Folk /
Chelsea Girl
She is beautiful. And in a world where so much can easily be possessed on a whim or for a promise, she is not comparable. She has a clear, pure ring, a trueness, like an arrow that has hit an inner mark and can’t be wedged loose. Her voice and her manner, that stretch farther into the past than perhaps she realizes, may set the new style: an existential pop style that is as earthy as Mary Travers (Peter, Paul & Mary) yet more elegant, more isolated. Her name is Nico. I don’t know where she was b…
The Temple
After being an integral part of the Manchester and Glasgow underground scenes, Leo Robinson announces his debut solo album under his own name: The Temple will be released 27th October on Prah Recordings. A baroque epic set in the mundane settings of contemporary Northern England, its narrative reflects a spiritual or psychoanalytic journey. Ten songs dealing in intricate string-tinged folk, and produced with a sense of up-close intimacy and structural freedom that frequently blindsides the liste…
Don & Stevie
Temporary Super Offer! Lost love songs and self-pressed pop acetates by this previously unheard Californian folk duo from beneath the shadows of the Hollywood Hills. These recordings of unreleased and unknown American acidic folk and acoustic pop were made in the late 60s by husband and wife duo Don & Stevie Gere. For over 40 years they've sat untouched and unplayed in a box of unmarked studio tapes at their family home in Los Angeles. As original pop songs and guitar based arrangements from the…
Astroturf Noise
Astroturf Noise exists at the intersection of free improvisation, effects-heavy noise music, and American roots music.
Divine Music From A Jail
Oidupaa Vladimir Oyun was a Tuvan musician and a man with an amazing, but really heavy destiny, a man of unbending will and divine talent and the creator of a unique style of throat singing, accompanied by playing the button accordion. Researchers described Oidupaa's style as blues and emphasized the complexity of this style of performance, which requires the singer to exert a lot of tension on the vocal cords. This is the author's unique version of the deepest and most powerful type of throat s…
Waka and Other Compositions: Contemporary Music of Japan
2024 stock. This 1960 release is a selection of compositions by Japanese experimental composer Michiko Toyama. The 12 compositions are drawn from traditional Japanese musical forms with additional influence from many of the experimental composers in the West that were active during the twentieth century. Some pieces are sung with instrumental accompaniment; others are spoken poetry. The instrumentation consists of a mix of traditional Japanese and modern Western instruments, including electronic…
Tibetan Ritual
2024 stock. This recording presents in its entirety the “Invocation to the Goddess Yeshiki Mamo,” performed by Buddhist monks (lamas) from the Nyingmapa Monastery of Dehra Dun in India with the authorization of the private secretariat of the Dalai Lama. The monks, who represent one of the oldest Buddhist sects to be established in Tibet in the 8th century, are trained to produce vocal sounds at a very low pitch, believing the disembodied sounds to be the nearest to the divine. The liner notes pr…
Sufi Ceremony: Rifa' Ceremony of the Eleventh Day of Rabi-L-Achien Honouring Abdul Hadir Beker
*2024 stock* Sufi, or Sufism, is often defined as "Islamic mysticism.” Sufism exists in both Sunni and Shia Islam. It is not a distinct sect, rather it is an association or fraternity for the achievement of religious enthusiasm and ecstasy by means of exercise undertaken in common. This 1959 recording is of a Rifa' Ceremony performed in South Africa. The Rifa’ association was originally found mainly in the Middle East eventually spreading to Malaysia and Africa.
Souvenirs
Black Vinyl. From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of vocal pieces. The first vocal album by beloved Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - profound and deeply moving home cassette recordings made amidst political upheaval and turmoil. These are songs of wisdom, loss, mourning, and exile, sung directly into a boombox and accompanied by Emahoy’s unmistakable piano. Though written and recorded while still living at her family’s home in Ad…
Alive In America 1974
This album features Fairport Convention's 1974 live recording from their USA tour, making its debut on vinyl. The band, founded in 1967 by Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings, and Shaun Frater, evolved through lineup changes, with Sandy Denny steering them towards traditional British music. Liege & Lief marked the inclusion of fiddler Dave Swarbrick. By 1974, Dave Pegg replaced Hutchings. This vinyl release captures a pivotal moment in the band's history during their USA tour.
Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Fascinating and highly attractive project which returns the music of Gurdjieff (c. 1866 – 1949) to its ethnic inspirational sources. To date Gurdjieff’s compositions have largely been studied, in the West, via the piano transcriptions of Thomas de Hartmann. Armenian composer Levon Eskenian now goes beyond the printed notes to look at the musical traditions that Gurdjieff encountered during his travels, and rearranges the compositions from this perspective. Eskenian…
Zartir
*Deluxe packaging* The third album from Levon Eskenian’s remarkable ensemble is its most adventurous to date. As well as reclaiming the music of esoteric teacher G. I. Gurdjieff for folk instrumentation, Zartir situates Gurdjieff in a tradition of Armenian bards and troubadours including Ashugh Jivani, Baghdasar Tbir and the legendary Sayat-Nova. In parallel, an emphasis on pieces for sacred dance reaches its apex in The Great Prayer, an entrancing collaboration between the Gurdjieff Ensemble an…
Thunder
Stephan Micus is a unique musician and composer. He collects and studies instruments from all around the world and creates his own musical journeys with them. This is his 25th solo album for ECM and its sound is dominated by the four-metre long Tibetan dung chen trumpet, an instrument he has recently learned and is using for the first time. It was the thunderous sound of this instrument that led to the album’s name and its nine tracks celebrating deities around the world. “I dedicate this music …
Christmas Soli
CD. Remastered edition: John Fahey has made a habit of recording a new album of Christmas music every five or six years, but The New Possibility, which was originally released in 1968, is still his best. One of the best and most influential acoustic guitarists of his generation, John Fahey's music fused past and present, borrowing from the traditions of blues and folk music and filtering them through a modern musical viewpoint. Some of Fahey's most striking (and most popular) work appeared on a …
Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice)
Nailed as John Fahey’s ‘non-Christian religious album’, where he ‘found’ Eastern religion and kick-started the New Age movement, Fahey said, in 1990, that it was his greatest guitar record. Considering the often-puzzling self-mythologizing that accompanied earlier albums, Fahey’s sleeve dedication to “my guru, Swami Satchidananda” and booklet extolling the virtues of Yogaville West, “a growing spiritual community in the beautiful mountains of Lake County, Northern California” were shockingly unt…
Volume 3 / The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites
Originally released in 1964, Dance of Death offers a glimpse of an artist in transformation. More than half the album's titles draw from the traditional blues and country repertoire Fahey had spent his teen years and young adulthood collecting, listening to, and learning to play, yet the recordings proved once and for all that his interests lay in musical transfigurations rather than preservation -- John Fahey was not afraid to use these old tunes as raw material.
Volume 1 / Blind Joe Death Volume 1
2016 remastered edition. "For several years major labels had been issuing records in both mono and stereo formats. By 1967 Takoma was doing well enough financially to justify the recording of John Fahey's first and second albums for the burgeoning stereo market. Thus Vol.1: Blind Joe Death, as the record would be titled henceforth, was recorded for the third time and it is probably this release that most people are familiar with today. For the new version Fahey recorded all but one song on the a…
Lonely Hymns and Pillars of Emptiness
*2024 stock* The debut release by Slovenian musical polymath Iztok Koren, best known for his work in avantefolk outfits Širom, Škm banda and Hexenbrutal. Made in the heat of 2020’s lockdown, Iztok transmutes the intensity of the period into 6 pieces that sensitively unfurl over time. With various stringed instruments and field recordings in hand, he weaves his interests in Slovenian mysticism, ancient Chinese divination texts, his family and his new found love of nature, revealing an intimate sn…
Namian Sidibé
Big Tip! Another side of modern Malian praise songs: an intimate, stripped down, acoustic session from Namian Sidibé. From a rising generation of young Malian divas leveraging social media, Namian has built a following, publishing videos and dedications in song, accompanied by her cousin Jules Diabaté on acoustic guitar. Recorded at her home, with powerful yet restrained vocals that drift over melancholy acoustic guitar, Namian explores epic generational songs and poetry, brought into the Tik To…
Rail Band
One of the greatest, heaviest, and most sought-after guitar records from 1970s West Africa, available on vinyl for the first time in over a decade!!!