Folk /
Open Roads
The new vinyl album from Dennis Young, founding member of Liquid Liquid,is an acoustic vocal album with quiet indie/folk sounds especially for fans who enjoyed his Athens of the North release. The recording consists of 15 new tracks accompanied by cello/violin and bass guitar.Dennis Young is best known as the marimba player and percussionist for Liquid Liquid, a trend-setting early 1980's NYC band whose song "Cavern" was used by Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel in "White Lines". Dennis Young is a s…
No Love is Sorrow
ESP Disk presents the third solo album 'No Love Is Sorrow' by Buck Curran (of the duo Arborea). Buck Curran - vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, Ebow, piano. Adele Pappalardo - additional vocals. Dipak Kumar Chakraborty - Tabla on Blue Raga. Mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering, Montreal. Album cover photo and layout - Sarp Tuncer.
Fretted and Indebted
* Edition of 300 * Alasdair Roberts is one of our more beloved folk singers of recent years (though he hates the term folk singer apparently). The Scottish musician here supplies another document of his fascinating interpretations of wild and rare traditional songs he's sourced from various parts of Scotland. Comes on a single sided 12".
I am indebted to my piping friend Donald Lindsay for The Blythsome Bridal, The Braes of Tulliemet and The Smith’s a Gallant Fireman, while Chief O’Neill’s Favou…
Jackson C Frank: The Clear Hard Light of Genius
The story of Jackson C. Frank is tragic. The victim of a school fire in his youth, struggling with homelessness and mental illness throughout his life, half-blinded in old age before his death in 1999, Frank met continuous obstacles. And yet he enjoyed a shining moment with the release of Jackson C. Frank on Columbia Records in 1965. The album would go on to be seen as one of the greatest folk albums of the decade—maybe of all time—and its opening track “Blues Run the Game” has become a standard…
Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12
Mindblowing!!!!!! Originally released in 1979, "Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12" was Robbie Basho's 15th record, and his magnum opus of solo guitar. It is the culmination of his life's effort to usher guitar music into a new artistic paradigm, and to "establish the steel string as a concert instrument indigenous to America."This album represents Basho’s most technically fine guitar work. In both composition and performance, the album is enormously complex and yet conveys an effort…
Third Dimension Blues
RESTOCKED, FEW AVAILABLE A sublime collisions of John Fahey-esque acid guitar picking set against trance-indulged eastern raga "Abate’s 4th album stands as the zenith of his solo work to date. Opening with an acid guitar and harmonica crescendo, somewhere between the Missisipi Delta and the desert, ‘Third Dimension Blues’ turns soon into a free, deep exploration of the possibilities of Maurizio’s instrument. The love he puts on every single touch of his strings, the warmth and the beauty of thes…
Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli
another gem, a wonderful collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar tunes from the mid 60s up to the dawn of the 80s -- beautiful work from a slew of players we've never heard of -- but we'd put right up there with Fahey and Basho in the way they reach from the back porch to the cosmos with just their fingers and some strings! One thing we love about this set, and the Numero Group releases to date, is how deep they dig and what beauty they unearth, somehow with impeccable sound quality. S…
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…
Nordic Visions
Alreay out of print "While Wooden Wand and Satya Sai jammed with the Sky High Band in beautiful California, the Vanishing Voice dug in deep in the frozen northeast. Snowed in with utopian texts and mounting paranoia, Steven the Harvester, Heidi White Diamond Diehl, and Pete Wolfy Nolan joined nonhorse in an abandoned textile factory, boiling out these ballads of suspended disbelief and hope for the better world... killer vinyl edition on this new label of the self released cdr. Great packaging w…
The Glass Bead Game
James Blackshaw once made Michael Gira cry. Not by sucker-punching the poor guy. It was something much simpler: Blackshaw reduced the former Swan frontman — a menacing presence even as he eclipses AARP eligibility — to tears through nothing but a finger-picked acoustic and minimal, melancholic chords. It's easy to understand why. As Gira wrote in a press release celebrating Blackshaw's signing to his Young God imprint, the widely-acclaimed 12-string maestro writes "absolutely beautiful and spell…
The Black Dirt Sessions
Displays fully honed examples of all of Rose's various styles & themes - traditional, raga & ragtime. "Cross The North Fork" - a 13-minute revisiting of a track 1st laid down on the great "Kensington Blues" is a winding, thoroughly engrossing journey. It is a welcome neighbor to the album's other spendid joys ranging from the jaunty & infectious "Fishtown Flower" to the pensive & appropriate melancholy punch of "Box Of Pine." Limited to 2000 copies on 180g RTI vinyl.
Music By William Eaton
Mellow disc of tripped-out experimental acoustic-instrument pieces from composer/instrument designer William Eaton, reissuing a self-released 1978 lp of said. there’s more than a twinge of Fahey/takoma-lineage steel-string wrangling herein, albeit augmented with a certain Partch/Hans Reichel-ish sensibility and unusual recording techniques... but it stays pretty damn “easy on the ears” throughout.. "When I started building instruments, playing guitar took on a whole new dimension. The process of…