Folk /
Lace
*In process of stocking.* For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details.Lace was originally released as a CD-R in 2008 on Alastair Galbraith's Next Best Way label. Imagine the just-so arrangements of Josephine Foster and the knowing quotidian eye …
Laylat Hob
Mohamed Abdel Wahab wrote another big score for Om Kalsoum in 1972. In Laylet Hob (A Night of Love) we hear Arabic music and poetry in perfect symbiosis. The rich and lengthy instrumental intro is just a precursor of the emotion present in this song. The talent of the composer is underlined by how he utilises the traditional style of singing poetry in a more open and creative way. Abdel Wahab’s infusing of long and groovy interludes with varied tonality, rhythmical patterns and an overall unique…
Enta Omri
Enta Omri is Om Kalsoum’s most famous song, composed by Mohamed Abdel Wahab, who is still rightly regarded as a prominent musician and composer in Egypt. The creation of this song was the first long expected collaboration of two musical giants, which came at the repeated urging of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser.There was talk in Egypt on the streets and in the media about what was believed to be a cold relationship between the two legends. Finally, after years of estrangement, Mohamed Abd…
Mirror Mirror
**300 copies ** "Every so often, the cosmos graces us with a chanteuse in possession of otherworldly inflections. Can you remember the first time Vashti Bunyan’s lilting voice kissed your ears? Or the moment when you knew that you needed Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms to resonate inside your home? Did you feel a lightness in your heart when Elisa Randazzo brought Bridget St John back into the fold? Have you ever sat spellbound in the presence of a Meg Baird performance? Did the hair on your arms …
Deadbeat Freedom
**600 copies** Belgium's psychedelic blues folk master Ignatz returns with his band for a second album on Ultra Eczema. These are songs to get lost in and confused by. Tripped-out blues folk that sounds like Les Rallizes Dénudés feedback in 100% Egyptian cotton. Ignatz is the alter ego of Bram Devens. He has been releasing albums since 2005 on Kraak, Feeding Tube and Fonal Records. Previously only playing solo, now he plays and records with De Stervende Honden, which includes Erik Heestermans on…
Our Mother The Mountain
Widely considered one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, Townes Van Zandt has been hailed by such singers as Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, and Willie Nelson. Fat Possum is proud to reissue four titles from his early career - Townes Van Zandt, Our Mother the Mountain, Delta Momma Blues, and Flyin' Shoes - that comprise an essential introduction to his best songs. Recorded between 1969 and 1978, Van Zandt's most prolific (and most critically acclaimed) decade, these four titles are the …
Delta Momma Blues
**2019 stock** Widely considered one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, Townes Van Zandt has been hailed by such singers as Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, and Willie Nelson. Fat Possum is proud to reissue four titles from his early career - Townes Van Zandt, Our Mother the Mountain, Delta Momma Blues, and Flyin' Shoes - that comprise an essential introduction to his best songs. Recorded between 1969 and 1978, Van Zandt's most prolific (and most critically acclaimed) decade, these four …
Odds Against Tomorrow
After two albums and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest full-lenght, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise's 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk / blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt's guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion o…
Pearls From the River
VHF presents the first time on vinyl for Pearls From the River, the all acoustic epics album from the “classic” Pelt trio lineup of Jack Rose, Mike Gangloff and Patrick Best. Recorded in a single March 2003 session in Virginia by Mikel Dimmick, this was a superb distillation of their interests at the time (both alone and together —Rose’s first solo records, the emergence of the Black Twigs as a busy working band, etc). Up the North Fork is a trio for banjo, baritone banjo, and cello —after the s…
Drums of Passion
**2019 stock, reduced price** Drums of Passion was the first album released by Babatunde Olatunji in 1960. Olatunji was a drummer, social activist and musician, born in Ajindo, Nigeria. In this album he has recaptured some of his early impressions in drum beats and giving them new zest. The African drum rhythms are not only musical melodies and songs but also ways of communication. For instance, the first track Akiwowo was the name of a train conductor who shouted his humorous cry against the fa…
Oh Really!?
The guitarist and singer-songwriter Mike Cooper was a key figure in the British blues boom of the late 1960s. Born in Reading in 1942, Cooper began playing guitar as a teen in local skiffle groups. After seeing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee perform in 1961, Cooper caught the blues bug and began to play the harmonica and formed The Blues Committee, supporting John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Alexis Korner and Long John Baldry, while Cooper was also performing solo. Acquiring a lap steel gu…
I've Always Kept a Unicorn: The Acoustic Sandy Denny
"Transcendental. I’ve never heard a voice like Sandy Denny’s. She started out with the band Strawbs, which she left when she realized they weren’t particularly folk enough for her, and joined Fairport Convention, where her, and many others, would make folk-rock history. Quite honestly, since I wasn’t around for this generation of folk, the only songs I like by Fairport Convention, are Sandy Denny’s songs. Her voice is simply breathtaking in its beauty and power, dynamic range, etc. Practically 4…
Mistérios da Amazônia
Underground musician Carioca left behind his electrical past in Progressive Rock in order to search for new expressions in Brazilian music. His first album is a fully acoustic, instrospective voyage into the world’s greatest Rainforest, featuring 12-string guitar, mandolin, zither, tabla, flute and self-made percussion instruments. Carioca is the term used to describe those who originate from Rio de Janeiro. But, in fact, there’s only one Carioca in the music scene in Brazil: Ronaldo Leite de Fr…
Ode To Quetzalcoatl
Repress in vintage-styled tip-on hard cardboard sleeve. Guerssen Records present a reissue of Dave Bixby's Ode To Quetzalcoatl, originally released in 1969. Since its discovery in the late '90s, Dave Bixby's legendary $2000 private press album from 1969 is considered by all serious record collectors as the king in the loner / downer folk genre. After being involved in '60s Michigan folk and garage-rock bands such as The Shillelaghs and Peter & The Prophets, Bixby started playing acoustic guitar …
Kalmykian Archaic and Soviet Folk
Since the beginning of its foundation, Sub Rosa has been interested in ethnographic recordings - among the milestones: the Inuit anthology, the Bhutan recordings by John Levy... More recently, the works of David Toop (Yamomami shamanism) and Ragnar Johnson (Yemen, Ethiopia, recorded in the early 1970s). The time in which the recording is done, it matters a lot because it also captures the air of that Time. On the other hand, the label can only feel it from where they are. It is in this state of …
The Sacred Entertainment, Réak Ceremonial Horse Trance Music (LP
Kasenian réak is a genre of performative art from the Priangan area of west Java, organized during hajatans (life-cycle celebrations) and nowadays primarily held during weddings and circumcisions. The style, known as a seni lungsuran, is part of the greater family of Javanese horse dances, originally known in their most famous forms of jathilan and kuda lumping. Javanese horse dances, which could be as old as animistic Java, may already have been practiced before the eight century, travelling th…
O Meadowlark
**300 copies** "Currently based in the Boston area, Joseph Allred was one of the players we first encountered at 2018's Ten Thousand Incarnations of the Rose festival in Takoma Park MD. Allred's playing had some Basho-esque sequencing that was highly engaging, and the rest of the set was a killer, off-center swathe of string quiver we could not resist. O Meadowlark is Allred's third solo vinyl (there are cassettes as well), and will surely please many heads. Here're Joseph's words on how the alb…
Liberty Rose
A classic album by contemporary psychic blues visionaries MV & EE. The duo spent 40 days and 40 nights under the twisted trees and endless sky of the Mojave desert via a Vermont homestead, freedom and unity. That's where these songs were unformed in dreams, floating off to mingle with the collective unconscious of coyotes and rattlesnakes, before they were re-birthed as smoke signals channeled through shaky hands, an old tele, germanium transistors and a bucket brigade. One of the purest distill…
Albania, There Where the Avalanche Stops
**300 copies** For one week in every five years, two thousand singers, dancers and musicians along with fifty thousand spectators make their way to the small town of Gjirokastra in southern Albania for the Festivali Folkloric Kombelar. In the great castle overlooking the town, they participate in the incredible National Folk Festival of Albania, hoping to attain the highest level of interpretation and win one of the many awards available at the festival… the banner, even. Considering the compara…
Basket of Light
Basket of Light is the most progressive and complex release by the British folk-rock group Pentangle. Traditional English folk songs are reinterpreted with a mix of jazz, pop and rock influences. Everything their previous works promised is fulfilled here. The album opener Light Flight has become their signature song. If there is a prog folk masterpiece then it is Basket of Light. Pentangle proved they could release a progressive, ground-breaking work without keyboards, much studio trickery or ev…