★Dust-To-Digital
The Sandman's Garden - A Film By Arthur Sloss Crenshaw
Captivating 66-minute documentary following autodidactic African-American outsider artist, Lonnie Holley - whose 'Just Before Music' album was one of our faves of 2012 - as he prepared his biggest exhibit to date in 2004 in the sculpture garden at Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. "The film follows Holley as he builds a sculptural environment out of discarded materials and found objects in the Birmingham Museum of Art’s sculpture garden. His art is by turns profound, playful, and deeply moving.…
Longing for the Past: the 78rpm Era in Southeast Asia
Compiled and edited by David Murray.Longing for the Past: The 78 rpm Era in Southeast Asia is the first survey of the 78 rpm record era in Southeast Asia. It is a kaleidoscopic collection featuring 4 CDs with 90 tracks of music spanning six decades (1905-1966), accompanied by a 272-page book with essays and annotations by leading ethnomusicologists that is richly illustrated with more than 250 vintage photographs, record labels, and sleeves.
"The consistently amazing Dust-to-Digital label presen…
Keeping a record of it
Keeping a Record of It is the follow-up to Lonnie Holley's debut album, Just Before Music. It features recordings made in 2006, 2010 and 2011. Guest performers include Cole Alexander from the Black Lips, Bradford Cox from Deerhunter, and visual artist Lillian Blades.
'Last year, at 62, after decades of singing while he worked, Holley released his jarring debut album, Just Before Music, a marriage of improvised keys and the rambling, hollow bellow of his voice, as well as the first original rec…
Qat, Coffee & Quambus: raw 45s from Yemen
Compiled by Chris Menist, Qat, Coffee & Qambus: raw 45s from Yemen features vintage oud and vocal music inspired by the qat-chewing, coffee-sipping, qambus-playing culture of Yemen. Although part of the classical Arabic musical tradition, the music of Yemen takes its rhythmic lead as much from the East African coast (a mere 20 miles across the Red Sea) as the surrounding Arab Peninsula.Little has been written about the music and culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations, and each 45rpm …
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco
Features six extended tracks from the Golden Age of the Moroccan record industry. 'Kassidat', the Arabic word for poetry, is one of the essential ingredients in Moroccan song. Despite the bewildering array of musical styles in Morocco, the Moroccan sense of poetry is found throughout the music, regardless of the style or language. This isn't the language of high art, but an often impenetrable vernacular poetry of oblique references, symbols, metaphors, and double entendres that describes the liv…
Luk Thung: classic & obscure 78s from Thai Countryside
Compiled by David Murray. Luk Thung: classic & obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside features fourteen outstanding funky performances of Thai country groove music from the 1950s and early 1960s. All previously unreissued, carefully transferred and mastered from the original 78rpm records of collector Dave Murray and presented with detailed full color liner notes by Peter Doolan.
Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey Of Rural Black Religious Music
A collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965 and 1973. Most are guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists. "Most records of black religious music contain some form of gospel singing or congregational singing recorded at a church service. This album, though, tries to present a broader range of performance styles and contexts with the hope of showing the important role that religious music plays in the Southern black com…
Greek Rhapsody - Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956
Greek Rhapsody -- Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956 is a 2CD collection featuring 42 tracks meticulously remastered from 78rpm recordings of Greek instrumentals (1905 to 1956). Many tracks are rare and never previously reissued on CD or vinyl; some are taken from the only known copies, while previously reissued tracks are here offered in far superior sound quality. This compilation offers, for the first time, a unique panorama of the instruments and styles of the Greek music of the…
Ten Thousand Points Of Light: The 20th Anniversary Edition
Kitsch alert! Worshipper at the shrine of Elvis, fans of unabashed bad taste, followers of pop culture, take note. Ten Thousand Points Of Light, originally released in 1991 and now available on DVD for the very first time, is a wry, understated and terrifically funny look at The Townsends, a suburban Atlanta family who, every holiday season for eight years, transformed their Stone Mountain area brick ranch house into a meteoric blaze of Christmas lights. Known as both "the Christmas House" …
Sorrow Come Pass Me Around
A collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965 and 1973. Most are guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists. "Most records of black religious music contain some form of gospel singing or congregational singing recorded at a church service. This album, though, tries to present a broader range of performance styles and contexts with the hope of showing the important role that religious music plays in the Southern bl…
Just before music
Fans of Sun Ra, take notice -- there is a new American original on the scene who hails from Birmingham, Alabama. Lonnie Holley's music is unlike anything ever heard, and these recordings are a welcome addition to the continuum of music. This album marks the first time Dust-to-Digital has taken an artist into a recording studio. Lonnie Bradley Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh of twenty-seven children. From the age of 5, Holley worked various jobs: pi…
Pictures of sound. One thousand years of educed audio : 980 - 19
Using modern technology, Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds--many of which were never intended to be revived. Over the past thousand years, countless images have been created to depict sound in forms that theoretically could be "played" just as though they were modern sound recordings. Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic "pictures of sound" dating back as far as the Middle Ag…
Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Tr
Based on four years of fieldwork throughout the state, the Florida Folklife Program released the two-album, 27-track LP Drop on Down in Florida: Recent Field Recordings of Afro-American Traditional Music in 1981. The album was intended to highlight African American music traditions for a statewide public audience, particularly blues and sacred traditions. When the Folklife Program sought the opportunity to produce an expanded reissue of the album that would include previously unissued field…
Opika Pende: Africa At 78 RPM
Opika Pende: Africa At 78 RPM is a 4CD collection featuring 100 tracks taken from rare 78rpm recordings of African music (1909 to mid-1960s), none of which have ever been issued on CD until now. Pan-African in scope and wildly diverse, Opika Pende is a testament to the deep riches found in early recorded music across the continent. 112-page softcover book with 4 CDs in a separate portfolio -- all housed in a deluxe cloth slipcase. Jonathan Ward is a Los Angeles-based collector, researche…
Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You
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…
... I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces
restocked! Artist Steve Roden combines found old pictures, recordings and text to create his new CD "… and I listen to the wind" that feels like something altogether different, though, more like a silent movie, a collection crafted from crumbs of the past. Tucked within the simple, minimally designed book's front and back covers is the music, which Roden organized into a two-volume mix of similarly excavated documents culled from flea market 78 rpm discs.With no biographical information on …
Strings
Fourteen outstanding performances from the four corners of the world played on stringed instruments and recorded and released on 78rpm records circa 1920-1950. This vinyl LP features fiddles, shamisen, charango, Paraguyan harp, Indian vina, Lebanese oud, Persian violin, Vietnamese moon guitar, and more. Compiled by Jonathan Ward, all tracks are previously unreissued, carefully transferred and mastered and presented with detailed liner notes. Vinyl-only release,
Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics (1918-1955)
fantastic CD of recordings made between 1918 and 1955 assembled and annotated by Ian Nagoski. This compilation contains 24 tracks from Bali, Burma, Cameroon, China, England, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Java, Laos, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia all newly transferred and mastered from 78 rpm discs. At least 18 tracks appear on compact disc for the first time with all but one never having been previously reissued in th…
How Low Can You Go?: Anthology of the String Bass 1925-1941
The first anthology ever of the string bass; A 3CD box set in a cardboard box; 96-page book. Original recordings from 1925-1941, from the legendary archival label Dust-To-Digital (that previously brought the world the beyond-elaborate Goodbye, Babylon and Fonotone Records boxsets). "Not so long ago, the string bass stood tall and proud -- roughly the length and breadth of a poor man's pine coffin -- in every musical aggregation throughout the land from Bangor to Buenos Aires, from the hi…
Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism In Vintage Music...
..And Photography 1890-1950 The latest release from Grammy Award-winning reissue label Dust-to-Digital gives music fans another reason to rejoice. A stunning 96-page hardcover book of historic baptism photographs, taken between 1890 and 1950 and compiled from the collection of noted folk art collector Jim Linderman, is accompanied by a CD of rare gospel and folk recordings from original 78 RPM records (1924-1940), featuring artists Washington Phillips, Carter Family, Tennessee Mountaineers, …