Folk /
Afro Exotique 2 - Further Adventures In The Leftfield, Africa 1975-87
After "Afro Exotique - Adventures In The Leftfield, Africa 1972-88" was enthusiastically embraced by heads, collectors and core Africa Seven enthusiasts alike, we dived back down into the vaults, and hope we've come up with another volume of listenable esoterica from roughly the same period. "The Quest", courtesy of fleeting 1978 leftfield supergroup Afro Cult Foundation (featuring Joni Haastrup, Remi Kabaka and friends) sets the tone-bar high and sideways, with 4.50 mins of atmospheric, effecte…
La Force Aquarienne
In his debut release with Constellation Tatsu, Andy Aquarius takes us on a journey from the forest to the sea. Aquarius was in the process of writing another album, the follow up to ‘Chapel’ (Hush Hush, 2021), when multiple voices emerged, each of them holding a distinct energetic signature. Those incantations became ‘La Force Aquarienne,’ a collection of intuitive prayers.
The first track, ‘U Lisi’ (Ukrainian for ‘In The Forest’), represents the connective and grounding tissue of our shared dim…
Shirk
*Edition of 300* Shirk is the new AOR flavored free improvisation solo album by Sam Shalabi featuring Eric Chenaux and Nadah El-Shazly where Synth Pop and Sound Poetry fester. Sam Shalabi is an Egyptian-Canadian composer, improviser and guitarist living between Montreal and Cairo. Starting out during the late 70s punk era, his work has evolved into an experimental synthesis of modern Arabic Music that incorporates free improvisation, traditional Arabic music, noise, classical, text, and jazz. Ot…
It's OK To Be Happy (1999-2001)
Early and mostly previously unreleased recordings from Dundedin's The Strange Girls, a band that initially consisted of Clayton Noone, Kaaterama "Motty" Morehu and Jon Arcus. The Strange Girls existed on and off from 1999 up until Motty's passing in 2019 and left behind a peculiar trail of gems scattered around on a myriad of limited lathe cuts, cassettes and CDrs. It's OK To Be Happy focuses on the trio era - Jon Arcus left the band in 2002 - and starts at the very beginning with 'Satan', the f…
Cycles
Edition of 50.* Hugjiltu plays the guitar with five strings. Not used to the standard chord-forms of Western guitar, he invented his own system of tuning, combining the three-string Mongolian lute and the two-string horsehead fiddle, both of which he started playing as a child. These five strings epitomise his relationship with the music from within the Mongolian ethnic tradition and with the music beyond, a state of artistic composure few in his generation have achieved. Hailing from a musical …
Cants Dels Trobadors: « La Douceur D'Un Son Nouvel »
Super Tip! Reissue of a traditional French Experimental/Folk rarity. Be ready for a spaced out trip through French medieval times. Ancient instruments, musique concrète, spoken word, old Occitan dialect minstrel songs, drone, from dark ambient and minimal percussive tracks to Middle Ages fuzz delirium. Includes a 4-pages insert with original liner notes by Gérard Le Vot and Thierry Lancino. As stated in the brilliant Dustygroove review: A weird and wonderful little record – one that combines noi…
Region, Music, and Practice Vol.1
"It is not only an album, but also a complete documentary of an event. We combine cassette and CD into one album so that one may review the unusual art project from different aspects. It also includes a precious booklet about everything said on the talks. Each track in the album is heard for the first time. For the project, Lao Dan and Mamer created brand new works. Mamer even began a new band named Mask. One remarkable song that didn’t be recorded is Water Flows sang by Wu Tiao Ren’s Mao Tao in…
There Is No Hunger in Your Shame
Tip! Builenradar is the new moniker under which Belgian visual artist and musician Wouter Vanhaelemeesch performs his damaged post-apocalyptic bikerfolk. Previously known as Urpf Lanze, he’s been producing trance-like guitar boogie that takes inspiration from disparate influences since the early 2010s. Builenradar plays in a self-developed unorthodox style with a resophonic guitar on his lap and a voice ranging from messy grunts to eerie whistling and absent murmurs. Once, after Vanhaelemeesch o…
Distances
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* "Brilliant new instrumental fork-bending from the always amazing Elkhorn, presented here in a quartet setting I had not heard before. The basic band remains Drew Gardner on electric guitar and Jesse Sheppard on acoustic, but as often seems to happen with these guys, there are a couple more faces in the studio. This time it's two drummers. One is Ian McColm, a Virginia tub monster who has played in many excellent situations, including a 2012 Feeding Tube duo casse…
Maison Rose
*2022 repress.* An album such as this obviously owes a lot to the atmosphere in which it was recorded, which we can imagine was magical. We know it took place in Fromentel, Normandy, in a farm converted into a studio by the producer Jacques Denjean, known for his work with Dionne Warwickor Françoise Hardyas well as having been a member of the Double Six. It was also at Fromentel, that Denjean would record two fantastic albums with Albert Marcoeur. When Emmanuelle Parrenin followed in his footste…
Funeral Folk
Funeral Folk is a musical collaboration between Sara Parkman and Maria W Horn. Together they explore the rituals of grief and the musical phenomenology of death through their respective crafts and influences. Sara Parkman is a violinist, singer and composer focused on Swedish folk music. For her latest release Vesper, she has been diving into her Christian heritage - the sacred music that has been a part of her family traditions for several generations. Maria W Horn is a contemporary composer em…
Via Lattea
Via Lattea is the new recording project of the music and performance research ensemble Enten Hitti. The work takes inspiration from research on the “feminine” and from the matrilineal transmission of life. It is the result of various research trips to the places where the culture of the “sacred female” took shape over 4000 years ago: Cyprus, Crete, Turkey, Ireland, South Africa, Indonesia … The historical and geographical suggestions have been freely reinterpreted and transformed into musical pi…
In New York
Moroccan Jajouka master Bachir Attar meets American experimental musician Elliot Shrap for a live jam of drum machines and traditional Moroccan instruments in 1990. Bachir Attar's career spans five decades and represents the transcendental sounds of Jajouka, a small Moroccan village situated between Fes and Tangier, known for its unique mystical sound. Fans include William Burroughs and The Rolling Stones with which Bachir recorded with in 1989. A year later Attar collaborated with the prolific …
Het Vuil Volkske
Ghent-based wanderer Benoit Monsieurs has been exploring the many routes paved by the primitive folk guitarists of legend and is now carving out his own path as Venediktos Tempelboom. These seven tracks straddle the Eastern and Western codes that so infused the hazy Americana pioneered by the John Faheys and the Robbie Bashos of this earth, with the always-haunting Flemish landscape unmistakably lining the contours.
Compulsions
*200 copies limited edition* 'The isolation of lockdown was challenging for guitarist J.R. Bohannon. In refreshingly vulnerable linear notes, he describes how his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were made worse by the pandemic. But he accommodated by creating Compulsions, a set of solo acoustic guitar improvisations in an American folk style, each recorded during a panic attack.
These slow and melancholy pieces have compelling melodies, which Bohannon used to calm himself. He …
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977
Tip! A poet, soothsayer, bicycle race tipster, actor, prolific drinker, self-taught guitarist, and living legend of Japanese sound, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-folk scene in the mid-1970s, forging a sound and sensibility marked by throat-wrenching vocals and searing ennui. Among his musical peers in postwar Japan, Tomokawa distinguished himself as a pioneer of radical individualism. He had “the personality of a hydrogen bomb”—as the notorious ultraleft band the Brain Police on…
Finally, His First Album
Tip! At the tender age of twenty-five, while he was working part-time at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo’s Kamata district, Kazuki Tomokawa released his debut record, fittingly titled Finally, His First Album. While he had already penned hundreds of songs, including his first single “Try Saying You’re Alive!,” written on a long train ride past fields and rice paddies, it was this recording that introduced Japan to one of its most unique musicians of the postwar era. Each track, as record label …
Straight from the Throat
Tip! In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo’s avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa’s second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form: as the “screaming philosopher” he would come to be called—cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes.
In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualis…
A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth
Tip! In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic…
After the Bend
*300 copies limited edition* 'After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM’s 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, an album noted for “an astute synthesis of ‘library music’ and solo acoustic guitar,” and “a seamless blend into the uncluttered and airier side of classic 1970’s giallo,” After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth—of strings, outdoor recordings, …