New Arrivals
Alan Lomax In Haiti
Harte Recordings, together with the estate of Alan Lomax, and in collaboration with The Library Of Congress and the The Association for Cultural Equity, present Alan Lomax In Haiti -- a chronicle of Lomax's 1936 Haitian recording expedition for the Library. This 10-CD box-set, in the modern tradition of those lovingly created by Revenant and Dust-To-Digital, is curated from over 50 hours of field recordings by the pre-eminent Haitian scholar, Gage Averill. Besides the CDs, the set contain…
Alone Together #1 – Obelisk / Tholos
A new 7" by Christina Carter which serves as the opening ceremony for our new 7" series of solo performances 'Alone Together'. A loan voice, the tangled bells, the caw of a crow, a plane passing overhead… A fortuitous overlapping of sound moments, trapped in amber by Christina for us to bear witness. Much like her early CDRs 'Hand & Mind' or 'Human As Guitar', 'Obelisk/Tholos' is an act of white witchcraft, a healing spell that defines time with the merest of tools: bells, voice, a microp…
Captain Wedderburn's Courtship / The Dowie Dens O Yarrow
A split single to be listened and heard (and more importantly, bought) with the compilation Whar the Pig Gaed on the Spree. Tradition-minded singers Alasdair Roberts, Karine Polwart, and Drew Wright do the honors. A-side: "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" performed by Alasdair Roberts and Karine Polwart B-side: "The Dowie Dens o Yarrow" performed by Drew Wright
Ragged And Right
This slab of gripping sound was brought about by Jack Rose's exuberant love of lowdown music. Inspired by the Mordicai Jones/Link Wray 3 Track Shack sessions, the idea for this collaboration was germinated while Rose was traveling through the heartland on a tour with D. Charles Speer & the Helix in spring 2008. Musicians used to the road are familiar with the phenomenon wherein a certain tape or recording becomes the thematic soundtrack to the tour at hand. In this case, daily doses of 'Scorpio …
The Glass Bead Game
James Blackshaw once made Michael Gira cry. Not by sucker-punching the poor guy. It was something much simpler: Blackshaw reduced the former Swan frontman — a menacing presence even as he eclipses AARP eligibility — to tears through nothing but a finger-picked acoustic and minimal, melancholic chords. It's easy to understand why. As Gira wrote in a press release celebrating Blackshaw's signing to his Young God imprint, the widely-acclaimed 12-string maestro writes "absolutely beautiful and spell…
Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, An
Spectacoular 4LP box on Honest Jon's called Open Strings which features 2 LP's of 78's from the MIddle East circa the 20's (we're talking Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey) and 2 LP's of more contemporary folks who are clearly inspired by such greatness. Thems being the likes of Richard Bishop (no longer calling him a sir as I don't believe the queen has chinned him with her sword), MV/EE, Ricky Tomlinson, Steffen Basho Junghans, Six Organs of Admitance, Micah Blue Smaldone, Michael Flower, Charlie Parr…
Alienacustica
'Alienacustica' is a superb collection of works by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) as you have never heard before. Forget all MCIAA's noise records... this is a totally different affair: starting from January 2006 they have released 3 unusual, completely acoustic works, all in limited and sold-out editions: a soloist split lp, a private art edition cd-r, and an out-of-print cd. The different approach to these works shows another side of the Opalio brothers' musical universe: all…
Empty The Sun
BOOK + CD: A novel by Joseph Mattson featuring music by SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. Available in First Trade Paperback Edition with CD soundtrack and as a limited edition vinyl LP soundtrack with Large Format Book. “Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles.” Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson’s Emp…
Luck In The Valley
Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few 'takes' and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, 'I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs without overworking the material, but at the same time creating memorable accompaniments on the spot.' Several of the so…
Redlight
"Portland, Oregon's Grails are another new band that fall into the developed post-everything niche sparked off by the likes of Godspeed at the end of the last millenium. Made up with members of Jacki-o-Motherf*cker and Holy Sons, their sound takes in the quiet/loud formula but peppers it with dense layers of Violin, Piano and twilight instrumentation. The band have already sparked off the interest of the Swans' Michael Gira and Neurosis guitarist/vocalist and label co-owner Steve Von Till - thou…
Sarod recital / live in Peshawar
Three beautiful extended ragas recorded last year in Peshawar: "Asad Qizilbash is the only Sarod player in Pakistan since 1992, keeping this traditional instrument and its music alive. Asad was born in 1963 to the famous violinist K.H. Qizilbash, who was responsible for closing the gap between western and eastern classical music. After attending a concert performed by his future Master, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Asad decided to devote himself to the instrument. Today, Asad Qizilbash has the honour t…
Have One On Me
Destined to be one of the top album of the year, finally Joanna Newsom releases her first album since late 2006's Ys, making up for lost time with a disc for 2008, one for 2009 and one for today. Featuring Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan from Joanna's Ys Street Band, Have One On Me is an extravagantly packaged (and extravagantly nicely-priced) collection of fantastic new Joanna Newsom songs -- her most colorful record to date.
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…
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…
Catch My Shoe
"Vinyl version of the 25th classic release from Dutch pioneers, The Ex. Absolutely essential."
relax most of your muscles
a blurry midlife crisis for all children of the revolution! the A side of this psychedelic bumcrack is filled with 10 locked grooves, all vocal, some different panned brainbubbles, featuring one loop of Dennis Tyfus' personal alarm clock. All of these sounds played simultaneously at the 'Relax most of your muscles' Dennis Tyfus' solo exhibtion at Be Part in Waregem, Belgium, providing a non stop soundtrack that coincided with large paintings and around 20 film loops and drawings which cre…
Dogs in English porcelain
Dogs in English Porcelain (Vanessa Rossetto's fourth solo album on the label) is a composition for electronics, field recordings, viola, violin, cello and acoustic turntable. It was created with many layers of very quiet elements that advance and recede, forming the episodic structure of the piece. The overlapping of electronic and environmental sounds with extended technique and traditional playing disturbs the boundaries separating the natural and artificial, the intentional and the incidental…
Ugly Man
Limited to 200 copies. Using fragments, distortions, samples and destructions of Dennis Cooper reading his story ÔUgly Man', Safe have made a powerful aural version of that story's charting of disintegration. From squalls of noise to perverse rhythms, Cooper's words grow and decline into countless shapes, often getting lost in the morass of what can be done to a voice, a body, in sound, only to re-emerge in some new hybrid form. Safe have added a greater sense of definition and drive to their so…
Dordogne
Benjamin Bondonneau (clarinet) and Fabrice Charles (trombone). This double CD has been recorded in 2006 near the river called Dordogne. The two musicians are really integrated into the landscape, and they even manage to make it becoming the third musician. A great release limited to 1000 copies with a nice cover.
Kitty Hawk, le sable et le vent
A composition by Olivier CAPPAROS & Lionel MARCHETTI. For string quartet, two voices and three loudspeakers. An oratorio of musique concrète and instrumental music about “Kitty Hawk” the city where the Wright brothers did the first experiment with plane.