Folk /
I Still Look For The Mountains
Debut of the New England singer, songwriter and naturalist Harper Bull as Allison Graves: breathy, worn-in songs recorded with a secondhand guitar and a broken laptop, between Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan and Adrianne Lenker. First vinyl edition on Important.
Leitmotiv
*200 copies limited edition* After a string of acclaimed albums, Maxine Funke should need little introduction. With Leitmotiv, she surprises us once again, this time with five quiet, soft yet haunting pieces that slowly reveal themselves. Her distinctive voice almost whispers its way through keyboard tones and field recordings, moving somewhere between silence and melody, intimacy and unease. While having a dip into a more experimental bath, Funke remains deeply connected to her folk tradition. …
Nothing Space Music
Maya Ongaku has always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date.
Written in the aftermath of several years of international touring, the album e…
You Never Were Much Of A Dancer
When I was about eight years old a pretty formative thing happened to me ... my mum bought me a cassette tape of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Being so young I'd had no real interest in music prior to that, but I did have a ‘My First Sony’ cassette player that I used to listen to audiobooks. Anyway, I put the tape in, pressed play, and what I heard blew my little 8 year old mind. I don't know what it was about that wall of sound that so captured me, but I spent many hours hyperactively running around the…
Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain
Welsh musician Gwenifer Raymond’s 2018 debut album, You Never Were Much of a Dancer, introduced a new voice on acoustic guitar, receiving 5 stars in The Guardian, big spreads in MOJO and UNCUT, and airplay on multiple BBC programmes. This led to months of touring on the European festival circuit. Her second album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, finds Raymond ranging into unexplored experimental territory, drawing from her Welsh roots.
Steve Gunn
On Steve Gunn, Steve Gunn’s 2007 debut captures a formative solo voice in raw, spacious focus. Recorded on four‑track in a Brooklyn apartment, its instrumental pieces drift between American primitive guitar, meditative drone and free improvisation - unvarnished home recordings whose patience, tonal richness and exploratory nerve already point toward a singular guitar language.
Eggshells
In recent years, many have become aware of the Egyptian oud player and composer Aly Eissa. He has long been a central part of the richly creative music scene in Cairo, but in recent years has really made his mark touring the world, both as a solo artist and with the trio The Handover.
Eissa was mentored in formative years by two legendary figures in Egyptian music; composer and multi-instrumentalist Abdo Dagher, and oud master Hazem Shahin. The music we are presented with on “Eggshells” is heavi…
Adormidera
“If stained glass windows could sing they would sound like Josephine Foster, and her interpretations of the songs of Víctor Herrero are as artful and finely detailed as motes of dust falling through shafts of light in the libraries of your childhood, engrossing in their restraint. Josephine's naked voice an echoing truth in repose against the existential question mark of Víctor’s guitar. In a world that can feel bewildering and relentless, this music is shelter. Adormidera is the sound of a hypn…
The Pain of Separation: Turkish Gazels, 1926-1935
A collection of spellbinding, melismatic vocal improvisations taken from 78s cut between the mid 1920s to mid '30s - a period defined by the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s partition, the Greco-Turkish War and the compulsory population exchange that followed. This same period also represented a time of intense efforts, following the establishment of the Republic, to westernise the new nation's music - coupled with a ban on traditional music education in schools, and later a complete ban on bro…
Blood Blood Song
"Blood Blood Song continues East of the Valley Blues’ streak of sublime, future-forward acoustic fantasias. For years, the Toronto-based duo, comprised of brothers Kevin and Patrick Cahill, has excelled at an earthy and pensive brand of instrumental music inspired by notions of folk music as a global, rather than regional, idiom.While the duo’s elegant and unassuming virtuosity easily distinguishes East of the Valley Blues from its contemporaries of would-be Bashos and fledgling Faheys, it is th…
The Voice of the Eagle
“I don’t call a lot of my stuff far out,” Basho explained. “I just call it a different level of feeling. It’s far in, as far as I’m concerned...I spent years on the road singing folk songs that had no meaning. It dawned on me music is supposed to say something. Music is supposed to do something.” This is a Basho vocal album – his singing, which John Fahey described as “strangely compelling”, came straight from the heart and soul with no regard for restraint, phrasing or timing. Thankfully, he wa…
Bulayo (Guitar Songs From Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, And DR Congo)
African acoustic guitar masterpieces, expanding on Mississippi’s beloved “African Guitar Box.” In 1979 and 1980, a young British-Kenyan musician named John Low hit the road to learn finger-style guitar from his heroes. He traveled across Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, and Zambia, visiting, and sometimes staying in the homes of, stars like Jean-Bosco Mwenda, Losta Abelo, and Emmanuel Mulemena. He also documented brilliant but previously under-recorded artists like Tanzania’s Francis Kitime and Kenya’s M…
Dålågjel
Dålågjel is Hans P. Kjorstad's third album as a leader for Motvind Records. The music premiered in concert form in 2022, when he joined by the all-star ensemble of Rasmus Kjorstad, Helga Myhr, Kenneth Lien and Astrid Garmo enchanted audiences at Motvind and Jørn Hilme-stemnet, with timelessly transcendental renderings of old Norwegian folk music material. Dålågjel is based on archival footage of traditional tunes from the Gudbrandsdal, Østerdalen, Halligdal, Valdres, Setesdal and Telemark region…
Scott Seskind
Ebalunga!!! is thrilled to announce the first official reissue of the self-released, self-produced, and self-titled 1985 LP Scott Seskind. The album is a lo-fi singer-songwriter jewel. Don't miss it.
The Manson Family Sings The Songs Of Charles Manson
Recorded at the infamous Spahn Ranch in 1970, while their leader Charles Manson was facing trial for the murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, The Manson Family Sings is a highly disconcerting listen. Beneath the harmonic brilliance and folksy innocence of these campfire-styled recordings are the hallmarks of Manson’s twisted worldview, rendering a dystopian edge to what is otherwise compelling singalongs. Squeaky Frome, Brenda Gold, Gypsy Share and Sandra Blue all feature, with Clem Grogan fron…
Live At San Quentin
A chilling artifact from one of history's most infamous figures emerges from the shadows: Charles Manson – Live At San Quentin, a raw, lo-fi collection of improvised folk songs recorded in 1983 inside the legendary prison. Captured with just an acoustic guitar amid the echoes of flushing toilets and jailhouse chatter, this album delivers Manson's most accessible – and surprisingly poppy – performances ever taped.
Following his 1971 conviction for the brutal murders of seven people, including act…
Indian Talking Machine Part Two
** 2-LP gatefold with 12 page full-color booklet insert ** This double LP of instrumental Hindustani, Carnatic and folk 78rpm shellac records from India comes with a full color 12-page insert of gramophone record ephemera, shops, labels, manufacturing details and graphics. The LPs feature over 25 artists recorded between 1904 and 1959 playing a panoply of instruments: jalatarang, dilruba, sarod, clarionet, pakhawaj, violin, been, kazoo, shehnai, tabla, sarangi, sitar, vina and more. Artists incl…
Amarante-Cerisier
*300 copies limited edition* What if, alongside the mainstream history of music, with careers and discographies spanning ten or fifty years from album to album, there was an underground, minority history, that of artists and projects with only one record? A flash, a burst of brilliance, a gem, but no follow-up, no repetitions, no decline.
This will most likely be the case for this album by Amarante-Cerisier, a duo formed by Mauricio Amarante (Radikal Satan, Équipage, travelling companion of Cana…
Bala
There’s a rich resonance to the music of Fodé Lassana Diabaté, whose music has travelled with him from his griot family in West Africa to the North American coast of Unama'kik (Cape Breton). Bala, his first album of purely balafón music, brings together traditional pieces with roots in the Mande empire, original compositions inspired by his time in Unama’kik, and tributes to friends and family members. Diabaté has developed a unique practice on the balafón—a traditional melodic percussion instru…
Universal Light
Debut by a new string trio of Pelt and Elkhorn veterans with the wild card contributions of Kaily Schenker, creating a new variant of supremely pleasing acoustic-psychedelic-drone-Americana etc. “Lullaby>Summer Field” is an aptly named gentle rise, with Sheppard’s fingerpicked 12 string snaking through waves of elongated fiddle and cello. “Triode>Freedom” follows a darker minor-key ostinato with Gangloff’s keening melody over the top. “Freedom>Universal Blues” starts as a dirge and builds to a t…