Folk /
Say God
The 2xLP version comes in an old-style tip-on gatefold jacket with 8” x 10” insert and MP3 download coupon. In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band, Lungfish. Higgs follows up the 2007 album/book release Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot with his new double album Say God. Say God is an album of gospel songs and poems as presently received by this Daniel Higgs. Recorded …
Volume One
The MONKS OF MALASPINA debut release is a phantastical psychedelic mystery musical filled with dark woods wonder and honey comb clouds over sparkling fjords from deep within the mountains of Canada's British Columbia. Highway 101 ends here, or like this new record, begins. Members of the band call up roots from First Nation relations with Jesuit missionaries co-mingled with a diverse offspring from a free love commune started in the 1970's. Most of the music on this record is gloriousl…
Rainy Day Raga
Peter Walker was the quintessential psych-folk guitar player to come out of the '60s. Revered by Timothy Leary, who had him program the music for his TURN-ONS, Walker was one of the first to take the Indian tradition of ragas and channel them through the guitar into a sound that is pure heaven. His exotic, state-of-the-art finger-picking transcends description and has influenced such artists as Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance.Vanguard Records originally released the record in 1966, …
Secrets from the Storm
With Secrets From The Storm, NYC-based singer and guitarist Peg Simone has put a remarkable avant-garde spin on the blues, collaborating with writer Holly Anderson and fellow Table Of The Elements star Jonathan Kane, who assists on the epic opening cut 'Levee/1927', a radical and poetic take on the original ('When The Levee Breaks') by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. This is quite some opening, shaping an incredible twenty-two minutes over which Kane adds his guitar and kick drum, leaving y…
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…
From The Ground
Very special vinyl edition cut at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, includes a bonus track and a hidden locked groove, together with new artwork. limited copies!* The sister of office favourite Peter Broderick, Heather Woods Broderick steps into the limelight with this hugely impressive solo debut. On 'From The Ground', Heather is ably assisted by her multi-talented sibling, who records, produces and contributes various instrumental elements to the songs. These two are regular collaborato…
Excavated Shellac: Strings
Excavated Shellac is an incredible resource for rare international 78rpm recordings. With each post, shellac excavator Jonathan Ward takes great care to ensure that the transfer is as clean as possible. His blog posts always go the extra mile in placing the music within a larger cultural and historical context (on the side, JW is a professional writer and researcher). With the motto "good music is best when it's shared", JW has done just that for upwards of 100 songs that might otherwise go unhe…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
Strings
Fourteen outstanding performances from the four corners of the world played on stringed instruments and recorded and released on 78rpm records circa 1920-1950. This vinyl LP features fiddles, shamisen, charango, Paraguyan harp, Indian vina, Lebanese oud, Persian violin, Vietnamese moon guitar, and more. Compiled by Jonathan Ward, all tracks are previously unreissued, carefully transferred and mastered and presented with detailed liner notes. Vinyl-only release,
The Cloud of Unknowing
For fans of acoustic guitar music, James Blackshaw's The Cloud of Unknowing is a gift that's long overdue. Blackshaw's fourth album gracefully glides over the same sonic ground that his contemporaries generally tread with reverential obedience or dilettante tactics. Growing into his prodigious own at the relatively young age of 25, Blackshaw has finessed his 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony that's as schooled in uncommon beauty as it is in complex 20th century composition…
People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Songs of Disaster 1913-193
“In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, the Depression gripped the Nation. It was a time when songs were tools for living. A whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member and to sow their songs like seeds. This collection is a wild garden grown from those seeds.” – Tom Waits, from the Introduction Songs of death, destruction and disaster, recorded by black and white performers from the dawn of American roots recording are here, assembled together for the first time. Whether they doc…
Lost Prayers
Originally released in a tiny pressing of just 200 CD-Rs by Digitalis Industries, this early James Blackshaw release is brought back in print by the Tompkins Square label, who on the back of last year's 'Cloud Of Unknowing' are intent upon reintroducing the guitarist' back-catalogue to his growing legion of fans (of whom there is almost certainly more than 200). 'Lost Prayers And Motionless Dances' is a single thirty-five minute composition, opening with droning harmonium passages and only…
Sunshrine
With a mindblowing track gracing this weeks phenomenal ‘Gold Leaf Branches’ compilation, James Blackshaw's brilliant "Sunshrine" album is finally being made available on cd. At only 23 years of age, Blackshaw has already mustered up enough talent on the guitar to put many more renowned acts to shame. His gorgeous finger picked melodies on 12-string guitar are incredibly affecting and a stark contrast to the ragas and ragtimes of peer Jack Rose. Instead of concentrating on replicating a sp…
Celeste
Another Tompkins Square reissue of early James Blackshaw material, and this is about as early as it gets: Celeste originally surfaced on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon a full five years ago and set the blueprint fr just about every solo recording he's made since. While the first part of the album finds Blackshaw in solo 12-string mode, the second deviates from the well-trodden Takoma-styled path and heads into an effects-laden drone composition. This sort of style-melding approach would come to…
Litany Of Echoes
It was once easy to think of James Blackshaw as an inheritor of the Takoma tradition, a school of searching acoustic guitar playing pioneered by John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, and others in the 1960s. But listening to the English guitarist's new album, it's clear it's not that simple. While echoes of those three and some of their contemporaries are still present in Blackshaw's music, these days you can hear just as much Terry Riley and Philip Glass in his work. His synthesis of acoustic e…
Three-Lane Blacktop
"Limited to 300 copies LP that bundles a bunch of great performances from the first Charalambides trio line-up featuring Tom and Christina Carter alongside Jason Bill (later of Migrantes). Two full sets that catch the group breaking out from their early Texas-psych sound into a whole new free/folk mutant, with Christina’s jubilant, spooked vocals over rattlesnake guitar and a wash of F/X. Still one of the most important – if relatively unsung – underground rock groups of the past decade p…
How Low Can You Go?: Anthology of the String Bass 1925-1941
The first anthology ever of the string bass; A 3CD box set in a cardboard box; 96-page book. Original recordings from 1925-1941, from the legendary archival label Dust-To-Digital (that previously brought the world the beyond-elaborate Goodbye, Babylon and Fonotone Records boxsets). "Not so long ago, the string bass stood tall and proud -- roughly the length and breadth of a poor man's pine coffin -- in every musical aggregation throughout the land from Bangor to Buenos Aires, from the hi…
E Pluribus Unum
a pure mantra: blending North African and Middle Eastern textures within a western context into our experience, regrettably the experience of a small few, but hopefully a wider community of listeners to come. Not only important historically, but musically: a wide range of music genres over the last couple of decades have worked with drone-note principles and it is an increasingly common device, but Sandy Bull was/is a superlative master of utilising the drone sounds;understated but effect…
What A Beautiful Place
A beautiful early 70s debut LP from a then 20-year-old, Halifax reared Catherine Howe -- produced and arranged by US jazz pianist Bobby Scott in a mode that manages to feel lush and opulent while never belying Catherine's warmth, intimacy and maturity -- and quite possibly the best unearthed singer-songwriter folk gem I've heard in years! The sound is warmly baroque, and Catherine's lovely vocals and evocative songwriting style is sheerly natural -- recorded in a fairly stripped down setting and…
III
Picking up the threads with ease, Espers III was intended to be an aural reversal of the layered sound of II. The goal was to record fewer tracks in order to achieve a stronger, more oxygenated sonic presence. Where II was almost claustrophobic in its density and darkness, III was envisaged as being somehow lighter, effervescent; perhaps even of a cheery disposition at times (whoa there! Don't go not breaking our heart, Espers). Under these auspices, recording started in late 2008 and spi…