Folk /
"Second Poem To Karmela" Or Gypsies Are Important
2014 Release. Light In The Attic and the legendary folk/blues/roots label Vanguard Records are proud to begin a series of collaborations under the umbrella Vanguard Vault. The series will explore the vaults of Vanguard and see the reissuing of obscure nuggets, psychedelic weirdness and just some good old-fashioned seminal music.
Originally released in 1968 on Vanguard Records, Peter Walker’s album “Second Poem To Karmela” Or Gypsies Are Important was a ground breaking blend of folk, raga, ps…
Heart Food
Judee Sill is one of folk's more interesting and lesser-known stories. Because of her troubled family history she was looking for an escape of reality. After surviving a heroin addiction and a brief stint as a bank robber, Sill turned her rather intense passions to music. She released two albums and partially completed a third album before her death in 1979. Sill's music was complex, elegantly crafted and yet completely devoid of pretension or overwrought melodrama. Unfairly lumped in with othe…
Anthems In Eden
Anthems in Eden is a 1969 album by Shirley and Dolly Collins, with the Early Music Consort of London, directed by David Munrow. The album originally consisted of a 28-minute set of folk songs plus seven other individual pieces performed by the same group. The musical arrangements for these eight pieces included early music instruments, such as viols, recorders, sackbuts and crumhorns.Track one is a suite, "A song-story", lasting 28 minutes, 7 seconds and is the centrepiece of the album. This is …
Spirit Of The Golden Juice
The world that inspired Spirit of The Golden Juice nearly 50 years ago has moved on. F.J. McMahon moved on with it. Originally pressed in a small quantity and scattered along the California coastline in 1969, F.J. McMahon’s first and only album, Spirit Of The Golden Juice, is a spell-binding blend of singer-songwriter emotion and spiraling guitar accompaniment with a raw, adventurous character all its own. Well-chronicled and loved since its rediscovery, Spirit Of The Golden Juice is an album co…
Jackdaw
Larry Conklin bought his first guitar, a Gibson J-45, in 1970, after he got out of the army. "I taught myself to play. I wrote songs and instrumentals (at that time Bert Jansch was my guiding light). I listened to a lot of people - Leo Kottke, John Renbourn, Django Reinhardt, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson - and especially Rev. Gary Davis, who played only with his thumb and index finger as I did." Larry's first record, Jackdaw was self-released in 1980 and includes beautiful solo 12 stri…
Gentle Wilderness
Gentle Wilderness was released as a private press LP in 1978. River Sun River Moon consists of previously unreleased recordings from the same time period. Deitrick came to our attention via Brooks Rice and Michael Klausman, who compiled Imaginational Anthem Vol 8 : The Private Press, which features Rick's "Missy Christa" from Gentle Wilderness.Ohio-born Rick Deitrick took up the guitar at 16 and decided to approach his playing as if he was the only guy on an island and the instrument had just wa…
River Sun River Moon
Tompkins Square is proud to release two solo acoustic guitar albums by Rick Deitrick. Gentle Wilderness was released as a private press LP in 1978. River Sun River Moon consists of previously unreleased recordings from the same time period. Deitrick came to our attention via Brooks Rice and Michael Klausman, who compiled Imaginational Anthem Vol 8 : The Private Press, which features Rick's "Missy Christa" from Gentle Wilderness.Ohio-born Rick Deitrick took up the guitar at 16 and decided to appr…
Gallivantin'
Texas Songwriter Will Beeley's Rare LPs from 1971 & 1979 Reissued by Tompkins Square. Tompkins Square reissues two albums by Texas singer/songwriter Will Beeley - the self-released mega-rare (only 200 copies) private press LP 'Gallivantin' from 1971, and 'Passing Dream', originally released by Malaco Records in 1979. Recorded in San Antonio, 'Gallivantin' shows Beeley's heartfelt, folky side - a wistful set of original tunes, plus a cover of Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and a spaced-out…
The Music of The Music of Harry Taussig & Max Ochs
Fifty years ago, Harry Taussig and Max Ochs were featured on a sampler LP, 'Contemporary Guitar - Spring '67', alongside John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Bukka White. Both guitarists were "re-discovered" by Tompkins Square in 2005, and have since released new recordings for the label. 'The Music of Harry Taussig & Max Ochs' features newly recorded material, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Takoma sampler they first appeared on.
Am I Really Here All Alone?
Phil Lewin's homespun debut is a loner folk masterpiece; accidentally psychedelic, lit by heartbreak and timeless in its sadness and hope. 1975 Private-press LP (only 300 signed and numbered copies pressed at the time) now remastered from the original tapes. In his own words, today: in 1967 I began my life in the student union of a university. In other words, I was in school. But, classes definitely took a back seat to people-watching and attempts at relationships. I would not say that I was par…
Endless
First-generation American Primitive guitarist Richard Osborn studied with Robbie Basho in the late 60's. 40 years later, Osborn finally recorded, appearing on Tompkins Square's 'Beyond Berkeley Guitar' comp in 2010. 'Endless' is his first widely available solo guitar album. [Osborn has] an unhurried, quiet spirit of adventure, a love of ringing strings and slowly revelatory meditations on the natural world. - Acoustic Guitar Magazine "He's a student of mine and he's better technically t…
Sousoume Tamachek
Music for desert picnics. Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar delves into his more sensitive side with a minimal studio recording of dreamy ballads. Thumping calabash, droning guitars, and vocal overdubs evoke an imagined desert soundscape. All instruments and vocals performed by Mdou only, creating a very personal and auteur sessions. Emotive and introspective, exploring themes of religion, spirituality, and matters of the heart. After his underground success on the pirate mp3 networks of West Africa …
The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors
A fascinating immersion in the heart of a funeral ceremony live recorded in Bali, where gongs, cymbals, and drums give rhythm to the bewitching atmosphere of this mortuary procession. The international audience’s interest into Balinese music and its gamelan orchestras dates back to the edition of large ethnographic series in the 1950s, 60s and 70s which largely encouraged the discovery of this music beyond Indonesia’s borders. Taking advantage of a more advanced technology compared to the vinyl …
Guitars From Agadez (Music Of Niger)
Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blue…
Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa El Fna
For centuries, the Jemaa El Fna (Rendezvous of the Dead) has remained the stage for one of the most spectacular social forums on the planet. By day, this central square in the city of Marrakesh, one of Morocco's great imperial cities, fosters a kaleidoscope of entertainment for its local inhabitants; storytellers, acrobats, magicians and snake charmers all create intriguing displays of bewitching spectacle. As the sun sets, the evening grows frantic with the pulse of the crowd; it is then that t…
The Feudal Spirit
2017 small repress. "Rob Noyes has been on the Eastern Massachusetts scene for a while, but what we've heard him play is music from within the context of electric bands, most of whom are loud as hell and exist somewhere along the rim of the post-core continuum. More recently, Rob has taken to displaying his solo acoustic guitar chops and they are massive. The Feudal Spirit is the first vinyl evidence of their 'shoulders.' Like Western Mass's Tony Pasquarosa, who mines the same widely-varia…
Burning The Threshold
A salve for folk souls and whoever needs it; Ben Chasny makes acoustic folk-pop great again. “In preparing for the first album of non-Hexadic Six Organs of Admittance music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the first time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our list…
Sugar Daddy
"This year sees an exciting new undertaking from the Strut camp. We’re launching ‘Original Masters,’ a series of essential original LP reissues exploring rare and under-rated African, Latin and Caribbean music classics, curated by leading collector and DJ, Duncan Brooker. If that right there is enough to let you know that you’ll be needing each of these classic LPs, we’re offering a subscription option which guarantees a copy of each of the four 1LP Original Masters releases we have planned for …
Tibetan Buddhism Trip
Psalmody, small bells, big cymbals, gongs and drums - this puzzling collage of Tibetan Buddhist rites recordings is hypnotizing. It opens the way to the state of trance. The slight electronic arrangement still reminds that reality is not so far. The two twenty-minute tracks instantly convey an unknown and fascinating universe. Mantra chanting accelerates, horns become more insistent and a mystical atmosphere arises. With Tibetan Buddhism Trip, Akuphone starts exploring ritual and ceremoni…
Tchashm-e-Del
The Paris-based Collapsing Market label unveil a gem of found art with Tschashm-e-Del: a radio play recorded in Iran sometime during the '60s by Morteza Hannaneh, co-founder of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra with Parvis Mahmoud, and the grandfather of Collapsing Market co-owner Cyrus Goberville, who discovered the recording on a tape at his home. Without definitive records to go from, Tschashm-e-Del was presumably recorded in the '60s (certainly pre-revolution) and quite possibly broadcast on Ra…