Folk & Traditional / All styles

Drop a needle on Psyché's debut double-sider and you'll see visions, or rather Mediterranean visions, be they of waves of heat shimmering above dunes of sand, or of women dancing around a bonfire on a rocky plain, or of bushy cliffs overlooking emerald-green and turquoise sea. The name Psyché is of course ancient Greek for 'soul' or 'mind', signifying the band's love of psychedelic funk, but also the wide range of Mediterranean influences – from Southern Europe to the Balkan Peninsula, and from …

*2022 stock.* The Sacred Ceremonies series began in 1989, by recording artist David Parsons, when he traveled to Dharamsala, India to experience the mystical sounds of Tibetan ritual music. He was received by the Dip Tse Chok Ling Monastery School and given permission to incorporate his DAT recordings of their rituals into his 1990 album of original music, Yatra (18072-2). In return for the monks' kindness, Parsons decided to release selected Dip Tse Chok Ling ceremonial performances in their or…

Chinese classical music is a much larger field than Western classical music. It covers a huge geographical area as well as a time frame of thousands of years. Although some of China's musical instruments have changed very little in hundreds of years, others were adapted to Western standards under the influence of Russian musicians during the middle of the last century. In some cases, frets were added to non-chromatic instruments and tonalities standardized. The liner notes of The Hugo Masters co…

*2022 stock.* Celestial Harmonies' Music of Cambodia box set collects three volumes of traditional Cambodian songs as performed by indigenous orchestras and musicians. The Pinpeat Orchestra's "Sathouka," the Trot Orchestra's "Somplov," Taam Ming's "Klang Chanat," and the Mahori Orchestra's "Trorpean Piey" are some of the collection's highlights, all capturing the mysterious, hypnotic sounds of Cambodia.

*2022 stock. In process of stocking* The Ongaku Masters: An Anthology of Japanese Classical Music, a five-CD edition presented in a black linen box, spans 1,000 years of Japanese classical/traditional music, from early Buddhist Shomyo chant to late 20th century Takemitsu. It touches on every relevant stage in the development of Japanese music from the distant origins on the Asian mainland to contemporary expressions. Leading scholars from universities on three continents contributed to extensive…

The Music of Bali is produced by the highly acclaimed New Zealand composer/musician/producer David Parsons. Much like the other traditional/lost arts replications he has produced, The Music of Cambodia (19902), The Music of Vietnam (19903) and The Music of Armenia (19909), this collection is an opened time capsule of music from the isles of paradise. Jegog as heard on The Music of Bali, Volume One: Jegog (13136) is played predominantly for entertainment although it occasionally accompanies relig…

*2022 stock. In process of stocking* A country shaped by struggles with Chinese, French, Japanese and American invasions. That is how Vietnam stands in the minds of many, while its culture most people actually know little about. It is a rich culture, whose musical heritage has developed over a thousand years' time. Celestial Harmonies, early in 1994, released the first two volumes of The Music of Vietnam series in order to bring this beautiful, fascinating music to the world at large. It is unde…

All-time arabic music classic recorded in 1971 by egyptian music titan Abdel Halim Hafez. Composed by Baligh Hamdi and featuring Omar Khorshid, the album is reissued on vinyl for the first time in decades, with remastered audio.

Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue Farid el Atrache's cult album 'Nagham Fi Hayati' another cornerstone of Arabic Music released in 1974 and the soundtrack of the eponymous film starring El Atrache and Mervat Amin. Nicknamed the King of Oud, El Atrache is one of the giants of Egyptian music with Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Warda. Composed of four tracks showcasing El Atrache's versatility, the album which contains the monster groove 'Hebina Hebina' happens to be one of Brian Eno's favo…

Folk, Alternative, Psychedelic, Soft, Poetic..

"Wow! Great new LP by the full trio version of Maine's Big Blood. Colleen, Caleb, and Quinnisa are all present and accounted for at every turn on this one! Unlike their last LP, The Daughter's Union (FTR 459LP, 2019) (which seemed like some sort of experiment involving glam-rock-readymades), Do You Wanna? is awash with crazily re-imagined girl group dynamics. Some of these tight-sparkly-dress recreations have a savage teenage authority, but others wiggle more like dreams stolen from the nodes of…

Folk, Alternative, Psychedelic, Soft, Poetic..

Official Frederiksberg Records is proud to announce the first reissue of Suzanne Menzel’s 1981 album “Goodbyes and Beginnings”. This sought-after rarity presents a blend of ambient, new-age, 60’s inspired folk music. The melancholic lyrics of singer-songwriter Suzanne Menzel are transformed by Danish New-Age pioneer, Klaus Schønning’s, futuristic soundscape. Schønning, not only produced “Goodbyes and Beginnings,” Menzel also credits him as giving her the artistic courage to self-release her firs…

Subtitled: The Fonotone Years 1958-1965. More than 10 years in the making, this box set features the earliest recordings and the first book ever written about one of the most influential guitarists from the 1960s and '70s, John Fahey. The five CDs feature 115 tracks, most of which are available on CD for the first time. The audio was remastered from Joe Bussard's reel-to-reel tapes to achieve pristine sound quality. As for the accompanying book, the list of scholars who contributed essays includ…

After 4 years of work on their 11th release for ReR, Biota, this extraordinary, reclusive, and highly individual audio-visual collective continues to evolve through the painstaking accumulation and disposition of a seemingly incompatible range of both exotic and familiar musical languages, instruments, techniques and studio manipulations – into one of the few genuinely original bands at work today. It took a long time to refine their unique process of composition to this level of ambiguity and d…

Six years in the making, the visual/sonic art group Biota have finally completed their Sixth CD for ReR. Unique in their history and method, Biota painstakingly construct complex, organic structures that mix extensive studio processing and musique concréte techniques with a highly eclectic orchestra of acoustic and electronic resources – from kit drums, through mediaeval winds, strings and barrel organs to early experimental electronic instruments. Their works are always performance driven and i…

Recorded in Australia, Brasil, Italy, Japan, Turkey and America on his 2015/16 world tour, these excellent recordings offer an astonishing range of styles and sounds – all somehow emanating from Angeli’s fingers and feet – and his highly modified, prepared, extended and amplified giant Sardinian guitar which – like Angeli himself – is routinely able do several very different things at once. You have to keep reminding yourself as you listen that this is just one person with one instrument, workin…

Disques Ocora, a French label dedicated to capturing and publishing the sounds of folkloric culture from around the world, is held in the highest possible regard in the realms of professional and amateur ethnomusicology. Instigated in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of musique concrète, Disques Ocora's sterling reputation is largely built on composer and musicologist Charles Duvelle's pioneering field recordings, as well as his now-iconic photographs and graphic design. Charles Duvelle's w…

The story of Jackson C. Frank is tragic. The victim of a school fire in his youth, struggling with homelessness and mental illness throughout his life, half-blinded in old age before his death in 1999, Frank met continuous obstacles. And yet he enjoyed a shining moment with the release of Jackson C. Frank on Columbia Records in 1965. The album would go on to be seen as one of the greatest folk albums of the decade—maybe of all time—and its opening track “Blues Run the Game” has become a standard…

Park Jiha’s debut album Communion - released internationally by tak:til last year - drew well deserved attention to the young Korean instrumentalist / composer’s vivid soundworld. The widely acclaimed album graced 2018 critics lists at The WIRE, Pop Matters and The Guardian. Her new album Philos - which she calls an evocation of her “love for time, space and sound” - is every bit as inventive, elegant and transcendent as her debut. While Park Jiha’s music is often contextualized by its kinship w…

More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air.

Several decades young on the trap kit, Matt Espy makes his solo bow with an album of solo drums, in dialogic flight with birdsong. Restaging a seminal moment from his seismic early days in music (and inner life), Matt references places he’s been between then and now with hallucinatory evocation. Hawksworth is a new organic space where percussive meditations on a life in music create NEW life in music, a comment on the nurture of nature itself.

Mike Cooper's Blue Guitar is a collection that first appeared on Cooper's Hipshot CDr label in 2010 in a limited edition. It is presented here on Idea Records, for the first time on vinyl. Upon its initial release Cooper wrote: "For the past couple of years I have been collating a body of text culled (mostly) from Thomas Pynchon's novels Gravity's Rainbow and V and making cut-up collage pieces in the spirit of William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, Tom Phillips and others. Those two particular nove…

"Debut solo full length album from Jack Allett; a skilled British guitarist formerly known as Spoono. The Collapsing Middle is his third release for Blackest Rainbow following a split with Cam Deas and a hugely limited CDr, but no mind if you missed them because this is probably his best work yet. The A-side Place, Memory and Forgetting is a stirring display of fluid finger picking and swirling, psyched-out space noises flowing and sweeping against each other in a distinctly individual style. Th…

Closer To Stranger is the new solo album by Pakistani-born dream-folk musician Ilyas Ahmed. Drawing on a wide range of influences, his songs incorporate classic singer-songwriter gestures alongside more experimental leanings. Recorded to tape in the studio by Justin Higgins in the fall of 2016 and finished in the spring of 2017, Ahmed's instrumental palette includes: acoustic and electric six- and 12-string guitars, Fender Rhodes, multiple keyboards, tanpura, and percussion. Closer To Stra…

Ilyas Ahmed's songs exist in a sublime moment of suspended animation, calmly dwelling in between modes of music making both timeless and contemporary – deeply imbued with stillness and peace. On I Am All Your Own, his first album in three years, Ahmed employs strategies gleaned from experimental and ambient musicians, such as Lawrence English and Fripp & Eno, and applies them to song-based guitar music. Building slowly and purposefully, each individual track adds to the album's overall, scrupulo…

It is a long time since Zimbabwe gave us some of the giants of African music but, in the mighty Mokoomba, there is finally a convincing successor … Lead singer Mathias Muzaza naturally grabs the attention with his stunning, piercing vocals [...] the band’s magic quality is the perfect gelling of guitar, bass, keyboard and African drums ... [and] impressive arrangements. - The Independent

Sandy Bull’s unorthodox approach to guitar was as unique as his personal circumstances. Son of jazz harpist Daphne Hellman and brother to the sitarist Daisy Paradis, Bull became part of the bourgeoning Greenwich Village folk circuit. A move to San Francisco in 1963 found him sharing an apartment with Nubian oud master, Hamza El Din, which had a profound effect on his playing, spurring early world music experiments. The previously unreleased Live In San Francisco features bluesy electric ‘Memphis…

This set of Al Brown dub mixes by Paolo ‘DubFiles’ Baldini was a project that Pressure Sounds had been itching to tackle for some time. They finally got around to starting on the mixes during the lockdown period, when everyone had a little more time and headspace!! Thirteen tracks on the CD and eight tracks on the single vinyl LP. Al Brown is a fine Jamaican singer who came closest to troubling the UK charts with his Al Green cover version ‘Here I Am Baby.’ In the early 1980’s he recorded a beau…

"Back in 2011 when I was tentatively looking for a second release for my fledging record label Clay Pipe Music, I stumbled upon a mysterious MySpace page by a group called ‘Tyneham House’, the page was decorated with artwork by Rena Gardiner (who was unknown to me at that time) and the music was an otherworldly mix of field recordings, Mellotron and acoustic guitar. It turned out that Tyneham was promised to Glen Johnson’s Second Language label, so I offered to do the artwork, and in January 201…

First solo LP in a decade from long-time Pelt/Black Twigs/Eight Point Star leader, presenting a remarkable program of solo Hardanger and octave fiddle music. Evening Measures is a bold and unique statement, a direct and disarming individual expression of a musician’s inner thoughts and inspirations. Like some of Mike Gangloff’s work in other projects, this ricochets back and forth across the line between the most traditional and the most “out” music, blending drone, melody, and the pure tactile …

An important figure of the Argentinean acoustic school, his 4th album released in 2004, which is praised as the best album of his career, is now available on vinyl for the first time in the world! The latest release from SRRD label, which has released albums by Motohiko Hamase, Mono Fontana, Edison Natali, Yoshiharu Takeda and others!Alejandro Franov has been surrounded by music since he was a child, and became a multi-instrumentalist as he should. On this album, he plays a variety of percussion…

The Diva Faïrouz. Her real name Nouhad Haddad, she was born in the Zokak el Blat district of Beirut. The eldest of a modest Maronite family, she developed a passion for singing very early on. Her parents are too poor to afford the luxury of a radio, so she spends most of her time listening, her ear glued to the wall, to the neighbors. Nouhad quickly memorizes the songs she hears and gives a few samples at parties organized by her school. It was there that she seduced her comrades with her vocal …

Tip! Almost 40 years since its original release on cassette, Robbie Basho's 13th album is now available for the first time on vinyl. Remastered from the original master recording (discovered during the production of "Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho"), it has never sounded better. Included are notes from the original lyric sheet, as well as insights from Glenn Jones, Henry Kaiser and others. Bonus tracks (Digital only) include an epic 13-minute solo version of "Land of Our Fathers"…

*Limited edition of 500 copies.* Here's Lantern Heights' personal tribute to the one and only Michael Chapman, a hero in his own right, a 'Fully Qualified Survivor' (just to mention one of his most successful creations). An unreleased live album on vinyl in the form of an astonishing trio." A live set recorded at Nottingham's Playhouse Theatre on July 23rd 1977 by Chapman and a power house rhythm section in Lindisfarne bassist Rod Clements and former John Mayall drummer Keef Hartley. Some of his…

Previously better known for his analogue electronic music productions as Automatic Tasty, Jonny Dillon’s debut acoustic LP ‘Songs For A One-String Guitar’ took the listening public by surprise and the critics by storm when it dropped out of the blue on All-City in 2019. It represented a departure for an artist who was renowned for having the Midas touch when it came to coaxing dance floor fire from all manner of hardware. But fortune favours the brave and temporarily setting the machinery aside …

This recording is a miraculous session produced by Makoto Kubota and is surely precious being their very first performance in Japan. “Tumai Takahashi” is often sung in a set with “Yatcya guwa” but in this recording it is performed as a stand-alone song, which makes it very rare. The coupling song “Uya nu Kukuru” is a classic piece by Teihan China, Misako Oshiro's mentor. Misako Oshiro sings with Kanako Horiuchi, her top pupil, in a relaxed and lustrous voice. Misako Ōshiro (or sometimes Misako O…

From the two towering pillars of the Arab World’s Tarab, Om Kalsoum & Mohamed Abdel Wahab, comes another cult classic of Wa Maret El Ayam. With an iconic prelude featuring one of Abdel-Wahab’s quintessential fusions, this time a Libyan folk melody, Souma records bring a long-awaited remastering of the original studio version. Entrancing, magnetic and transcendental all at once.

Egyptian King Baligh Hamdy and “The Lady” Om Kalsoum meet for the final time in her parting ode, Hakam Aleena El Hawa. With a hypnotic intro featuring the rhythmic fireworks of Hany Mehanna’s organ, Souma records bring a remastering of the original studio version for The Voice of Egypt to live on. Musing, beckoning and triumphant as always.

The much-awaited vinyl version of a musical piece which has garnered much attention over the recent years in Japan. The sound is eye-opening, profound, spiritual, and will leave you in awe. Absolutely mind-bending. This is beyond categories and beyond good! The highest possible recommendation!