Folk /
What I Became
"If string theory is correct, this is approximately the thirteenth album Matt Valentine has released that definitely shouldnt be filed under a group name (Tower Recordings, Bummer Road, Golden Road, etc.). On the other hand, if string theory is correct, this might also be his 11,000th album. The truth, one suspects, is somewhere in between. Since bedding down in southern Vermont at the dawn of the century, MV has been as cussedly prolific as anyone. The gout of LPs, cassettes, CDRs, singles and …
Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967-2010
UK's Michael Chapman began his career on the Cornish folk circuit in 1967. He signed to the Harvest label, home to Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and many others, recording four quasi-legendary albums. The influential Fully Qualified Survivor was John Peel's favorite record of 1970, and featured future Bowie collaborator Mick Ronson. After decades of recording and touring, Chapman remains an obscure figure in the states. His profile was raised by a lengthy interview with big fan Thurston Moore in…
Maidenstone E.P.
"A previous member of the band UN, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) is now one of the epicenters and key collaborators of the North American free-folk movement, along with such luminaries as Jack Rose, Charalambides, Ben Chasny and the Jewelled Antler Collective. With her hypnotic, echoey church bell chanting, Burke possesses a power-filled vocal sound that harkens back not only to those other polar queens of disaffected freakout psychedelia Nico and Barbara Manning, but she is also akin to and i…
Fully Qualified Survivor
"Although not as well known as his peers (Roy Harper, John Marytn, and Bert Jansch), the name Michael Chapman is an important one in the linage of English folk rock guitarists and singer/songwriters of the late '60s/early '70s. For those unfamiliar with Chapman's work, Roy Harper might be his closest musical cousin (and both artists were signed to EMI's seminal stoner record label Harvest -- also home to Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett). Like other Harvest artists, Chapman's music contains a …
A Prayer For Light
Heresy of the Free Spirit is a trio comprised of Dutch lute player, Jozef Van Wissem and Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalists, Che Chen (of True Primes) on violin, bowed rawap, bass recorder, percussion and tape machines, and Robbie Lee (of Howling Hex, Baby Dee) on portative organ, bass recorder, guitar, banjo and electronics. Using early European as well as non-western instruments and electronics, the trio plays arrangements of Van Wissem’s lute compositions as well as free improvisations tha…
Stations Of The Cross
Ltd ed of 500 copies, first edition "New release from baroque conceptualist and improviser, Josef Van Wissem, who, for more than a decade, has been quietly but surely reinventing the vocabulary of that most unlikely of instruments, the lute. With the exception of the odd Renaissance preservationist context, the lute, which was once the most popular portable instrument in the Western world, has all but disappeared from our musical landscape. Despite the arcane associations of his chosen ins…
A Priori
“Once some music dropped through my letter-box; let’s summon their sounds into our world now, and deliver their names as Roses or Stations. The picture they imagined was both clear and cryptic: the certainties of the 17th century holding tight the ugly beauty that we now see scattered around us. I loved these CDs by Jozef van Wissem, A Rose by any other Name and Stations of the Cross. And then I received a new album, A Priori, and I immediately played it and heard its stark and repetitive intens…
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…