Psych /
Livin' Love Plus
*2025 stock. LP miniature* A road paving, agency grabbing, '69 girl group garage band trip! Nashville, 1966: five young girls teach themselves their instruments playing along to the radio. Initially named 'The Pivots' and by the end of '67 christened as The Feminine Complex, they were playing out and developing a local following including radio and television appearances. They created their own versions of popular songs, a style that reflected their need to express their own experience of girlho…
Pass The Distance
*2025 stock. LP miniature* "A black-magical Devendra Banhart in a different time/place long before this freakfolk thing hit, the English bard Simon Finn released Pass The Distance, a sprawling, fractured, dense brew of dark acid-folk... The album’s centerpiece is “Jerusalem”, a six-minute, shiver-inducing crucifixion-of-Jesus exorcism that anticipates Current 93 as well as a bevy of lesser apocalyptic folkies. By its ecstatic, organ smashed final strains, you can’t but help imagining Finn sweaty…
Bebek / Irgat
Zel Zele is extremely proud to present the first-ever reissue of a cult classic from 1974, written, produced, and arranged by Anatolian rock pioneer Barış Manço, backed by his legendary Kurtalan Ekspres band. Sevil & Ayla’s Bebek / Irgat is a highly sought-after Turkish folk and psychedelic single, sung by Yeşilçam stars Sevil & Ayla during the golden era of Anatolian Rock music.
A-side Bebek hardly needs an introduction, being a rare gem among crate diggers and beat enthusiasts. The track’s str…
Prodigal Son
VHF debut and second widely-available LP by Liam, part of a new generation of underground “American primitive” guitar players serving the traditions and smashing them up simultaneously. Prodigal Son is a portrait of an artist on the road, changing fast, recording things as they spring from the fountain. The sound here is raw – grass and dirt instead of pre-fab; homemade/handmade instead of high-tech, etc.
There’s a visceral quality and immediacy of culture that’s being lost every day in modern…
What A Beautiful Place
This recorded autobiography of Catherine Howe, age 20, briefly appeared in 1971. Too young for memoirs, most artists have barely established any sort of musical competence by the age of legal adulthood, let alone compositions matching the maturity and complexity of Howe's. What A Beautiful Place, however, is a prodigious effort wrought from the melancholy ruminations of post-adolescence. The album's twelve songs unfold like a classic bildungsroman, beginning in the smoke-stained industrial count…
Magical Power
One of truly iconic figures in the Japanese alternative rock scene ever! Originally released in 1973 this was Magical Power Maco’s highly visionary debut album. An eccentric mix of psyche, folk, kraut elements wisely filtered with Oriental sensibility.
Träden
The highly praised and long sold-out 2LP album of transcendental psychedelic rock from the eternal Träden, formerly known as Träd, Gräs och Stenar, is finally available again. New limited edition pressing on multi-colored vinyl. Recorded live to tape in the band’s countryside music workshop, these mind-melting improvisations travel beyond time and space through the magical unknown, a manifestation of timeless organic music and free creation.
Scott 4
2024 Repress. Scott 4 is Scott Walker's fifth solo album. It was released in late 1969 under his birth name, Scott Engel, and failed to chart. Reissues have been released under his stage name. It has since received praise as one of Walker's best works. Scott 4 was the first Walker album to consist solely of self-penned songs. The preceding Scott (1967), Scott 2 (1968) and Scott 3 (1969) albums had each featured a mixture of originals and covers, including several translations of Jacques Brel son…
Yodeling Astrologer
2024 limited restock, last-ever copies. "Yodeling Astrologer (aka: Color By The Number) could be considered an anomaly, a one-off or a miracle of circumstance in the history of psychedelic pop music. Mij, a.k.a. Jim Holmberg was discovered by ESP-Disk owners while playing in Washington Square Park in the summer of 1968. His style and persona mesmerized the label heads, and he explained to them a recent auto accident had fractured his skull but left him changed. He perceived sound, color and visi…
Lee Hazlewoodism - Its Cause And Cure
Deluxe 180gr edition. Lee Hazlewood's second album for MGM had something of a split personality, though both sides were an accurate depiction of various sides of his musical mind. Released in 1967, Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure opens with five story-songs, most of which are dramatic narratives in which Hazlewood speaks rather than sings, approaching his recitations with all the seriousness he can muster, while Billy Strange's arrangements provide elaborate but understated accompaniment. E…
Mosaike der Imagination
Turning their gaze to the buoyant culture of wyrd, modernist German folk music, Quindi welcome a spectacularly idiosyncratic offering from Johannes Schebler, aka Baldruin. Bewildering narrative twists, high drama and intricate delicacy make Mosaike der Imagination an engrossing listen from the outset, as baroque atmospheres and tumbledown drums intertwine with tactile string plucks and needlepoint synthesis in an authoritative bridging of ancient and hypermodern sonic sensibilities. Schebler's c…
The Red Valley
Debut standalone VHF LP by the Elkhorn duo of Drew Gardner and Jesse Sheppard, a tight set of six studio recordings in a variety of moods and featuring a lot of new sound textures. Elkhorn’s prolific stream of releases since 2016 has highlighted their mastery of sprawling long-form, acoustic-driven hypno-jams, with an emphasis on live performance (including on their collaboration with Pelt’s Mike Gangloff on the Shackamaxon Concert LP). The Red Valley is a more layered and composed-sounding set,…
Shackamaxon Concert
Delicate and beautiful music from the combined forces of the recently ubiquitous East-Coast psychedelic combo Elkhorn and Pelt’s Mike Gangloff, laying down two epic raga-like performances captured on a 2022 collaborative tour. Gangloff - fresh from the triumph of his VHF solo fiddle LP “Evening Measures” - has found a distinct instrumental voice, blending drone music and trad influences in a way that really advances the tradition into new areas.
“East Dauphin Suite” builds patiently on the inter…
Lavender Daydreams
*375 copies limited edition* "One reviewer said this about Lavender Daydreams: “Blissed out folk psycher in the vein of Tim Buckley or Dan Fogleberg but waaay more psyched out. Richard has certainly dropped a tab or three in his time. A really, really good album to mind-surf to, and also poppy enough that it would sound good coming out of a boombox in a field while you are throwing the frisbee and smoking some bohoofus.” And they were right—Richard did drop many a tab when writing and recording …
Sweet Child
*Comes in a CD-sized papersleeve album replica (gatefold), with obi-strip and insert of notes mostly in Japanese..2024 stock* Second album released in 1968 by Pentangle, who with Fairport Convention led the British fark/trad scene, as a two-disc set containing a live performance at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1968 on disc 1 and a studio work on disc 2. Live performances and newly recorded songs, richly expressed through a high level of musicianship with elements of folk and jazz. Definitive …
The Pentangle
*Comes in a CD-sized papersleeve album replica (gatefold), with obi-strip and insert of notes mostly in Japanese..2024 stock* Debut release from Pentangle, who with Fairport Convention led the British folk/trad scene and were introduced in Japan in 1968 as the standard-bearers of new rock. With two guitarists, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, the band absorbed elements from jazz, and the vocals of Jackie Maxey added colour to the record. Definitive release in paper jacket, SHM-CD, 10 bonus tracks,…
Reflection
*Comes in a CD-sized papersleeve album replica (gatefold), with obi-strip and insert of notes mostly in Japanese..2024 stock* Released in 1971, this was the fifth and final album on the Transatlantic label. Following on from the previous album, this album, with Bill Reeder as producer, aimed to break new ground by adding an American element to the traditional Pentangle style. The depth of Bert Jansch's and John Renbourn's guitar playing remains the same, and this is a good album that will appeal…
Troubadour
Just Restocked - Drag City presents the first official reissue of Dorothy Carter’s 1976 debut album, her folk-music exegesis: Troubadour. It’s been 20 years since Dorothy’s passing — but thanks to last year’s reissue of her second album, Waillee Waillee (1978), and this edition of Troubadour, her music is surging forward ever more powerfully. Today’s announcement comes with a visualizer for the first single, “The King of Glory”, a hypnotic hymn hammered by Dorothy evoking western medieval music.…
Soft Power
Ezra Feinberg’s third album Soft Power sees the composer-guitarist enlist an impressive array of fellow musicians including Mary Lattimore, David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Robbie Lee and share the life affirming lead single ‘Future Sand’.
Defined by its abundance of melodies, repeating figures and ecstatic improvisations, Soft Power exudes an enlightened and transformative spirit to empower the listener. Feinberg, a practising psychoanalyst and former founding member of the San …
Waillee Waillee
** LP version includes 12 page booklet with unpublished manuscripts, drawings, photographs, and sheet music of the songs from the album.** The first ever reissue of the work of American composer Dorothy Carter, master of the hammered dulcimer, zither, and other instruments of the hammer chord zither/psalterium family. A true musical vagabond, Dorothy was born in New York in 1935, though her spiritual pursuit of an expansive musical knowledge would take her to monasteries in Mexico, conservatorie…