remains one of the greatest singer/songwriters, as much for his ma…
Repertoire
Restock due soon! Edition of 500 copies. Shane Parish is a member of the Bill Orcutt Quartet and Tzadik Recording Artist. Solo guitar arrangements of various jazz /avant garde/electronic/etc. tunes. Imagine: It’s sometime in the back half of the 19th century, America. You’re sitting in the parlor of your mansion, or in the only room of your shack; things are dusty and smell like sweat and hair, no matter how wealthy you may be. You don’t own a phonograph, and you don’t know who Tony Hawk is, but…
Time is Glass
With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County -- a far country, to some, but still part of the world thro…
Bonn Ist Supreme
2023 restock. Subtitled: Live at the Kulturforum, Bonn, Germany, November 24, 1980. Another in the Wooden Weavil series, this time an unreleased live Robbie Basho recording from Germany in 1980. Robbie Basho was one of the great pioneers of the acoustic steel string guitar in the U.S., along with Leo Kottke and John Fahey in the 1960s. This program appears to have been recorded in one go. Robbie scatters his Americana numbers throughout, beginning with "Redwood Ramble," and ending with "Californ…
In My Own Time
Tip! *50th annyversary deluxe edition* Recorded over a six month period in 1970/71 at Bearsville, In My Own Time was Karen Dalton's only fully planned and realized studio album. The material was carefully selected and crafted for her by producer/musician Harvey Brooks, the Renaissance man of rock-jazz who played bass on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Miles’ Bitches Brew. It features ten songs that reflected Dalton's incredible ability to break just about anybodys heart – from her spectral evoc…
Faro Annie
*2022 stock* This is John Renbourn’s fifth and most blues influenced album, backed by the Pentangle rhythm section of Terry Cox and Danny Thompson. The singer/guitarist often takes a folk-rock approach, and often investigates American folk songs, on ‘Faro Annie’, beginning with the traditional “White House Blues”, a song about the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. Next is “Buffalo Skinners” another traditional piece made famous by Woody Guthrie. Then there is “Country Blues”, a p…
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…
Arc Minutes (Lp)
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…
Midnight Man
* 2023 stock * LP version. "Davy Graham is recognized as an early influential figure on the 1960s British folk scene, where he inspired many famous practitioners of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar such as Bert Jansch, Paul Simon, John Martyn and indeed Jimmy Page. Not one to be categorised Graham could be seen as a true world music artist covering the genres of folk, blues and jazz. He also popularized DADGAD tuning, later widely adopted by many acoustic guitarists. Midnight Man was Davy's 2nd s…
Hat
LP version. "Davy Graham is recognized as an early influential figure on the 1960s British folk scene, where he inspired many famous practitioners of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar such as Bert Jansch, Paul Simon, John Martyn and indeed Jimmy Page. Not one to be categorised Graham could be seen as a true world music artist covering the genres of folk, blues and jazz. He also popularized DADGAD tuning, later widely adopted by many acoustic guitarists. Released in 1969 Davy noted that the fourtee…
Ex Patris
The title Ex Patris (from the fathers) plays on the idiomatic baroque lute compositions presented here which emulate the classical repertoire. It also refers to this almost forgotten instrument, which was passed on by the fathers. The Jozef Van Wissem's aim is to bring back and liberate the lute. The four compositions on Ex Patris form a circular narrative of interlocking repetitive melodic series. The follow up to Important release “ It is all that is made” kicks off with the pro apocalyptic tr…
Companion Rises
Six Organs of Admittance is back after 3 years with a new record, new techniques in sound generation, and a new attitude. Companion Rises has a driving force only hinted at with previous releases. Manipulating the rhythmic DNA from songs such as the bass-dominated “Taken by Ascent” (on his last record, Burning the Threshold), Ben Chasny has grown a new sound creature in his lab that is as welcoming as it is terrifying and as fun to listen to as it provocative and intriguing.Methodologically, Com…
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Mark McGuire takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through a winter wonderland with his soulful take on holiday favorites. From timeless classics like Joy to the World to a gorgeous rendition of Vince Guaraldi's Christmas Time Is Here, McGuire thrillingly updates these arrangements with his signature psychedelic guitar work. Here, he employs a wide spectrum of sounds and instruments to bring new ideas to these beloved chestnuts. Brimming with joy and festive cheer, Do You Hear What I Hear? is a mo…
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…