Folk /
Paintings
"The much-revered avant-garde guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) incorporated influences ranging from folk, blues, and bluegrass to classical music, musique concrete, and noise in his primarily acoustic guitar-based compositions. Considered a legend by many, Fahey released upward of three dozen LPs in his lifetime. Relatively late in life, Fahey extended his so-called 'American Primitive' approach beyond music, and into the creation of a substantial body of paintings. Painting on found post…
Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting
The second revised edition of the book profiles over 130 vinyl collectors, featuring a foreword by the RZA and interviews with Questlove, Gilles Peterson, Four-Tet, the Gaslamp Killer, and more. (This edition has 20 more pages than the first edition!) Readers get an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions as well as a glimpse into the collections of world-renowned and lesser-known DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. The book is divided i…
Folk Music of the Sahel Vol. 1: Niger
Folk Music of the Sahel: Niger consists of field recordings collected in the Republic of Niger during the course of six expeditions undertaken by Hisham Mayet between 2004 and 2014. This first volume in Sublime Frequencies' new Folk Music of the Sahel series comprises a subjective but spectacular overview of Hausa, Zarma, Fulani, Songhai and Tuareg music culled from Mayet's rich archives. On this lavish double album, Mayet methodically reveals the dazzling range and power of Nigerian music, f…
The Travelling Archive - Folk Music from Bengal
The Travelling Archive is a journey through the folk music of Bengal. It is run by Calcutta-based Bengali singer, writer and researcher, Moushumi Bhowmik, and sound recordist and sound designer, Sukanta Majumdar. They have been making field recordings of songs and stories across Bangladesh and eastern India, even the Bengali diaspora in East London, since 2003; documenting and disseminating their research through archives, presentation-performances, art works, and their own independent reco…
Ten Impressions for Piano & Strings
Realized over a four year period, Sean McCann’s Ten Impressions for Piano & Springs is a document of transition and maturation. Slow moving cloud forms over corporeal landscapes, these impressions whisper of McCann’s imminent & decisive lean towards classical & avant-garde musics, culminating in 2013’s Music for Private Ensemble on his own imprint, Recital. Less a final statement on ambient music, more a meditation on change, discovery and process.
Black Ribbon of Death, Silver Thread of Life
Mike and Cara Gangloff’s "Black Ribbon of Death, Silver Thread of Life" is the third in a series of loosely connected melodic investigations released by Mike Gangloff over the past two years. All three were recorded around the Gangloff home in rural Floyd County, Virginia, and were engineered by Joseph Dejarnette (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bruce Greene, Curtis Eller). And all three feature the far-reaching improvisation familiar from Gangloff’s work with the old-time stringbandBlack Twig Pickers…
Unmoored By The Wind
restocked! Folk guitarist and songwriter originally from New York State Kayla Cohen, a.k.a. Itasca, has released several small-press CDrs and cassettes over the past five years. A resident of Los Angeles since 2012, She records at home, taking inspiration from the fringes of the city’s open space and natural land. On Unmoored by the Wind, Cohen achieves new levels of clarity and expansiveness. Where 2012’s Grace Riders on the Road reveled in homemade intimacy, Unmoored by the Wind opens t…
Fanafody: A Collection of Recordings and Photography from Madaga
2011 release. **Housed in typical Mississippi old-style tip-on heavy card jacket** "The second volume of recordings in a series of Madagascar music. From the archives of Montreal recordist, Charlie Brooks. While containing some similar artists as volume one, Fanafody focuses more on his second trip through the island during 2002 featuring violin players and throat singers. Includes extensive photography and Liner notes." We don't recall stocking the first volume of 'Fanafody…' but it would…
Ishilan N Tenere
Ishilan n-Tenere is a compilation of recordings of guitar music from three regions of Senegal and Mali -- Fouta Toro, Timbouctou, and the Adrar d'Ifoghas. Each region differs in language and culture, but all have a popular music based on the guitar, and their respective local guitar bands. These bands are almost unknown outside of their homes but have a devoted local following. They play all events, celebratory or political. Their songs are folk anthems, hummed under the breath and chante…
The Widow's Joy - Eastern European Immigrant Dances In America
Sound American and Canary Records collaborate for The Widow's Joy: Eastern European Immigrant Dances in America 1925-1930, the first release of Sound American Records. Canary Records curator Ian Nagoski has crafted the ultimate Lemko party record as a labor of love for the forgotten music of the Austro-Hungarian diaspora in the midwest region of the United States. The Widow's Joy with a cover by Mississippi Records' E. Isaacson features the music that helped immigrant coal workers and laborers f…
Gita Pon Yeik
Beautiful sounds in a style we've never heard before – music played on the saung gauk, which is a special leaf-shaped Burmese harp – mixed with some light background percussion and ethereal vocals from Su Wai herself! The notes of the harp have this rhythmic way of progressing – almost like the falling of rain – but the vocals slide more gracefully over the top in waves of lyrics – a strange sort of counterpoint that really creates a lot of presence from the relatively lean elements of t…
Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-1959
In 1947, '48 and '59, renowned folklorist Alan Lomax went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck -- and, in 1959, a camera -- Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates labored "from can't to can't," chopping timber, clearing ground, and picking cotton for the state. They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their …
Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers
For the traveling recording men of the late 1920s, Arkansas offered enticing pickings. The region was thronged with vigorous, idiosyncratic string bands. This album carries the listener from the hillbilly music craze of the '20s to the song-based country music of the late '30s. Scarcely more than a decade, but a period, in music as in all American life, of galvanic change. This CD serves as the soundtrack album to the newly-released photograph book, Making Pictures: Three for a Dime by Ma…
Christmas Soli
LP version. 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 appear…
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…
Rang'ala
Open-hearted, fresh, lovely, bumptious recordings of women’s singing, from Rang’ala village in southwest Kenya. ‘Dodo’ is a type of traditional Luo music mostly used for entertainment at weddings, drinking parties and wrestling festivals. Songs in praise of the happy couple, the hardest drinkers and the best wrestlers. Ogoya Nengo was born in 1943. Her vocal abilities were discovered when she was herding cattle, as she never attended school, though nowadays her professional name signals bot…
Melodies For A Savage Fix
Steve Gunn and Mike Gangloff (Pelt) combine six-and 12-string guitars with gongs, tanpura, singing bowls, shruti box, and banjo fora gorgeous collection of improvised compositions. The two artists took it pretty far off the beaten path for Melodies for a Savage Fix, sequestering themselves for an overnight session in the remote farmhouse/recording studio of noted roots-music engineer Joseph Dejarnette (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bruce Greene, Curtis Eller) in the countryside of Floyd County, Virg…
Mercury
CD version of the 2009 Mississippi Records release. Highly recommended to followers of the Blackshaw/Wissem line of acoustic instrumental composition that runs through the Imprec catalog. From the original notes: "Portland guitar virtuoso Marisa Anderson is back with a new set of home-recorded instrumentals. This time around we find Marisa exploring structures more based on the Appalachian folk tradition. The bluesy cadences of Marisa's other previous release -- Golden Hour -- are still the…
Take Care Of Your Own Beast
From the deep woods of Maine comes this zoned acid folk combo spinning around the core duo of Daniel Beckman and Amy Moon and featuring members of Big Blood, Ancestral Died, Caethua among others. Stoned rural vibes extracted to their essence, essential oil for the mind and body. Edition of 100 copies.
Take Care Of Your Own Beast
Heavily processed thai pin recordings, taking medieval sensibility into deep psychedelic drones. 80 copies.