Folk / Roots

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 1999.

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 2009.

Irresistible, charming and intimate DIY/outsider psych-folk from London troubador Gengis Cohn. What we get is the inner dialogue and storytelling of one man and his guitar (which is apparently over one hundred years old!) with some additional violin from Lauren Collier, and occasional hand drumming and harmonica. Over intricate string plucking, we get dream logic lyrics that paint surreal pastoral vistas, all with a quintessentially English feel.

This is the debut solo release of Benju maestro, Ustad Noor Bakhsh, from the Makran Coast of Balochistan. The album is named 'Jingul', after a bird that often frequents Noor's house, and whose songs inspired the last track on this release — an original by Noor. The album was recorded live on location, over a memorable sunset on the Shadi Kaur creek, close to Noor's village, near Pasni, Balochistan. Noor plays an Electric Benju, amplified using an old pick up and Phillips amp that he found in a market in Karachi three decades ago. The Benju, is said to have once been a Japanese children's toy called the Taishōgoto. At some point in the 20th century, it was modified and naturalised by Baloch musicians who made it in to a refined folk instrument for themselves. Balochistan straddles the space between modern day Pakistan and Iran but its music, particularly that of Makran, evokes the well documented migrations and seafaring; historical intimacies with Africa, Persia, and Arabia, via the greater Indian Ocean world. It is this world that Noor's music wanders through.

Hive Mind and Sing-A-Song Fighter are delighted to present to you their first collaborative release, the amazing solo guitar album from legendary Congolese guitarist Kahanga Dekula aka ”Vumbi”. At last, Mr Dekula is finally releasing an instrumental solo guitar album after more than 40 years of playing lead guitar in numerous great bands and orchestras. Vumbi, who now lives in Sweden, is one of Europe's greatest ambassadors for Congolese music, has got a special story to tell and he uses his magnificent, infectious guitar playing to do so... Vumbi and the guitar go back a long time. Born with polio in the Kivu province of North Eastern Congo, Vumbi grew up in a Swedish missionary home and picked up the guitar at an early age. Listening intently to the radio, he learned the style and rhythms of Rumba and Soukous from the giants of the Congolese guitar sound, Dr Nico and Franco. "Listening and playing Soukous music makes you feel happy to be alive and you just have to dance to it no matter what". In the early 80’s Vumbi emigrated to Tanzania where he successfully auditioned to play lead guitar for the legendary group Orchestra Maquis. He toured extensively with the band, and from them he earned the nickname Vumbi, his solos being one of the main attractions of Orchestra Maquis' live shows. He moved to Sweden in the early '90s and played in numerous bands including the Makonde Band with Ugandan artist Sammy Kasule and Ahmadu Jarr's Highlife Orchestra. In 2008 Vumbi put together his own group, The Dekula Band, playing his beloved rumba and Soukous every saturday night to an eager crowd of dancers in a worn and faded restaurant in Stockholm called Lilla Wien. Vumbi has since taken the group's infectious and hypnotoic sound to Stockholm Jazz Festival, Face Z in Geneva and festivals and shows around Europe. Swedish producer Karl-Jonas Winqvist (founder of Sing-A-Song Fighter and member of Senegalese/Swedish act Wau Wau Collectif) has been a longtime fan of Vumbi Dekula’s artistry which led to him releasing The Dekula Band's debut album ”Opika” in 2019 with the Dekula Band. While watching the band perform was always a blast, says Karl Jonas, his desire to hear Vumbi play on his own, without the thunderous drums, wailing saxophones and chanting vocals grew in his mind, “Because, in a way, Vumbi’s guitar playing is like an orchestra on its own. And the idea of just concentrating on all the amazing riffs and beautiful, uplifting melodies was just so appealing”. Karl-Jonas proposed the idea of producing a solo album to Vumbi, and within a week the production process began Recorded in two days during lockdown at the Helter Skelter Studios in Stockholm, Karl and Vumbi allowed the music to guide them. Vumbi was inspired to play 2nd guitar adding some harmonies and melodies here and there, and on the final track (”UN Forces Get Out of the DR of Congo”) he introduced a banjo into the world of ”Congo guitar”. Karl Jonas started up his old rhythm box machine to some of the songs to see how Vumbi and his playing would react to it. Elsewhere, wordless backing vocals from Karl-Jonas and Emma Nordenstam were added to Maamajacy, bass melodica by Karl-Jonas appears on Weekend, and a little piano tinkering from Emma adds some sparkle to Zuku. But clearly, Vumbi's virtuoso playing remains the star of Congo Guitar.

Nora Guthrie's ultra-rare "Emily's Illness" is a lost gem of songcraft originally released in 1967, now reissued in the same 7" vinyl format (b/w "Home Before Dark") as the original. Featuring the pure vocals of the 17-year-old daughter of Woody Guthrie, "Emily's Illness" was written by Eric Eisner (The Strangers) and impeccably arranged by Artie Schroeck. A romantic collaboration of psychedelia, pop, and acid-folk, but informed by the harmonic and rhythmic developments of João Gilberto and jazz.

Driving is Sam Wilkes’ Indie Rock record. Out October 6th, 2023, it is the first release on Wilkes Records, an imprint borne of the artist’s emergent need to self-release. The songs presented here exist comfortably within the ever-expanding Wilkesian cosmos, characterized as they are by virtuosity, torqued experimentalism, and collaboration with a range of talented musicians. But Driving’s influences, its sincerity, and its allegiance to a certain pop sensibility reflects a departure for an artist who has primarily staked his claim within the experimental jazz idiom. Take the first track, “Folk Home,” which inaugurates the album’s fecundity—a bright, green, humid, summer feel. A swirling, freakout coda of reversed vocals gives way, in no short order, to a caterwaul of flute work that conjures Van Morrison’s (in)famous Astral Weeks sessions. Standing beside Morrison, the usual suspects are all present, if somewhat abstractedly. Dylan, The Dead, Joni, the Fab Four. Wilkes has developed a reputation as an experimental jazz luminary, but his deep affinity for the pop/rock/folk idiom of the latter twentieth century rings clear throughout Driving. More so than any Wilkes release to date, Driving is a collection guided by and dedicated to the man’s attention to songcraft. Written and recorded during a period of rain-damage induced renter’s itinerance (and the attendant desire to produce a kind of therapeutic, self-soothing, home-feeling music), Driving loosely charts the trajectory/experience of “a protagonist,” both Wilkes and not, “who has figured out how to live an enlightened and fulfilled life, but is unable to do so because he thinks about it too much.” This friction is surely relatable — a symptom of our compulsively self-aware present. But Wilkes avoids the obvious pitfalls of public hand-wringing. Rather, Driving’s nine tracks evince a genuine, and mature searching-ness, both sonically and lyrically. The ending refrain of “Own” serves like something close to a thesis— “Letting go // isn’t a concept // it’s an action.” In an attempt to beat back ego, hyper-cogitation, language itself, Wilkes arrives at an axiom that feels so true and familiar, you’d swear you’d heard it one hundred times before. Driving’s final third is, fittingly, its most emotive and cathartic. Tracks seven and eight, “Again, Again” and “And Again,” form a diptych, joined most obviously by the jangling, recursive grooves of guitarist Daryl Johns. Wilkes is said to have encouraged Johns to go “full Lindsey [Buckingham]” (clearly a welcome and resonant prompt), but one also catches stray Knopfler vibes, some intermittent Fripp, and (perhaps more-so in tone than technique) the spirit of DIY prophet and jangling man himself, Martin Newell (the Cleaners from Venus). Wilkes has stated that he finds joy in creating musical environments suitable to the contribution and flourishing of his favorite musicians. Throughout Driving, and in these two tracks especially, he has more than succeeded. The record closes with the titular track: a story-song that, according to Wilkes, poured out of him (melody, composition, and lyrics) in a single sitting. The tale is told plainly, bravely, starkly; a mistake was made, regrets have been had, and all is wrapped up in the recollection of a deeply felt adolescent heartsickness—a time when the narrator was first afire with music and automotive freedom. The song captures the moment when meaning inexplicably falls into place, when a long-nagging memory suddenly assumes narrative form, and the subsequent sense of lightness and unburdening. It is fitting that Driving, a record conceived as a form of self-therapy, should culminate with a sense of humble revelation. That Wilkes is plainly eager to share the vulnerable fruits of this labor constitutes Driving’s joyful offering.

Black Truffle announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases -- brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (BT 051LP, 2019), and Vanish (EMEGO 288LP, 2020) -- focused on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy's propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their approach while simultaneously pushing into challenging new areas. Comprising nine pieces ranging between two and seven minutes in length, the album's opening title track promptly introduces the distinctive palette of just-intoned electric guitars, subtle electronic processing, and voice that is rigorously explored throughout. Where much of Reidy's guitar work on previous recordings explored rapidly pulsed cycling figures, here, notes often hang in the air in a more spacious, lyrical fashion. The elasticity of rhythm and non-linear repetition of pitches initially suggests improvisation until the listener becomes aware of the precise arrangements of spatialized lines. At times, World in World suggests classic bedroom electric guitar works of the 1990s such as Loren Connors's Airs (2015) or Roy Montgomery's Scenes from the South Island (1995); like those works, Reidy's possesses a wonderfully live ambience, with frequent pedal clicks adding to the music's powerful sense of intimacy. In Reidy's case, however, the yearning, melancholic mood of Connors or Montgomery is tempered by the unorthodox guitar tuning, which at points produces a unique and uncomfortable effect somewhere between the hyper-precision of Harry Partch or Lou Harrison and Jandek's slack-stringed descent into the void. While World in World plots out its terrain with a bold single-mindedness that allows some pieces to appear almost as variations on a common theme, subtle changes in emphasis distinguish each track. Tactile percussive interjections skitter across the tremolo tones of "Paradise in Unrecognisable Colours", while "Ajar" ramps up the role played by the electronics, with glitching pitch-shifted and back-masked textures threaded through the guitars and thickly harmonized vocal layers. Ranging from autotuned melodic lines to buried murmurs, Reidy's voice is a frequent presence throughout these nine pieces, at times creating the impression that a more conventional series of songs lurks underneath the chiming microtonal guitars. On the stunning "Poised", whispers and distant, ghostly wails surround the layers of guitars, at times suggesting the foggiest outer reaches of Liz Harris's Grouper. Both rigorously experimental and emotive, World in World

“Upopo Sanke“ means “Let's sing a song" in the Ainu language. Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was one of the best-known artists of the Ainu, an indigenous, long-suppressed community in northern Japan. She sings their traditional songs together with Oki Kano on the Tonkori harp, who also recorded the album. The two are supported by members of the female vocal group Marewrew as well as Ainu percussionists, a string player and a male singer who provides rhythmic shouts and also throat singing. The call-and-response structure of many of the songs is performed with a mantric quality in a vocal style that is perhaps best described as elastic and breathing. There seems to be a gentle smile in every note and syllable. This music softly hits the heart. Upopo Sanke was recorded on a farm in Tokachi in the summer of 2003. We hear dogs barking, a distant thunderstorm and voices imitating animals. The liner notes that accompany the 2LP release gather the anecdotal memories of Umeko Ando and Oki Kano about the stories of the 14 songs. Oki Kano is a musical ambassador of the Ainu culture who tours worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band and also gives solo concerts, always playing the Tonkori, the five-stringed Ainu harp. The Ainu have suffered from the oppression of their culture and language by Japan, especially since the 18th and 19th centuries. Only recently, in 2008, were the Ainu officially recognized again as an indigenous people culturally independent of Japan. As a result of the marginalization, there are now only a few hundred native speakers of the Ainu language left, making it a particularly worthy object of preservation. "Upopo Sanke" was mixed again in part by Oki Kano, before being mastered and cut to vinyl by Kassian Troyer. The 2LP plays on 45rpm and it sounds fantastic. This album was the second album by Umeko Ando, the follow-up to „Ihunke" and also re-released in 2018 by Pingipung together with Oki Kano.

Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was a folk singer from Japan. She was a representative of the Ainu culture on the Hokkaido Island in the north of Japan. “Ihunke” is her first album which was recorded with the Ainu musician and dub producer Oki Kano in 2000. It was released on CD in Japan only and is finally available on vinyl (2LP + linernotes, DL included). “Ihunke” is following last year’s single “Iuta Upopo” [Pingipung 58, incl. M.RUX Remix] which had been received with overwhelming enthusiasm and was quickly sold out. The 16 Ainu songs on “Ihunke” are delicate, natural gems. They are built on Oki Kano’s Tonkori patterns (a 5-string harp), over which Umeko Ando develops her repetitive, mantric vocals, often in a call-response manner. Oki Kano is one of very few professional Tonkori players who performs worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band. The songs possess a mystical energy – when crows call accurately with Ando’s brittle voice in the first song, it seems like natural powers join in with her music. Her voice sounds like animals of the sky and the forest. Oki Kano: “It was a lot of fun to record with Umeko Ando. Many Ainu hesitate to break from tradition - if Umeko hadn’t been so flexible to work with the younger generation and recording technology, this album would never have happened. Our sessions were intense, and we were proud and happy about making such beautiful music.” Upcoming in autumn: remixes of “Ihunke” by Tolouse Lowtrax, M.Rux, DJ Ground, El Buho Mark Peters, Gama, Andi Otto, and Dreems.

Historical background: Only recently (in 2008) have the Ainu officially been acknowledged as indigenous people who are culturally independent from Japan. This record is an example of how their music has been passed on through generations in the underground Ainu communities while it was oppressed by the Japanese hegemony. It deserves a huge audience.

Driving is Sam Wilkes’ Indie Rock record. Out October 6th, 2023, it is the first release on Wilkes Records, an imprint borne of the artist’s emergent need to self-release. The songs presented here exist comfortably within the ever-expanding Wilkesian cosmos, characterized as they are by virtuosity, torqued experimentalism, and collaboration with a range of talented musicians. But Driving’s influences, its sincerity, and its allegiance to a certain pop sensibility reflects a departure for an artist who has primarily staked his claim within the experimental jazz idiom. Take the first track, “Folk Home,” which inaugurates the album’s fecundity—a bright, green, humid, summer feel. A swirling, freakout coda of reversed vocals gives way, in no short order, to a caterwaul of flute work that conjures Van Morrison’s (in)famous Astral Weeks sessions. Standing beside Morrison, the usual suspects are all present, if somewhat abstractedly. Dylan, The Dead, Joni, the Fab Four. Wilkes has developed a reputation as an experimental jazz luminary, but his deep affinity for the pop/rock/folk idiom of the latter twentieth century rings clear throughout Driving. More so than any Wilkes release to date, Driving is a collection guided by and dedicated to the man’s attention to songcraft. Written and recorded during a period of rain-damage induced renter’s itinerance (and the attendant desire to produce a kind of therapeutic, self-soothing, home-feeling music), Driving loosely charts the trajectory/experience of “a protagonist,” both Wilkes and not, “who has figured out how to live an enlightened and fulfilled life, but is unable to do so because he thinks about it too much.” This friction is surely relatable — a symptom of our compulsively self-aware present. But Wilkes avoids the obvious pitfalls of public hand-wringing. Rather, Driving’s nine tracks evince a genuine, and mature searching-ness, both sonically and lyrically. The ending refrain of “Own” serves like something close to a thesis— “Letting go // isn’t a concept // it’s an action.” In an attempt to beat back ego, hyper-cogitation, language itself, Wilkes arrives at an axiom that feels so true and familiar, you’d swear you’d heard it one hundred times before. Driving’s final third is, fittingly, its most emotive and cathartic. Tracks seven and eight, “Again, Again” and “And Again,” form a diptych, joined most obviously by the jangling, recursive grooves of guitarist Daryl Johns. Wilkes is said to have encouraged Johns to go “full Lindsey [Buckingham]” (clearly a welcome and resonant prompt), but one also catches stray Knopfler vibes, some intermittent Fripp, and (perhaps more-so in tone than technique) the spirit of DIY prophet and jangling man himself, Martin Newell (the Cleaners from Venus). Wilkes has stated that he finds joy in creating musical environments suitable to the contribution and flourishing of his favorite musicians. Throughout Driving, and in these two tracks especially, he has more than succeeded. The record closes with the titular track: a story-song that, according to Wilkes, poured out of him (melody, composition, and lyrics) in a single sitting. The tale is told plainly, bravely, starkly; a mistake was made, regrets have been had, and all is wrapped up in the recollection of a deeply felt adolescent heartsickness—a time when the narrator was first afire with music and automotive freedom. The song captures the moment when meaning inexplicably falls into place, when a long-nagging memory suddenly assumes narrative form, and the subsequent sense of lightness and unburdening. It is fitting that Driving, a record conceived as a form of self-therapy, should culminate with a sense of humble revelation. That Wilkes is plainly eager to share the vulnerable fruits of this labor constitutes Driving’s joyful offering.

Kevin Morby writes (and records, and imagines) at an almost incomparable clip, and his most recent album, This Is A Photograph, studies life, time and mortality through myriad lenses. It’s a dynamic, buoyant record on big, heavy themes, so it only makes sense that Morby found he wasn’t quite done with it on its completion. More Photographs (A Continuum) finds new nooks, corners and vantage points. “If This Is A Photograph is a house that you have been living inside of,” says Morby, “then More Photographs is, perhaps, the same home just experienced differently. As if you, its inhabitant, have taken a tab of something psychedelic and now, suddenly, you've replaced your eyeglasses with kaleidoscopes.” Here, Morby returns to his landmark album's bottomless themes with new wisdom, new imagination, and the winking, looping callbacks that tie his full body of work together in uniquely special ways. “Everything you once thought was familiar,” he continues, “suddenly appears differently, shifting shapes, color and sonic landscapes.” “Five Easy Pieces Revisited” captures the same moment from Bobby’s point of view; “This Is A Photograph II” takes a similar tack, revisiting its predecessor from a different angle. “Triumph” explores more of the myths and deaths that surround Memphis, TN, this time inspired by Big Star’s Chris Bell. And “Kingdom Of Hearts” arrives as an origin story to both This Is A Photograph and its new companion. “With every collection of songs,” says Morby, “I feel I must cast them out of me before moving onto the next project, and here I knew that what I had begun with This Is A Photograph was not finished. Releasing this collection is my tying a bow on that time and place in my creative life.” With a luxurious nine tracks – three re-imaginings and six brand new songs – More Photographs (A Continuum) is prequel, sequel and primer to an already rich and generous record from one of our most luminous modern songwriters.

Over the course of his career, Sufjan Stevens has blurred distinctions between the major and the minor, between the details that color our existence and the big events that frame our lives. He has turned historical footnotes of States into kaleidoscopic pop, and rendered the immeasurable grief of loss with intimacy and grace.His new album Javelin — Sufjan's first solo album of songs since 2020's The Ascension and his first in full solo singer-songwriter mode since 2015's Carrie & Lowell — bridges all these approaches. Sufjan uses the quietness of a solitary confession to ask universal questions in songs we can share communally. Accompanying the CD and LP formats of the album is a 48-page book of art and essays. With a series of meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint word clouds, and iterative color fields, Sufjan builds order from seeming chaos and vice versa. And toward the middle of it all are 10 short essays by Sufjan, another window into the process that informed Javelin.

Official reissue of the sophomore album from fabled folk singer-songwriter/actress/writer, and one of the most gorgeous voices of Japanese music, Hako Yamasaki, originally released in 1976 on the legendary Elec Records, one of the first independent labels in the country. Tsunawatari is a perfect follow-up to her classic debut Tobimasu, immortalizing the bitter beauty of heartache with tearful performances and nostalgic empowerment. Hako Yamasaki is considered a pioneer in both the creative boom and the rise of feminism of 1970s Japan. This album is released in conjunction with Tobimasu, also available on WRWTFWW Records. Folk, Alternative, Psychedelic, Soft, Poetic

Wow, it's as if you're being swallowed into another world of beauty, music that is out of this world. A Colourful Storm, a prestigious label based in Melbourne, Australia, has released an important album this year. The latest album by Maxine Funke, a female musician from New Zealand who has been introduced to us several times, and who was also a member of the legendary experimental rock band "$100 Band", is now available. From the sensual, exploratory sounds of "Fairy Baby" and "Homage" to the ghosts of American primitive folk on "Quiet Shore," it's a delicate dreamscape documenting the finest of soundscapes. Drop the needle and you'll instantly fall in love with it. This is New Zealand's most extraordinary voice. I highly recommend this album to all music lovers! Insert included.

This recorded autobiography of Catherine Howe, age 20, briefly appeared in 1971. Too young for memoirs, most artists have barely established any sort of musical competence by the age of legal adulthood, let alone compositions matching the maturity and complexity of Howe’s. What A Beautiful Place, however, is a prodigious effort wrought from the melancholy ruminations of post-adolescence. The album’s twelve songs unfold like a classic bildungsroman, beginning in the smoke-stained industrial county of Yorkshire, transformed by the electrified creative landscape of mid-century London, and retiring to the warm pastoral bliss of the county of Dorset on England’s southern coast. Produced by noted jazz pianist Bobby Scott, the LP—oft-mistaken for a concept album—was available for only a month in the summer of 1971, disappearing after Reflection Records’ shuttering in 1971.

Let the Moon Be a Planet marks the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl., and documents an inspired exchange between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth. Conjured by a mutual curiosity, and appreciation, for the respective musician’s work, Let the Moon Be a Planet initially took form over a progression of remote sessions and ultimately harmonized when Gunn and Moore completed the album together in the bucolic surroundings of Hudson, New York. Let the Moon Be a Planet is an invitation to relive the intimate moments shared between two artists finding their way along a single path, and into a world where the most subtle of gestures can ripple for an eternity.

激レア化している2018年作が初の再発。ノースカロライナ州アッシュビルを拠点に、フォーク、カントリー、ブルース、そして宇宙的なアメリカン・ロックを見事に溶け合わせるソングライター、Ryan Gustafsonの変名The Dead Tonguesによるアルバム『Unsung Passage』が〈Psychic Hotline〉よりヴァイナル・リイシュー。常に各地を飛び回ってきた冒険家であるグスタフソンが、歌うにふさわしいといえるほどに見てきたものを、その一人称で見つめ直した作品。慌ただしい現代に向けた内省的なアンセムに注ぎ込まれる秀逸な一枚。

"Bridging the gap between American primitive pioneers John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, and the California modernists William Ackerman, Alex de Grassi, and Michael Hedges, Guitar Soli explores the private side of the solo guitar movement from 1966-1981. While Takoma and Windham Hill were laying the groundwork for the new age marketing juggernaut of the mid '80s, these fourteen loners were picking away in tiny cafes, selling records hand to hand. The single disc set comes housed in a digipack chipboard slipcase with a 40-page booklet and features Ted Lucas, Daniel Hecht, Dan Lambert, Jim Ohlschmidt, Tom Smith, Mark Lang, Richard Crandell, Tree People, William Eaton, George Cromarty, Scott Witte, Brad Chequer, Dwayne Canan, and Dana Westover." 

Frank and His Sisters is a family band formed by Frank Humplick, Thecla Clara, and Maria Regina in the early 1950s in Moshi, a Tanzanian city located in the rolling hills of the southern foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. Frank and His Sisters, a family band formed by Frank Humplick, Thecla Clara, and Maria Regina in the early 1950s, is known for their tours and recordings throughout East Africa with their fans. The album is a dreamy fusion of John Fahey's fingerstyle, The Carter Family, The Beach Boys, and Tanzanian music from the golden age. It's an idyllic sound to listen to on a sunny afternoon with the windows open!

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography and creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within Walker’s music has never been so articulately explored, or graced with as much intention, as on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed and engineered entirely by Walker, with the exception of some subtle upright bass from C.J. Boyd on the song “Window I.” Producing the album on her own wasn’t Walker’s original intention, though; after flying to New York in November 2019 to develop some home-recorded tracks with The Blow’s Melissa Dyne, a sudden illness forced Walker to cancel the sessions and return home to Tucson to recover, and soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic ruled out the possibility of a return trip to New York. Instead, Walker decided to finish the album herself in her makeshift home studio. She spent the following months recording, processing and arranging her self-described “messy Ableton sessions” into densely harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and her own dulcet singing voice, allowing trial, error and intuition to guide her way. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient compositions (as in the instrumentals “Horizon, Harbor Resonance” and “For Heddi”) and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting (as in the lyrics-focused tracks “Reconstellated” and “Waking the Dreaming Body”), their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

At first, Gia Margaret called her new album ‘Romantic Piano’ to be a bit cheeky. Its spare, gentle piano works share more spirit with Erik Satie, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou and the ‘Marginalia’ releases of Masakatsu Takagi than they do with, say, a cozy and candlelit date night. But in that cheekiness lies hidden intention: across the gorgeous set, “Romantic” is suggested in a more classic sense, what the Germans call waldeinsamkeit. Its compositions conjure the sublime themes of the Romantic poets: solitude in nature; nature’s ability to heal and to teach; a sense of contented melancholy. "I wanted to make music that was useful,” says Margaret, vastly understating the power of the record. ‘Romantic Piano’ is curious, calming, patient and incredibly moving — but it doesn’t overstay its welcome for more than a second. Margaret’s debut, ‘There’s Always Glimmer,’ was a lyrical wonder, but when an illness on tour left her unable to sing, she made her ambient album ‘Mia Gargaret’ (another cheeky title!) which revealed a keen intuition for arrangement and composition not fully shown on ‘There’s Always Glimmer’s lyrical songs. ‘Romantic Piano’, too, is almost totally without words. “Writing instrumental music, in general, is a much more joyful process than I find in lyrical songwriting,” she says. “The process ultimately effects my songwriting.” And while Margaret has more songwriterly material on the way, ‘Romantic Piano’ solidifies her as a compositional force. Originally pursuing a degree in composition, Margaret dropped out of music school halfway through. “I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” she said of her decision, “I really just wanted to write movie scores. Then, I started to focus more and more on being a songwriter. ‘Romantic Piano’ scratched an old itch.” ‘Romantic Piano’ does indeed touch on a rare feeling in art often only reserved for the cinema — a simultaneous wide-lens awe of existence and the post-language intimate inner monologue of being marooned in these skulls of ours. How very Romantic!

At first, Gia Margaret called her new album ‘Romantic Piano’ to be a bit cheeky. Its spare, gentle piano works share more spirit with Erik Satie, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou and the ‘Marginalia’ releases of Masakatsu Takagi than they do with, say, a cozy and candlelit date night. But in that cheekiness lies hidden intention: across the gorgeous set, “Romantic” is suggested in a more classic sense, what the Germans call waldeinsamkeit. Its compositions conjure the sublime themes of the Romantic poets: solitude in nature; nature’s ability to heal and to teach; a sense of contented melancholy. "I wanted to make music that was useful,” says Margaret, vastly understating the power of the record. ‘Romantic Piano’ is curious, calming, patient and incredibly moving — but it doesn’t overstay its welcome for more than a second. Margaret’s debut, ‘There’s Always Glimmer,’ was a lyrical wonder, but when an illness on tour left her unable to sing, she made her ambient album ‘Mia Gargaret’ (another cheeky title!) which revealed a keen intuition for arrangement and composition not fully shown on ‘There’s Always Glimmer’s lyrical songs. ‘Romantic Piano’, too, is almost totally without words. “Writing instrumental music, in general, is a much more joyful process than I find in lyrical songwriting,” she says. “The process ultimately effects my songwriting.” And while Margaret has more songwriterly material on the way, ‘Romantic Piano’ solidifies her as a compositional force. Originally pursuing a degree in composition, Margaret dropped out of music school halfway through. “I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” she said of her decision, “I really just wanted to write movie scores. Then, I started to focus more and more on being a songwriter. ‘Romantic Piano’ scratched an old itch.” ‘Romantic Piano’ does indeed touch on a rare feeling in art often only reserved for the cinema — a simultaneous wide-lens awe of existence and the post-language intimate inner monologue of being marooned in these skulls of ours. How very Romantic!

We are thrilled to release Bon Iver's debut full-length 'For Emma, Forever Ago'. Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for "good winter" and spelled wrong on purpose) is a greeting, a celebration and a sentiment. It is a new statement of an artist moving on and establishing the groundwork for a lasting career. 'For Emma, Forever Ago' is the debut of this lineage of songs. As a whole, the record is entirely cohesive throughout and remains centered around a particular aesthetic, prompted by the time and place for which it was recorded. Justin Vernon, the primary force behind Bon Iver, seems to have tested his boundaries to the maximum, and in doing so has managed to break free from any pre-cursing or finished forms.