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Ayalew Mesfin stands aside the likes of Mulatu Astake, Mahmoud Ahmed, Hailu Mergia and Alemayehu Eshete as a legend of 1970s Ethiopia. Mesfin’s music is some of the funkiest to arise from this unconquerable East African nation.
Mesfin’s recording career, captured in nearly two dozen 7” singles and numerous reel-to-reel tapes, shows the strata of the most fertile decade in Ethiopia’s 20th century recording industry, when records were pressed constantly by both independent upstarts and corporate behemoths, even if they were only distributed within the confines of this East African nation.
Though Mesfin was forced underground by the Derg regime that took control of Ethiopia in 1974, he has returned almost 50 years later with this triumphant set albums – the first time that his music has been presented in this form.
These albums give us a chance to discover a rare and beautiful moment in music history, in anthologies built from Mesfin’s uber-rare 7” single releases and from previously unreleased recordings taken from master tapes. Each individual album contains an oversized 11” x 11” 16 page book that tells the story of modern Ethiopian music and Mesfin’s role within it. An OBI wrapped “box set” of all five albums is available at a discounted price. The box set only contains one booklet.
Mot Aykerim (You Can’t Cheat Death) gives us a chance to discover a rare & beautiful moment in music history, in an anthology built from previously unreleased songs re-discovered on master tapes. Contains an oversized 11” x 11” 16 page book that tells the story of modern Ethiopian music and Mesfin’s role within it.
Ayalew Mesfin stands aside the likes of Mulatu Astake, Mahmoud Ahmed, Hailu Mergia and Alemayehu Eshete as a legend of 1970s Ethiopia. Mesfin’s music is some of the funkiest to arise from this unconquerable East African nation.
Mesfin’s recording career, captured in nearly two dozen 7” singles and numerous reel-to-reel tapes, shows the strata of the most fertile decade in Ethiopia’s 20th century recording industry, when records were pressed constantly by both independent upstarts and corporate behemoths, even if they were only distributed within the confines of this East African nation.
Though Mesfin was forced underground by the Derg regime that took control of Ethiopia in 1974, he has returned almost 50 years later with this triumphant set albums – the first time that his music has been presented in this form.
These albums give us a chance to discover a rare and beautiful moment in music history, in anthologies built from Mesfin’s uber-rare 7” single releases and from previously unreleased recordings taken from master tapes. Each individual album contains an oversized 11” x 11” 16 page book that tells the story of modern Ethiopian music and Mesfin’s role within it. An OBI wrapped “box set” of all five albums is available at a discounted price. The box set only contains one booklet.
Good Aderegechegn (Blindsided By Love) gives us a chance to discover a rare & beautiful moment in music history, in an anthology built from his uber-rare 7” single releases. Contains an oversized 11” x 11” 16 page book that tells the story of modern Ethiopian music and Mesfin’s role within it.
Glorious vinylization of this 2022 duo session, originally issued as a cassette, documenting the first time Suzuki and Noyes ever collaborated. Ayami Suzuki has become known to cognoscenti for her brilliantly imagined vocal improvisations, through recordings with like-minded folks such as French vocalist/polymath Delphine Dora and avant hurdy gurdy player, TOMO. Rob Noyes has developed a parallel reputation as a master third-generation acoustic guitarist in the post-Takoma tradition. Originally based in the U.S. he wisely relocated to Tokyo several years ago. Which is where this meeting took place, And while I initially assumed the music had been composed to some degree. Rob assured me that was not true, He says, “I think the recording can seem like something we took a lot of time with and discussed/composed to some degree, but we actually just agreed to meet at a rehearsal studio. It took a little more than an hour to track it all, without ever having played together before or even really discussing the approach we were going to take. I just tuned my guitar to a different tuning for each one and we let it roll.” The results kinda speak for themselves, but I was blown away by the notion they had never collaborated previously. The intimate nature of their blend recalls such long-time collusionists as Tim Buckley & Lee Underwood or Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille. Rob's delicate instrumental arcs create a perfect net for Ayami's vocals, which are usually wordless (although they always feel weighted with emotional content). It's a mesmeric pairing of voices. Which I can only hope is the first of many. Classic Fevers and Chills is a perfect soundtrack for spring, Unconditionally magical. --Byron Coley, 2026
"Remnants" is an album marked by the ambiguity of presence and absence. The pieces, recorded using minimal equipment in what Suzuki describes as a ritual-like atmosphere, began as a way of processing the loss of her father in 2019. But beyond this, they also come to speak to the ways in which loss changes our relationship with someone, and our experiences of the world. Indeed, the experience of loss is not marked merely by a single event, but is instead a process that unfolds over time. Despite the other's absence, a particular location, the smell of a certain brand of tobacco, a look on a friend's face - traces such as these are enough to bring about a renewed presence. It is through these subtle traces and remnants, encountered over time, that we come to understand loss as not only the acceptance of absence, but the recognition of a continued presence. As Suzuki says, "this is not a solo album." Its creation was instead shaped by an ongoing dialogue, the continued elaboration of a complex and ambivalent relationship. At once melancholic, warm, and embracing, it is this ambiguity, these subtle traces, that Suzuki’s compositions speak to. These are not merely the sounds of mourning, but instead have been shaped by the evolving dialectic of presence and absence into something far more subtle and haunting. (Zefan Sramek, 2026)
A collection of ten hypnotic guitar renditions that dive deeply into the traditional compositional musicality that underpins Harakami’s hallucinatory beatscapes before reconsidering them under a fresh, innovative and engaging new light. River: The Timbre of Guitar #2 Rei Harakami signals a new level of awareness and understanding of both Rei Harakami’s significance and Ayane Shino’s undeniable talent.
Re-upping and expanding our 2020 sufi-flamenco grail on LP and tape format, adding 4 newly unearthed tracks to those previously thought to be Aziz Balouch's only recordings.
Aziz Balouch moved to the Iberian Peninsula from modern-day Pakistan in 1932 in search of work and music. After a childhood spent studying Islamic mysticism and devotional songs in the Sufi shrines of his native Sindh he soon fell in love with the 'deep song' of flamenco and was taken in as an apprentice to the great heterodox cantaor Pepe Marchena after a chance encounter. He dedicated the rest of his life to flamenco and developed an elaborate theory of the South Asian and Sufi origins of the art which he propagated through live performances and publications in London, Spain and Pakistan.
Decades before the arrival of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology or the invention of 'fusion' Aziz Balouch painstakingly immersed himself into a completely different musical tradition seeking connections and drawing inspiration to create a unique performance style which has tragically remained hidden and ignored. These 8 tracks are taken from Aziz Balouch's only surviving recordings, two 7" EPs released in Spain in 1962. On each track Balouch draws on his polyglottism to seamlessly merge Sufi poetry in Persian, Sindhi, Hindi and Arabic with various forms of Andalusian song in Spanish. Accompanied by a single guitar his voice pushes through into the profound depths of human experience to excavate the shared past of flamenco which had been submerged beneath the surface.
Many thanks to Stefan Williamson Fa.
Re-upping and expanding our 2020 sufi-flamenco grail on LP and tape format, adding 4 newly unearthed tracks to those previously thought to be Aziz Balouch's only recordings.
Aziz Balouch moved to the Iberian Peninsula from modern-day Pakistan in 1932 in search of work and music. After a childhood spent studying Islamic mysticism and devotional songs in the Sufi shrines of his native Sindh he soon fell in love with the 'deep song' of flamenco and was taken in as an apprentice to the great heterodox cantaor Pepe Marchena after a chance encounter. He dedicated the rest of his life to flamenco and developed an elaborate theory of the South Asian and Sufi origins of the art which he propagated through live performances and publications in London, Spain and Pakistan.
Decades before the arrival of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology or the invention of 'fusion' Aziz Balouch painstakingly immersed himself into a completely different musical tradition seeking connections and drawing inspiration to create a unique performance style which has tragically remained hidden and ignored. These 8 tracks are taken from Aziz Balouch's only surviving recordings, two 7" EPs released in Spain in 1962. On each track Balouch draws on his polyglottism to seamlessly merge Sufi poetry in Persian, Sindhi, Hindi and Arabic with various forms of Andalusian song in Spanish. Accompanied by a single guitar his voice pushes through into the profound depths of human experience to excavate the shared past of flamenco which had been submerged beneath the surface.
Many thanks to Stefan Williamson Fa.
The second outing for our short run book publishing imprint, The End books, takes the form of a reprint of Spanish Cante Jondo and Its Origin in Sindhi Music, originally published in Spanish in 1955 under the name Cante Jondo: Su Origen y Evolución and later in this English translation. Aziz Balouch presents his theory on the roots of flamenco's 'deep song' in modern-day Pakistan, a cultural journey that mimics the routes of his own life, having been brought up among the Islamic mysticism and devotional songs of Sindh before travelling to Gibraltar in the early 1930s and becoming transfixed with the cante jondo across the border in southern Spain. Positing this concept through personal accounts rather than solid theoretical backing, this text provides a valuable account of an extraordinary existence that crossed remarkable geographical, musical, and spiritual lines. Issued here with a new introduction from anthropologist of sound, the senses and Islam, Stefan Williamson Fa. "It would be easy to place Balouch on the fringes, as an eccentric footnote in flamenco history. But that misses the shape of his life and work. He was a figure who moved intuitively across boundaries that our present categories of nation, genre, discipline tend to fix in place. His work predates the founding of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, the global circuits of world music, and the marketplace logic of fusion projects by decades. He was not an ethnographer or a proto–world musician, but someone for whom the deep song of Andalusia and the devotional song of the subcontinent resonated along the same fault lines of feeling, and who spent his life trying to trace them. This book is one of the few surviving traces of that attempt. To read it now is to encounter a perspective that resists tidy narratives of influence or origin, despite its title and what he claims to do. It stands instead as evidence of an idiosyncratic musical imagination, one that relied less on proof than on listening, and on the belief that certain echoes carry farther than history can easily explain." — Stefan Williamson Fa
Following on from their seminal Light As A Feather LP, Outubro (October) was originally released in 1980 and began Azymuth’s run of prolific output for Milestone Records throughout the decade. Typifying the consummate craftsmanship of the three members’ performances - each with such distinct personality and together so perfectly balanced - their perfectionist attitude to sound is maintained across the production on the album, beautifully colouring the expressionist fusion of samba rhythm, jazz progression, funk attitude and psychedelic electronics. The album hosts a wonderful mix of tempos and styles, from Alex Malheiros’ earth-shaking slap-bass on ‘Dear Limmertz’, which was to become a hit on London’s underground disco and jazz-dance club scenes alike, to the late maestro Jose Roberto Bertrami’s genial melodic Rhodes excursions on the vocoder laden, samba-jazz masterpiece ‘Un Amigo’, while Ivan ‘Mamao’ Conti’s signature swing on ‘Maracana’ exemplifies the root of Azymuth’s ‘samba doido’ (crazy samba) philosophy. The two cover versions on the album are the title track which was originally penned by Milton Nascimento, and Chick Corea’s, ‘500 Miles High’, both of which magically reimagine the originals and further demonstrate the immense virtuosity of this cult recording.
A selection of unreleased works from the prolific and Eastbourne based artist B.L. Underwood. As often, it started with discovering a CD, leading me to the depths of the Internet Archive. I still remember the excitement of going through B.L. Underwood's recordings for the first time and realising how unique his approach to electronic music was, every track had something powerful yet moving within it, as he could play around with genres and tempos yet carrying a very distinctive touch. After a short detective work to get in touch with the artist, and quite some time curating the content of this compilation (the hardest part by far), System Of Objects is proudly presenting the remastered version of 6 of his tracks that showcast B.L. Underwood talent and uniqueness.
インド中央部を流れる聖河ナルマダ川は、神話では瞑想するシヴァ神から流れ出た汗が川となったと言われ、あの聖なるガンジス川ですら黒牛に姿を変えて沐浴に来るとされる。その聖河ナルマダ流域の小さな村で産出される「ババグーリ」と呼ばれるインド瑪瑙です。このババグーリは聖者のビーズ（石）として現地では扱われ、日本国内ではデザイナーであるヨーガン・レール(1944-2014)が収集していたことでも知られいます。その自然が作り出した完全性漂うタイムレスな美しさは、瞑想的であり心の静止を齎します。
約6.5 x 7.0 cm,205grams
インド中央部を流れる聖河ナルマダ川は、神話では瞑想するシヴァ神から流れ出た汗が川となったと言われ、あの聖なるガンジス川ですら黒牛に姿を変えて沐浴に来るとされる。その聖河ナルマダ流域の小さな村で産出される「ババグーリ」と呼ばれるインド瑪瑙です。このババグーリは聖者のビーズ（石）として現地では扱われ、日本国内ではデザイナーであるヨーガン・レール(1944-2014)が収集していたことでも知られいます。その自然が作り出した完全性漂うタイムレスな美しさは、瞑想的であり心の静止を齎します。
約5.0 x 3.5cm,75grams
インド中央部を流れる聖河ナルマダ川は、神話では瞑想するシヴァ神から流れ出た汗が川となったと言われ、あの聖なるガンジス川ですら黒牛に姿を変えて沐浴に来るとされる。その聖河ナルマダ流域の小さな村で産出される「ババグーリ」と呼ばれるインド瑪瑙です。このババグーリは聖者のビーズ（石）として現地では扱われ、日本国内ではデザイナーであるヨーガン・レール(1944-2014)が収集していたことでも知られいます。その自然が作り出した完全性漂うタイムレスな美しさは、瞑想的であり心の静止を齎します。
5.5 x 3.5 cm,71grams
インド中央部を流れる聖河ナルマダ川は、神話では瞑想するシヴァ神から流れ出た汗が川となったと言われ、あの聖なるガンジス川ですら黒牛に姿を変えて沐浴に来るとされる。その聖河ナルマダ流域の小さな村で産出される「ババグーリ」と呼ばれるインド瑪瑙です。このババグーリは聖者のビーズ（石）として現地では扱われ、日本国内ではデザイナーであるヨーガン・レール(1944-2014)が収集していたことでも知られいます。その自然が作り出した完全性漂うタイムレスな美しさは、瞑想的であり心の静止を齎します。
5.0 x 2.5 cm,24grams
インド中央部を流れる聖河ナルマダ川は、神話では瞑想するシヴァ神から流れ出た汗が川となったと言われ、あの聖なるガンジス川ですら黒牛に姿を変えて沐浴に来るとされる。その聖河ナルマダ流域の小さな村で産出される「ババグーリ」と呼ばれるインド瑪瑙です。このババグーリは聖者のビーズ（石）として現地では扱われ、日本国内ではデザイナーであるヨーガン・レール(1944-2014)が収集していたことでも知られいます。その自然が作り出した完全性漂うタイムレスな美しさは、瞑想的であり心の静止を齎します。
約6.5 x 4.5 cm,140grams
