Folk /
Amplifying Host
Amplifying Host finds Richard Youngs wandering the guitar desert somewhere between Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score and Neil Young's work on Dead Man. Yet, the randomly determined chord movements and Youngs' stretched-out vocal passes across the record are, perhaps, more akin to Jandek's Six And Six -- here, removed from its gauze and dipped in a dark gold. When Youngs bends strings in this anglo-americana vision, it's like he's bending spoons.For more than 20 years, the UK's Richard Youngs has be…
Ready for the House
The 1978 release of Corwood Industries Ready For The House, began one of the most compelling, disturbed, and singular legacies in musical history. In the 30 years since this unique debut, Jandek has released 53 albums of mournful, atonal music that continues to defy classification and accessibility. And while the past three decades of intense productivity have yielded a depth of discussion, a handful of legendary live performances and even a film documentary, no amount of time or experien…
Red Planet
Red Planet establishes Arborea's complex synthesis of acoustic folk and minimalist drone right out of the gate. From the opening motif of the acoustic guitar lament "The Fossil Sea", Red Planet conjures a panoramic aura, like a lost outtake from Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas soundtrack. As that echoes its way into "Black is the Colour", an eerie and utterly transcendent take on the traditional tune, it becomes mesmerizingly clear how the soft confluence of texture, sound and style meld to create the …
Golden Trees
RESTOCKED: Golden Trees is a minimalist psych-folk masterpiece. A supergroup of sorts, Helen Rush, Pat Gubler and Samara Lubelski have created seven songs characterized as much by quiet and restraint than by their acclaimed musicianship. The lyrical lines in these songs appear suspended between pregnant pauses of silence and subtle instrumental flourishes. On one side of the gap, Samara Lubelski's violin invokes the Velvets and other avant string-players. On the other side, P.G. Six layers effec…
Sixty strings
Sixty Strings is an album of two epic duets by Eric Carbonara (22-string upright Chaturangui guitar) and Jesse Sparhawk (38-string lever harp). While Carbonara has studied Chaturangui extensively with Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya in Kolkata, and Sparhawk was classically trained by major figures of the harp world in his formative years, the music here is their own—not a mashup of quasi-orientalism and conservatory bloodlessness. Both side-long tracks lay out a spacious framework, with the two pl…
God Is Saying This To You...
More than a mere odds-n-ends collection, Kurt Vile’s latest LP is a compilation of tracks from Overnite KV, a tour-only CDR, along with a handful of extra tracks recorded specifically for this release. Here we find Kurt solo, four-trackin’ as usual, and blowing minds with his mix of bluegrass guitar, blazed singer-songwriterisms, and the knowledge of how to balance these contexts out with laidback precision. Psychedelic to its core, these twelve tracks speak to the will of the casual perf…
A Dream A While Back
Come pre-Hashing with Gary! The in-between years, echoing from far out, seeking love and peace and happiness but disturbed by what all's around the treasure. It seems that '70–'71 wasn't all smiles and sunshine — paranoia struck deep, and it hit a chord: a pretty, eerie acoustic one. With archival material like this, it is always tempting to examine the songs for hints of foreshadowing, and it's easy to have a little shiver when Higgins sings such fatalistic lines as "Ragged edges will cut your …
Texas Blues Working
Featuring the 6 tracks from the original release, along with an additional brand new amazing track. The original edition on tape received some fantastic reviews, so its great to finally have this out on CD, as it really is a superb recording. which came out around one of Christina's most amazingly active recording periods, self releasing fantastic discs like Masque Femine, Two Nights Film and A Blossom Fell as well as Kranky releasing Original Darkness in 2008. Texas Blues Working feature…
The Collapsing Middle
"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…
Imperfiction
Another addition to Drag City’s curious collection of ‘outsider’ folk records (sitting neatly alongside Gary Higgins in your collection), Ed Askew is an artist I haven’t come across before. After his debut for ESP in 1968, his second album ‘Little Eyes’ was recorded in 1970, but somehow never got past test pressing stage, and as so many records of this era did, was lost for decades. After the 70s Askew seemed to sink into obscurity, but in the early 80s he got his hands on a harpsichord, a tiple…
Between Two Skies / Towards The Night
Restocked, now out of print: Pakistani-born musician Ilyas Ahmed traffics a sound that borders on the folk/drone/raga/rock axis, one that Scottish critic David Keenan has called “gone”. Currently residing in Portland, OR, Ahmed has released recordings on Time-Lag, Digitalis, and Root Strata. He is known to perform live with Honey Owens (Valet) and Jed Bindeman (Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged) and his recent recordings have featured Liz Harris (Grouper). He first appeared in the Fall of 2005 with…
Split
Debut vinyl release for both of these great artists who collectively have had releases on a host of excellent underground labels such as Stunned Records, Housecraft, Sturmundrugs Records and Digitalis. Black Eagle Child is the musical project of Michael Jantz, and this release is his second outing for Blackest Rainbow following his excellent Kite Excursions CDR a while back. Here he presents us with 4 tracks of skillful guitar finger picking layered with glockenspeil, accordian and some perfectl…
Evening river
Vinyl edition of this stunningly beautiful album of fragile and haunting Korean folk from Kim Doo Soo that was issued earlier this year on CD by Japan's consistently incredible PSF label. Kim Doo Soo's first major appearance outside of Korea was through the Damon & Naomi curated 'International Sad Hits' compilation featuring 4 tracks from Kim. This was followed with PSF releasing his first new record in 5 year, 2007's superb '10 Days Butterfly'. On 'Evening River', Kim has re-recorded some of hi…
Asleep On The Floodplain
Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…
Wind Wound
Early Songs is the work of Glaswegian David Scott. It’s been less than five years since David starting writing music, but he’s been playing guitar for nearly 15 after hearing his first musical inspiration in the lyrical country-blues of fingerpicker Mississippi John Hurt. The second turning point for David’s work came after hearing the violin playing of The Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis. The instrumental trio prompted him to leave singing behind, pick up the fiddle and create emotive instrum…
From The Great American Songbook Label: Preservation
This second collaborative work from the pair is an expansive and ambitious recasting of American music now in the public domain. The influence of the songs collected here is long and widespread for their style and lyricism, forging a rich tradition and ever evolving history. With their interpretations, Carter and Kiefer have taken the songs that have seeped into their souls and extended upon them in such a way that brings something entirely new to their original ideas. It’s something that’s enti…
Seamstress In A Suitcase
Tan or Boil – a pun on the name of bratty short stop from those 1970s Bad News Bears films that stuck – is the alias of the Pittsburgh-born Jason Bacasa. After growing up in Pittsburgh and studying graphic design, Jason took flight from his home town to work freelance in a variety of cities, though his latest and current stint in New York seems more permanent than those in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. On the songwriting side, Jason’s continual travels kept him to just an acoustic guit…
Beeswax Ephemera
The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…
The Temporal Wheel
For all intents and purposes, Grand Salvo is the work of singer-songwriter Paddy Mann. Grand Salvo’s debut album, 1642-1727, and its follow-up, River Road, earned him rave reviews and a solid following at home and beyond for his stark, sensitive and beautiful songs. After a spell living in Europe, Paddy returned to Australia and began work on another album he’d dreamt up while away, A set of songs that acts as a children’s storybook, the album became cursed with too many recording problems and P…
Soil Creatures
The name under which Melbourne singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Paddy Mann records and performs, Grand Salvo has quietly and unassumingly developed a body of work that has inspired both hardcore devotion and more recently, wider recognition, stemming from his previous album, Death. The ambitious fairytale orchestration received rave reviews from all over the country. With Soil Creatures, Grand Salvo has returned with no less scope but sits within quieter surroundings. This gorgeous s…