Folk & Traditional / All styles

One of the most innovative and ambitious albums ever made, Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Ecophony Rinne is a sonic masterpiece featuring over 200 musicians that expanded the limits of what music and sound could do.

Death Is Not The End, following their cassette reissue of Harry Smith's Anthology, present a collection of recordings of Sacred Harp singing (a traditional sacred choral music with origins in the American South) taken from the late 1920s through to the late 1930s. Necessary vinyl edition of Death is Not Final’s I’m On My Journey Home, Sacred Harp Singing, 1928-1934, a collection of recordings of Sacred Harp singing (a traditional sacred choral music with origins in the American South) taken from…

The Italian band's 2005 debut mini-album, issued on CDr and never reprinted, now on vinyl for the first time with two tracks recorded in 2021. Neofolk, neoclassical and ritual music. Numbered, Steinklang.

Neofolk from Todd Paulson of the Minnesota black metal duo Canis Dirus: acoustic guitars, wyrd folk and dark ambient shading. Grey vinyl with insert, 100 hand-numbered copies, Steinklang Industries.

Chicago guitarist Eli Winter's 2022 album, made with a loose group that includes Cameron Knowler, Yasmin Williams, David Grubbs, Ryley Walker and jaimie branch, and often steps back to let them lead.

Scottish singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts and Norwegian just intonation explorer Fredrik Rasten stretch seven traditional Scottish ballads into slow, drone-rich spells: an hour of overtones, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and two voices.

Tip! At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this  recording that introduced  Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label …

"Warbler Wind" is a sequence of selected tracks from the live recording of Shoko Numao’s solo concert held at Waseda Hoshien Scott Hall in Tokyo on May 23. This is Numao's second solo album, following “The Siwnin Sails” (elsewhere 037/elsesong 003), which was released on elsewhere music in November 2025. In this album, Numao's poetic and introspective world of music reached new horizons. Beautifully resonating through the 105-year-old church's spacious acoustics, her musical personality reaches …

Former hardcore punks from Palembang who swapped amps for mandolin, accordion and Malay drums: pantun-inspired songs from 2009-2013, including unreleased material, sung by muezzin David Hersya.

Robert Lester Folsom's private-press album of 1976, a cult of Georgia home-recorded folk, remastered for its fiftieth anniversary together with the original reel-to-reel demos.

James Blackshaw’s ‘Unraveling In Your Hands’ marks his return post-hiatus, blending hypnotic, precise guitar and minimalist influences. The album, praised for its emotive depth and beauty, features meditative tracks and earned critical acclaim, including an 8.0 from Pitchfork.

Settima Tacca's eleven songs of voice, drones and throat singing on Stroom, with Natalia Grishanina on one track.

Rosa Balisteri was one of the brightest stars on the Italian folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s, certainly far too little known given her talent and expressive power. Her life story is marked by a tormented nature, punctuated as it is by traumas, anguish, injustices, and wounds that forever scored her turbulent existence. Through her songs, Rosa relives the suffering and despair for the devastating challenges and trials of her harrowing life. The archaic and expressive power of her dialect stirs …

On Sandy, Sandy Denny sharpens intimacy into something orchestral, fusing folk clarity with country shimmer and chamber strings. The album feels like a private notebook sung aloud, where regret, resilience and quiet defiance unfold with luminous, unhurried precision.

On Like an Old Fashioned Waltz, Sandy Denny leans into cinema-lit nostalgia, braiding English folk melancholy with 30s-inflected strings and jazz standards. Time, memory and solitude waltz together, her voice hovering between confessional intimacy and silver-screen reverie, poised at the fragile brink of reinvention.

2025 stock When they formed in 1968, Pentangle were hailed as Folk’s first supergroup, fusing elements of jazz and underground music and comprising the twin guitar/songwriting talents of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn with bassist Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox and singer Jacqui McShee. Between 1968 and 1972, Pentangle issued six albums – five on legendary Folk label Transatlantic and a swansong release on Reprise. Their debut, The Pentangle (1968), was hailed as a Folk Rock classic and charte…

Karen Dalton's 1969 debut is finally back in print. 2024 reissue features all-analogue mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, direct from the original analogue tapes. Housed in an expanded gatefold jacket with liner notes by Brian Barr

For years, Jackson C. Frank was as ghostly a legend as they come. Even the relatively few record collectors who revered his work were only aware of the lone LP released during his lifetime. For all most listeners knew, Frank made an incredible album in 1965 and then vanished, despite that record having been produced by Paul Simon. 1975 Mekeel Sessions features six tracks recorded in the mid-'70s at a studio in Lake Hill, New York about five miles from Woodstock where Frank was living at the time…

Originally released as a double album Wee Tam & The Big Huge for some reasons gets commercialized as two separate Cds, the first called Wee Tam and the next being The Big Huge. Again the Boyd/Elektra connection is present, the pastoral setting of artwork (both albums photos taken from the same shoot (same clothes) and the group was at its apex. This Cd reissue of Wee Tam should read side 1 & 2 of the double vinyl issue Well no matter how you look at it, ISB’s better moment had turned with Hangma…

2025 stock Anne Briggs was born in Nottinghamshire in 1944 and began singing in local folk clubs in her teens. Her break came through the Centre 42 tour of 1962. This was a distinctly leftist group of artists, writers, actors and musicians whose lofty aim was to make arts and culture accessible to the masses. Local artists were invited to audition where Ewan MacColl first heard Briggs' remarkable voice and persuaded her to join the tour. There Briggs met MacColl's broader minded comrade A.L. 'Be…

2025 stock A long overdue reissue of the classic first album from Anne Briggs on Topic. Widely regarded as a long-lost treasure and recorded in 1971 by Sean Davies, featuring Johnny Moynihan from Sweeny’s Men on bouzouki. Anne Briggs began singing in local folk clubs in her teens. In 1962, she became part of the Centre 42 tour, a leftist group of artists, writers, actors, and musicians aiming to make arts and culture accessible to the masses. Ewan MacColl first heard Briggs’ remarkable voice and…

Few singers of the English folk revival have attempted as much on record as Shirley Collins – an extraordinary combination of fragility and power. “I like music to be fairly straightforward, simply embellished – the performance without histrionics allowing you to think about the song rather than telling you what to think.” Through an impressive series of experimental recordings Shirley established an extraordinarily sympathetic marriage of traditional songs handed down through generations of rur…

**Clear vinyl editions. Old-school tip-on jacket with metallic silver foil stamping along with a 12-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes from scholar and pianist Thomas Feng.** 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,…

Emmanuelle Parrenin's 1977 album, recorded in a farm studio in Normandy: traditional songs she collected in the countryside, arranged and recorded by Bruno Menny, a student of Xenakis.

Every Thursday night, the ocean promenade in St Denis becomes an open stage for everyone who wants to sing, play, dance and enjoy maloya in one of its most festive and community oriented forms. Sets that last for long hours are charged with energetic songs, and are open to anyone who can sing or play. These songs belong to the creole culture and most of them are well-known to all participants. You do not come here to give a concert but to be a part of it. You sing, keep the rhythm for a few minu…

Stephan Micus' 27th solo album for ECM, dedicated to the sea: a dozen instruments from Borneo, Japan, India, Armenia, Africa and beyond, from hang and kalimbas to shakuhachi, duduk, sapeh and sho.

Belgian improvisers Linus and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy reimagine the songs of Dutch songwriter Jules de Corte: slowed, expanded folk miniatures on religion, love and loss, with guitars, banjo, clarinet and lap steel.

The transcendental guitar master's 1971 debut, remastered for all your sabbath needs. 37 minutes of ambient guitar witchcraft and the perfect soundtrack for third eye awakening, light alchemy, or human sacrifice. You could start a cult with this thing. California mail-order mystic Master Wilburn Burchette was first known from his ads, hidden in the back pages of Fate Magazine, Beyond Reality, and Gnostica News. On offer: Burchette's sevenpart, block-printed "Psychic Meditation Course," designed …

Debut of the New England singer, songwriter and naturalist Harper Bull as Allison Graves: breathy, worn-in songs recorded with a secondhand guitar and a broken laptop, between Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan and Adrianne Lenker. First vinyl edition on Important.

*250 copies limited edition* First & Last Records is proud to present the first-ever reissue of Daisuke Honda’s Love Songs, a deeply personal, holy-grail private press album originally released in 1977. At just 20 years old, Daisuke Honda was an enigmatic vagabond from Osaka who had left home after high school to wander and write songs. Possessing no grand ambitions of becoming a professional musician, Honda simply felt compelled to record the music he was creating. To bring the project to life,…

Ebalunga!!! is thrilled to announce the first official reissue of the self-released, self-produced, and self-titled 1985 LP Scott Seskind. The album is a lo-fi singer-songwriter jewel. Don't miss it.

Another limited first-time double vinyl and cassette release for recordings from Deben Bhattacharya’s early 1970s journeys around South East Asia, this time focused on the traditional and religious music of Thailand.

Jackson C. Frank's only album, recorded in London in 1965 and produced by Paul Simon, with bonus tracks previously available only on CD and digitally.

Bonnie Dobson’s self-titled 1969 album is a striking blend of folk-pop and psychedelic nuances, marking a move beyond the traditional acoustic style that made her famous in the early 1960s. The album’s mood is often reflective and melancholic, balancing pastoral beauty with darker themes of change, loss, and uncertainty. One of the hidden gems of the album is track B4 “Pendant Que” by the celebrated Quebec songwriter Gilles Vigneault, which stands out since it is sung in French and reflects Dobs…

French-Moroccan singer Basma Otmani sings in Darija over Temir Alcy's mix of ambient, leftfield and experimental folk: eleven songs on grief, a broken love and a slow return to light. Released by Stroom.

Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some…

Alasdair Roberts continues to do his bit for Scottish folk heritage on a fyne suite of augmented standards and new songs accompanied by his pals. Alasdair brings his undoubted charm, skill and imagination to ten songs ranging from celebratory elegies ('The Merry Wake') to doom-laden laments ('The Laverock in the Blackthorn'), distilling the passion, pain and yearning of hundreds of years of tradition with a timeless voice, perfectly summed up by fellow countryman and poet Robin Robertson: …

Young Scotsman Alasdair Roberts is an old hand at songcraft -- and not just his own, but the songs of the ancients, the near-ancients and their friends. Over the past decade that he's been singing music in his own name (after graduating from the Appendix Out youth brigade), he's made a habit out of recording songs of his own and traditional songs with an equal amount of investment and urgency. After all, it's all music, always deserving of everything we have to give. Following 2009's de…

CD edition: Luminous Night is the first set of new Six Organs Of Admittance material to leap forth from Ben Chasnys' cerebral cortex in 18 months, and what a joy it is. With the release of odds-and-sods collection RTZ earlier in the year there to bridge the gap between 2007s Shelter From The Ash it doesn't seem like he's been away for long per se but for serious Chasny-heads a new album is something to get pretty excited about and with his other musical outlet Comets On Fire either on extended h…

Listen through Sir Richard Bishop’s six readily available solo albums, and you get the picture that the worldview of the former Sun City Girls’ guitarist is not only complex, but also more than a little ambiguous. What exactly is Richard Bishop? A dealer in the exotic? A dabbler in esoteric mysticism? A “traveling salesman”? The Freak of Araby doesn’t make Bishop’s worldview any simpler for us, but it does clarify it some. He is, first and foremost, a traveler, picking up inspiration as he roams…