Experimental / Folk Rock

Original and only vinyl edition on ZKP RTVL of superb Slovenian 1981 album fusing jazz/rock experimentation with local folk music in great RIO style like Sammla Mammas Manna, Etron Fou Leloublan, Aksak Maboul, etc.

First edition of the beautiful first album with a very original combination of avant-rock/jazz/folk in RIO tradition by the Czech avantgarde duo, released by Panton in 1988.

2005 re-issue on De Stijl / Child Of Microtones of an obscure privately released American LP from 1971 with a wild and messy experimental mix of shortwave radio sounds, free jazz, spaced-out freak folk tunes, odd beat poems, etc.

Rare 1985 LP re-issue on Blu Bus with 2 extra-tracks of the 1983 cassette album by highly acclaimed and original hardcore folk band from Torino. With paste-on cover.

Rare second album by highly acclaimed and original hardcore folk band from Torino released on their own Blu Bus label in 1986. With book-cover and insert.

1989 album on New Tone Records of "100% Ethno Rock" by Sicilian ethno-rock pioneers. With original innersleeve.

2012 release ** "Woody Jackson has collaborated on soundtracks ("The Devil Wears Prada," "Youth in Revolt," "American History X") and on the works of artists like Badly Drawn Boy and Daniel Johnston. Devoted to Morricone-inspired influences, he threw himself into this new soundtrack, perfectly adhering to its canons. "Dos Manos" is an almost entirely instrumental album, slow, warm, and enveloping, and, inevitably, a bit lacking when deprived of its visual counterpart. This is common when soundtr…

Female singer-songwriter released in 1971 on the Dandelion label, run by progressive DJ John Peel, Second album by Bridget St John. Backed by John Martin (g), Rick Sanders (g,vln) and other artists active in the folk world, and with chamber music arrangements by Ron Gysin, known for his orchestral arrangement of Pink Floyd's “Atom Heart Mother”, this album is a masterpiece of shaded, magical singing and English fantasy beauty. Paper-jacketed, SHM-CD with commentary and bilingual lyrics. Includes…

2003 release ** "Pekka Streng's music was fundamentally far from rock or pop; his intimate and reflective songs were more reminiscent of folk, vocals and often even children's music (Tove Jansson was one of Streng's great idols). Love Records' brilliant insight was to have Tasavallan Presidentti accompany his first album. This synthesis gave rise to music that, instead of acoustic folk, was influenced by prog, psychedelia and sometimes even jazz. However, the arrangements did not banish the deli…

1998 release **

2007 release ** "Brad Rose, the man behind the Digitalis and Foxglove labels returns with another solo album. Archaic Spines is an album that utilises only a bouzouki and a hint of vocals, spreading five celestial ragas over forty minutes of improvisation. Unlike the open tuned raga variations we've come to expect from the Takoma lineage, these pieces tend to be strummed with droning open strings as you'd find in classical sitar music. For all the nods toward Eastern harmonic patterns and improv…

1998 release ** "Debut by Dutch art rock/folk band. Fine sensitive folk songs, Georg Trakl poems set to music, acoustic pop ballads, a progressive feel throughout. A multi-faceted album that contains all original material ranging from the 3 minute pop song to the 7 minute tribal folk suite and encompasses influences of Kurt Weill, British folk rock in a Comus/Spirogyra vein, 70's avantgarde art rock (Lindsay Cooper). The album is hard to classify, but achieves a wholeness due to the band's songw…

2010 release ** "Verdure is Donovan Quinn, who resides in Walnut Creek, deep in the East Bay of San Francisco. He's performed his songs with the Sky green Leopards (collaborating with Glenn Donaldson) and can currently be found performing solo, occasionally being joined by various friends and collaborators under the umbrella of the 13th Month. His Verdure alias draws influence from heavy collaboration with the Jewelled Antler Collective, that loose-fitting West Coast group of artists known for b…

2010 release ** "...scraps of ulcerated, painful, immensely precarious songs. how to continue using a polaroid to fix images and faces with the awareness that what will stand out in the image, afterwards, will be the absence, not the living detail. It is a harsh and not at all consoling songwriting by Stefano Giaccone, one of the few "true" names of libertarian musical antagonism. here Giaccone uses a technological "zero degree" that is not at all trendy, a sort of epitome of unplugged: the guit…

2009 release **

2025 stock ** "Philly’s Kurt Vile can sound like Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp or Lou Reed — if those standard-bearers were murmuring through a speakerphone after a few salvia bongs. On Vile’s fourth LP, the stoner haze lifts a bit, and he settles on a mood: chilled-out but guarded, and wrapped in gorgeous folk-blues guitar-picking. The vibe is warmly psychedelic, but reality is banging at the door. “When it’s looking dark, punch the future in the face,” he slurs in “Runner Ups,” a Dylanesque rambl…

Ourselves was originally recorded as a one-hour special for broadcast on London's Resonance FM but was too good to leave to the aether. Ourselves is the first collaboration between Richard and octopus-armed percussionist Neilson. The music here represents something of a return to the extended psychedelic mania of mid 90-s outings such as Asthma and Diabetes and Endekeg. "Beam" kicks off the CD with Richard ripping it up on electric guitar over a thick blanket of hand percussion, plucked…

In 2009 Drifting/Falling released Gareth Dickson’s debut album, Collected Recordings, a stunningly beautiful and haunting ambient folk album which caught the attention of 12k’s Taylor Deupree. Thus began a not-as-easy-as- expected search for Dickson to try to coax him into writing an album for 12k. After a couple of cross-Atlantic voyages and a brief run-in involving a failing rental car and a herd of sheep on a dusty Scotish road, Deupree and Dickson met and Quite A Way Away was recorded for 12…

Mark Kozelek is back with a new Sun Kil Moon album featuring Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, Jen Wood (who has worked with the Postal Service), Will Oldham, and Owen Ashworth (formerly known as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, now of Advance Base).

“The outcome of a collective trudge across the European/American desert for 40 days and 40 nights.” Cat Mask at Huggie Temple is the superb debut 12” by Desert Heat, a dust bowl rock trio of Steve Gunn, John Truscinski and Cian Nugent. The trio originally came together when they played a bowling alley followed by an appearance at Tusk Festival in Newcastle, UK where the trio jammed together like they had been a band for years. Part of the group\'s success hinges on John and Ste…

2012 release ** "Estasy is the project of Emiliano Maggi, an Italian singer/songwriter who has spent the last couple of years releasing low-key CD-Rs and collaborating with artists and filmmakers in Rome. A lot of the time his live performances with other artists, well-documented on YouTube, are set to spooky visuals, and in those that aren't Maggi wears quite frightening masks. Sure, quite a bit of that does sound like the sort of standard gimmickry rife in 2012, but there's something about Emi…

In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…

Chris Rose's Robust Worlds has impressed us since first glimpse. He was actually barefoot, if you can believe that, and his set had the feel of a way more lysergic Kevin Ayers. It was freezing fucking cold and I'm pretty sure he wore a Hawaiian shirt. His debut LP is called Emotional Planet, and it's deceptively simple. Voice, guitar, some noisy shit, whatever. His playing is sick: fluid, unforced, warm, soothed and soothing. It's a bath you don't want to exit. Seriously, if yr going to play gui…

This is a collection of previously-unreleased studio and live material. Originally released in 2002 and deleted for years -- this collection is now made available again in 2012 due to demand. The studio material is as beautiful and sad as "Dirty Old Town," made famous by The Pogues, which is released on CD for the first time here. The oldest song, "Willie Boy," was recorded during the 1991 session for Documentary but didn't make it onto the record. "German Mustard," "Where I Lead Me," "Heav…

Utterances into a dictophone from a backdoor man hiding in the closet as the husband arrives home. The tales plod along in whispers, accompanied by defined guitar interplay, punctuated piano and snappy drums. Nearly every accent of guitar seems present. Fragile flamenco plucks, fuzz-to-the-front fumblings onto smooth lyrics of a detective attempting to resolve his own crimes. Vocals and acoustic guitar were recorded by Greg Weeks. The arrangements, instrumentation and production were lovi…

In the all-female duo Coa, Eddie Corman trades on volume and velocity in a howling rock beast that could well fit the bill soundtracking an apocalyptic horror movie. Both Eddie and Marcon first played together in an early incarnation of LSD-March, pysch-blasted legends of the Japanese underground. Combining their names to form a new endeavour into Japanese acid folk, Eddie and Marcon – as Eddie Marcon – have been working in much quieter tones to make delicate, gorgeous and esoteric music. Shinin…

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…

"As K.J. Gustin wrote, Piece Of Mind is a work of 'exotic psychedelic free-jazz-meets-rock, East-meets-West, progressive and smoky moment in late Twentieth Century music history'. Add to that a spice of jazzy brassed R&B and a touch of minor-key popsike sensitivity and you get an accurate description of the sounds contained in Roger Bunn's astonishing 1969 LP, originally released in the UK on the Major Minor budget label, but issued in some European countries (Ohr label in Germany or Phil…

Emil Amos, world renowned as drummer of the illustrious experimental rock groups Om and Grails, has an increasingly prolific, though relatively unknown, solo career under the moniker Holy Sons. Home recording over 1000 songs since the project's inception in 1992, Amos has spent the better part of the last two decades honing his song writing and production skills over a wide swath of genres in a mission to capture his internal world sonically. Only a handful of shows have ever been pla…

Luminous Night is the first set of new Six Organs Of Admittance material to leap forth from Ben Chasnys' cerebral cortex in 18 months, and what a joy it is. With the release of odds-and-sods collection RTZ earlier in the year there to bridge the gap between 2007s Shelter From The Ash it doesn't seem like he's been away for long per se but for serious Chasny-heads a new album is something to get pretty excited about and with his other musical outlet Comets On Fire either on extended hiatus or spl…

The burgeoning Finnish free-folk movement has been garnering much praise & attention over the past year. First CD release by Avarus who play a left-field blend of noise, folk & free jazz. From the same circle of psychos who bring us Kemialliset Ystavat, Maniac's Dream, Pylon & the Anaksimandros. Backward, dirt-eating freak folk that makes the Animal Collective sound like Judy Collins.

Recorded in 2005/2006 in Portugal and Europe... and they like to dance to the sound of tribal music!

A true solo endeavor, this LP is the debut of D. Charles Speer on long player. Recordings over a span of 4 years have been assembled here into a rumination on loss in its many forms - loss of direction, loved ones, home, mental acuity, money, and emotional stability. Pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl and limited to 500 copies.

This album is essentially the first recording by Robin Williamson and Mike Heron as a duo. What's most exciting about this album is that fans can witness these songs take creative flight for the first time. Most of these selections found their way onto subsequent studio recordings, but there are also a few unreleased songs, including Williamson's "Born in Your Town" and Heron's "Lover Man," which was later recorded by Al Stewart. The discovery of these tapes was made in 1985. They finally saw re…

White Magic is the songwriting and vocal lyricism of Mira Billotte engaged by the talented likes of 'Sleepy' Doug Shaw, Jim White (Dirty Three), Tim DeWit (Gang Gang Dance), Tim Barnes, Samara Lubelski, Shahzad Ismaily, Jesse Lee, Karen Leblanc and Brad Truax. White Magic's debut full length album Dat Rosa Mel Apibus is an elaborate evolution from the first release. It is a journey which sets forth into an untamed musical landscape, finding the familiar in unusual streams of new sound -- a new m…