Folk / Roots

My first EP, June McDoom, was hugely inspired by the minimal sound of the 60s and 70s folk era. I wanted to reimagine a couple of those songs more stripped down as a follow up to that first EP. Judee Sill's songwriting and arrangements have impacted me deeply, and so I hoped to honor the music she made by recording a version of her song, “Emerald River Dance” – one of my favorite songs for many years and a song I still sing at most of my shows. The first time I heard “Black is the Color” was Tia Blake's version that she recorded in 1971, and then Nina Simone's performance inspired me to try and record a rendition of my own. While writing "On My Way" and "The City," I always imagined versions of those songs stripped down with three-part harmonies, which I was finally able to do here with dear friends, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Kate Davis, who have both been big inspirations to me throughout the years. One of my close friends, Sam Weissberg – who I met while studying in jazz school when I first moved to New York City – worked with me and arranged the harp and strings for each song. I produced the songs and tracked the remaining instruments and vocals with Evan Wright at our new studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn that we share with our friend, Nick Hakim (who also provided backing vocals on “On My Way”).

Rachika Nayar's fragments (expanded) is a collection of sonic miniatures constructed from guitar loops created in the familiar comforts of her own bedroom. These cyclical, meditative pieces stem from an intimate part of Nayar's creative practice, revealing a deep source of self-exploration and restoration. A collision of midwestern emo and post-rock influences with virtuosic minimalist guitar, fragments (expanded) provides an intimacy between Nayar and those listening in parallel spaces, activating our collective past and shared unconscious experience. This expanded vinyl edition adds a full extra side of previously unreleased pieces and includes a high quality multi-format digital download.

Guitarist Lee Underwood’s syncretic blend of jazz, folk, and blues was a tremendous force behind Tim Buckley’s genre-stretching late 60s/early 70s music – but his 1988 acoustic guitar opus California Sigh has remained a unsung footnote to his story. Until now! This first time vinyl-edition reveals Lee’s free-floating acoustic moods, with synths and co-production from ambient avatar Steve Roach, as a soulful work of tranquility and transcendence.

Delphine Dora is a prolific composer, improviser and musician who has released on a plethora of labels including Recital, Morc, Sloow Tapes, Feeding Tube, Okraïna and more, and ‘Le Grand Passage’ is her Modern Love debut, a stunning set of songs for piano and voice, recorded in one take without overdubs or edits. We don’t think theres much, if anything, quite like it, but if you’ve been snagged by transcendent, advanced and amateur music by Andrew Chalk, Virginia Astley, Dominique Lawalrée, or Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, we think this one might just be for you. In an act of pure expression, Delphine Dora recorded the 8 songs of ‘The Great Passage’ in a single take, succumbing to a whirlwind of inspiration that transported her beyond the material world. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It’s music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Delphine was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when an technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, "something greater than myself". The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Glistening imperfections lash 'The Great Passage' to the physical world, but Dora - seemingly possessed as she quivers in a fictional dialect - lets her fantasies intensify her spirit, lifting the music towards the heavens. It's not sacred music, per se, but it is unashamedly mystical. On the luxurious, languid opening, Dora dissolves eerily familiar romantic piano motifs into an attentive ceremony, singing with charged emotion. Her words aren't really decipherable, but their resonance vibrates beyond language; it's striking to hear how confident she is in vulnerability. She lets the piano wrap into her voice, connecting us directly to a unique mode of emotional expression by urging us - the listener - to project our own meaning onto her abstracted words. Dora refers to the act of improvisation itself as a way to indicate "the fragility of being”, and as her words blur in and out of focus, dipping from a hoarse croak to a choking wail, she places herself at the very edge of musical formality, questioning strictures put in place to suffocate self-expression. Her music has often been labeled "outsider", but here she sounds intimate and interconnected, more self-consciously candid than anything traditional might have allowed. She conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channelling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora's hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she's able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multi-dimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable.

Karen Dalton’s 1971 album, In My Own Time, stands as a true masterpiece by one of music’s most mysterious, enigmatic, and enduringly influential artists. Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Light in the Attic is honored to present a newly remastered (2021) edition of the album on LP, CD, cassette, and 8-Track.

The LITA Anniversary LP edition features the original 10-track album, pressed on clear wax at Record Technology Inc. (RTI) and housed in an expanded gatefold LP jacket, while the album makes its long-overdue return on the almighty 8-Track format.

Both the CD and cassette editions feature 9 bonus tracks, including 3 alternate takes from the In My Own Time album sessions, along with 6 previously unreleased tracks captured during Karen’s 1971 European tour, including live at The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival and Germany’s Beat Club.

All audio has been newly remastered by Dave Cooley, while lacquers were cut by Phil Rodriguez at Elysian Masters.

A newly expanded booklet—featuring rarely seen photos, liner notes from musician and writer Lenny Kaye, and contributions from Nick Cave and Devendra Banhart—rounds out the CD (32-pgs) and LP (20-pgs) packages. 

The Oklahoma-raised Karen Dalton (1937-1993) brought a range of influences to her work. As Lenny Kaye writes in the liner notes, one can hear “the jazz of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, the immersion of Nina Simone, the Appalachian keen of Jean Ritchie, [and] the R&B and country that had to seep in as she made her way to New York."

Armed with a long-necked banjo and a 12-stringed guitar, Dalton set herself apart from her peers with her distinctive, world-weary vocals. In the early ‘60s, she became a fixture in the Greenwich Village folk scene, interpreting traditional material, blues standards, and the songs of her contemporaries, including Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and Richard Tucker, whom she later married. Bob Dylan, meanwhile, was instantly taken with her artistry. “My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton,” he recalled in Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004). “Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed.”

Those who knew Dalton understood that she was not interested in bowing to the whims of the record industry. On stage, she rarely interacted with audience members. In the studio, she was equally as uncomfortable with the recording process. Her 1969 debut, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, reissued by Light in the Attic in 2009, was captured on the sly when Dalton assumed that she was rehearsing songs. When Woodstock co-promoter Michael Lang approached Dalton about recording a follow-up for his new imprint, Just Sunshine, she was dubious, to say the least. The album would have to be made on her own terms, in her own time. That turned out to be a six-month period at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY.

Producing the album was bassist Harvey Brooks, who played alongside Dalton on It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best. Brooks, who prided himself on being “simple, solid and supportive,” understood Dalton’s process, but was also willing to offer gentle encouragement, and challenge the artist to push her creative bounds. “I tried to present her with a flexible situation,” he told Kaye. “I left the decisions to her, to determine the tempo, feel. She was very quiet, and I brought all of it to her; if she needed more, I’d present options. Everyone was sensitive to her. She was the leader.”

Dalton, who rarely performed her own compositions, selected a range of material to interpret—from traditionals like “Katie Cruel” and “Same Old Man” to Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream” and Richard Tucker’s “Are You Leaving For The Country.” She also expanded upon her typical repertoire, peppering in such R&B hits as “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “How Sweet It Is.” In a departure from her previous LP, Dalton’s new recording offered fuller, more pop-forward arrangements, featuring a slew of talented studio musicians.

While ‘70s audiences may not have been ready for Dalton’s music, a new generation was about to discover her work. In the decades following her death, a slew of artists would name Karen Dalton as an influence, including Lucinda Williams, Joanna Newsom, Nick Cave, Angel Olsen, Devendra Banhart, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, and Adele. In the recent acclaimed film documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, Cave muses on Dalton’s unique appeal: “There’s a sort of demand made upon the listener,” he explains. “Whether you like it or not, you have to enter her world. And it’s a despairing world.” Peter Walker, who also appears in the film, elaborates on this idea: “If she can feel a certain way in her music and play it in such a way that you feel that way, then that’s really the most magical thing [one] can do.” He adds, “She had a deep and profound and loving soul…you can hear it in her music.”
 

‘Blue Car’ is a collection of songs from Joanne's archive of unreleased solo recordings, similar to ‘Painting Stupid Girls’, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. The dates she wrote these songs is unknown, they span roughly a ten year period.

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

"An arresting suite of drawn-out melodies anchored by De Kol’s majestic, multi-octave vocal range." The Guardian Greece’s ecstatic ritual singer, pianist, and ambient composer Maroulita de Kol announces her debut album Anásana, a record of deeply traditional Hellenic ceremonial cultures interwoven with contemporary experimental colour. Athens-raised, Berlin-based Maroulita de Kol creates music formed from the ancient, pre-Christian rites and practices of Greece, newly re-presented through a contemporary lens. A former student of classical piano and voice, an unbreakable bond with her homeland yielded an extensive and ongoing dive into the mythologies, arts and storytelling of ancestral Greece. These studies eventually guided her to the debut solo works that make up Anásana. The instrumentation and themes of Anásana borrow both from the ancient ecstatic ritual of historical Greece and meditative electronic ambient music. Flowing lines of deeply learned piano technique clothe traditional Hellenic folksong. And while its imagery was unmistakably born in Greece, its tones are inflected by de Kol’s time in Berlin and her immersion in its electronic and experimental scenes. “My music is an act of freedom and beauty,” she explains. “Hymns that aim for the restoration of Women's faith; they can heal the collective wound of the feminine.” De Kol’s voice evokes a Byzantine trance, a gateway into a faraway land, full of magic and mythology, like a priestess of a solemn religion guiding her flock through an arcane, liturgical sacrament. The record takes place in a blissful ancient world of birdsong and salt air, sunbaked caves and blue skies, as de Kol conjures spells in reverence to ancient divinities.

Once again, Six Organs of Admittance showcases the intricate tangle of fingers on the fretboard and flash of lens flare slicing the air, as the future arcs 360 degrees around to become a part of the past as well. Oscillations in this glass bowl ripple outward eternally, but are rooted on the ground where all the creatures are moving and communing; humans too. An intimate cosmic expression, file under: rural-industrial psych, ecosystem goth.

Arriving as the hippy movement was discovering its peaceful easy '70s feelings, Sandy Harless' Songs LP is Chillicothe, Ohio's lone contribution to the Cosmic American Music movement. Financed from a 27-aquarium fish breeding business, the album shows its Appalachian roots with a tight weave of mountain folk, rural rock, and pastoral country. Real people music.

絵葉書のようなジャケット・アートに惑わされてはいけません！70年代半ばのレコード売り場に並んでいたメジャー・レーベルのカントリー・ロック・アルバムの中でも、頭ひとつ抜けた知られざる名作であるJimmy Carterの77年のアルバム『Summer Brings The Sunshine』が〈Numero Group〉からアナログ再発。ナッシュビルやロサンゼルスから送り出される何百、何千もの洗練されたプロダクションを横目にミズーリ州の田舎で農夫やセミプロたちと共に77年に録音した作品。味わい深い女性のバッキング・ヴォーカル、物憂げなペダル・スティール、気迫のこもったギター・リックなど、コズミック・アメリカン・ミュージックの高貴でピークに近いスライスに溢れています。

Written with no big plan in mind, Reverend Baron's "Overpass Boy" becomes a Los Angeles meditation, an eight song prayer of poetic topography. The album gives the city its own sound, and its own songs to hum.Recorded in several different locations of LA, and loosely sketching the story of a young wanderer, the album is an easy current of observations and longings. Slices of soul and doo-wop emerge in stacked harmonies, while the percussion and grooves are the blooms that could only come from East LA. Garcia's investment to vocal tenderness and instrumental high style strikes our universal center. His soft serenade reconnects us to something misplaced.Playing almost every instrument on the album, Garcia's spirit is tailored into the sound, designing an amalgam of tones and frequencies as idiosyncratic as the singer himself.Traversing the alleys, passing the sous-chef's cigarette smoke, under the shaking bridges, behind a velvet curtain in a good suit, with a slide guitar in the rain, the titles quilt together for us: Every promise out here walks and waits in the little hours. Jackie and Jimmy drive away and we're left in that little valley, suspended.

US-born, Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer Carmen Villain's fourth album Only Love From Now On is out February 25th, 2022 on Smalltown Supersound. The culmination of a build-up that began with a turn in sound evident on 2019's Both Lines Will Be Blue, Only Love From Now On presents Villain’s aesthetic blossoming into something unexpected, benevolent in its composure and altogether luxuriant in its sensuality.If her themes are wide, philosophical, and occasionally abstract, the emotional tenor of Hillestad's music is clear and purposeful. Makes sense that her key musical touchstones are dub, ambient, and cosmic jazz – flexible vehicles for tranquil wonder.Listening to Only Love From Now On is simultaneously comforting and alluringly strange. Partly it’s the contributions of guests Arve Henriksen (trumpet, electronics) and Johanna Scheie Orellana (flutes). Partly it’s the fluidity between instruments – such as clarinets – field recordings, the studio, jam, and careful composition. She calls the process a conversation with sound that occurs in her deliberate attempts to experiment with new methods, like granular synthesis, for her music-making.Only Love From Now On is fueled by the sense of scale in feeling small in the face of things so large, the contemplation of how the biggest impact we can have is in the people close to us, the attempt to make sure that impact is a positive one, and the choice to try to focus on love instead of fear. Hillestad describes it as "wishing to maintain a sense of careful optimism for the future, while on the cusp of something unknown."

Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world. While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set out to capture on Quiet the Room was not the innocence of childhood, as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of copper corroding.To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock, Ballentine and her collaborator Noah Weinman brought in producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New York, close to where Ballentine grew up. “We wanted every song to have that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling,” she says. These songs thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace, as on lead single “Whatever Fits Together,” which chugs to a ragged start before the gears catch and ease. On “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track “You are my House,” she finds a way to reach out. “You are the walls and floors of my room,” she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles, she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place. The complexities of childhood are so often overlooked, but through these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest memories, widening the frame for us—even opening a window.

Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022. 
 Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora. 
 Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats. 
 Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons. 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule and ensorcelled storytelling.

牧歌的ニューエイジ・フォーク大傑作『Pentimento and others』を残した人物であり、サンフランシスコ拠点のフォークロック・バンド、Citayのメンバーとしても知られるニューヨークを拠点とするギタリスト/作曲家のEzra Feinbergによる最新アルバム『Soft Power』が〈Tonal Union〉からアナログ・リリース。当店お馴染みの名ハーピストMary Lattimoreに、シューゲイズ・ドローン/アンビエント名手Jefre Cantu-Ledesma、マルチ奏者のRobbie Leeといった面々と共に精巧に作り上げた親密でゆとりのある珠玉のアンビエント・フォーク作品！限定300部。

Official reissue of the debut album from fabled Japanese folk singer-songwriter/actress/writer Hako Yamasaki, released in 1975, at only 18 years old, on legendary independent label Elec Records. Tobimasu is a masterpiece of melancholy carried by one of the most beautiful, emotional, melodic, and haunting voices in the history of Japanese music. 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 her follow-up Tsunawatari, also available on WRWTFWW Records. Folk, Alternative, Psychedelic, Soft, Poetic

Damião Experiença's surreal, self-released run of LPs are among Brazil's most bizarre subcultural treasures, a blown-out mix of psychedelia, freak folk, prog and reggae that defies convention at every loose beat. 'Planeta Lamma' attempts to condense the output for curious beginners, cherrypicking crucial moments from the Brazilian legend's vast catalog. Mindboggling gear. Self-taught outsider Damião Ferreira da Cruz, aka Damião Experiença, is considered to be the Brazilian answer to Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Jandek or Moondog, a wildly inventive fringe hybridist whose dadaist, semi-improvised songs - often sung in his own invented dialect - have found him a dedicated cult following. Famously press-shy and irritable, Damião was born in Bahia, escaping as a pre-teen to Rio de Janeiro, where he joined the Brazilian navy. Legend has it that Damião hit his head when he fell from a ship's crow's nest, which could explain his unpredictable moods, but he left the navy in the mid-1960s, working as a pimp to fund his private press releases. Damião's moniker was an homage to his favorite band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but the music doesn't exactly come across as a tribute. Singing in his own 'Planet Lamma dialect', Damião improvised on instruments he never learned how to play, assembling his voice into ritualistic, overlayed chatters and one-string guitar riffs into a lumbering, reggae-esque chug. Drums might match up, or might not, pattering in the background to add psychedelic thrust, rather than a rhythmic backbone. At its best, the music sounds like multiple records playing at the same time, held together by Damião's charismatic, garbled tones. 'Planeta Lamma' might share a name with Damião's 1974 debut, but it's not the same album. Confusingly, both records begin with the same track (the brief '1308 Registrou Gravou Rose Oliria Experiença'), but this edition quickly goes off piste. The focal point of the first side is the chaotic 'Ritmo Linguagem Planeta Lamma', a densely layered 20-minute romp that Damião released in 1999 (as far as we can tell). The side ends with 'Planeta Lamma' from the debut album, and the second side is mostly taken up by 'Sol', another lengthy, freeform experiment that's taken from the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist's late period. Jazzy and unpredictable, it's a frothy blast of angular funk that's got us confused and completely absorbed. One for the cranks!

We invite you to enter the strange and enchanting world of Nino Gvilia, where nothing is quite what it seems. These two ep's (presented on one disc in March 2024) draw you deep into her dreamlike sound-world of hushed late night atmospherics and surreal songwriting. Born in Poti, near Lake Paliastomi in Georgia, Nino Gvilia is a singer-songwriter whose lyrics offer up meditations on what it is to be human in the 21st Century, and aim to carry us beyond into ecology and the politics of the non-human world. Her songs are influenced by folk and minimalism and make use of magnetic tapes, field recordings, vocal samples of contemporary thinkers and philosophers, and an array of strange instruments and vintage textures, drawing for us an intense dreamlike atmosphere. On these two EPs, Nino Gvilia collaborates with Zevi Bordovach (synth / keyboards) and Pietro Caramelli (electric guitar / vocals), with Giulia Pecora and Clarissa Marino adding violin and cello. Now I should tell you that Nino Gvilia does not exist. She is a purely fictional character invented in order to help us reflect on the place of the songwriter in times of global crisis.

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 2009.

Mysterious Japanese singer song writer. Originally released 1999.

HEAVY, ENTRANCING TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE GREEK UNDERWORLD Continuing Mississippi's exploration of the darkest reaches of Greek music, we bring you 12 rarely heard recordings of addled suffering and love from the most legendary of all Greek rebetika artists, Markos Vamvakaris. Rebetika is the sound of Greece and Asia Minor clashing amid civil war, mass population exchange, and the anarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Poetic, mournful, and bitter, rebetika music was born in the hash dens (tekes) of Mediterranean ports, its verses whispered in Greek prisons before spilling out to the greater population in the 1930s, propelled in no small part by a series of remarkable recordings by Markos Vamvakaris. Markos (first name basis for all fans of Greek music) sang heady, drugged out songs of love, pain and yearning at brothels, bars and hash dens in the port of Piraeus. He arrived as a youth in 1917, working as a skinner in a tannery. By the time he picked up the bouzouki around 1924, he was fully taken by the life of the manges, the lowest rungs of the Greek social ladder. They lived by their own code and in total opposition to the rest of the population, dressing, walking and speaking in their own style. Rebetika was their music. On these twelve early tracks, recorded in Athens between 1932 and 1936, Markos was already a master of the bouzouki. His forceful, clean playing compliments his hoarse voice and his stunning rhythmic sensibility, the result of his years as a champion zebekiko dancer. Tracks build and spiral outward, his open-note drones and melodic lines drawing calls of ecstasy and encouragement from his fellow musicians. Translations of songs like “Hash-Smoking Mortissa” and “In The Dark Last Night” provide a glimpse into the life and language of the manges - Ottoman cafe music, the calls of displaced Greeks of Smyrna, the chaos and suffering of port life, it all comes through Markos’ songs. These recordings, incredibly rare and expertly remastered, mark the height of rebetika, the brief period between the music’s emergence on the recording scene in the early 1930s and government censorship of all lyrics starting in 1936. During the Axis occupation there was no rebetika recording, and though Markos had some hits in the years after the war, he never again attained this level. These are the dizzying, entrancing, and heaviest works of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Expertly remastered from rare 78s by Stereophonic Sound, pressed on heavy 160gm vinyl at Smashed Plastic, includes full size 8 page booklet with detailed historical notes, rare photos, and lyric translations.

A Colourful Storm begins 2024 with a luxurious suite of daydreaming introspection courtesy of Unchained, the longstanding solo project of Nathaniel Davis. Recorded at home between 2020 and 2023, Gabbeh is the latest expression of Davis’s guitar-based instrumental musings and represents an almost two decade-long stylistic evolution of his self-released noise tapes and CD-Rs into romantic, bossa nova-influenced melody-making. He wrote the tracks sporadically, with minimal instrumentation and intervention. Electric guitar, bass improvisations and rhythms from an old drum machine are layered and given new life, the space between them softly breathing with minutiae of the everyday: the buzz of cicadas, the passing of cars, the whistling of passersby. The psychogeography of Grenoble, Davis’ home since 2018, played a conscious role in the weaving of Gabbeh’s fabric: “I think certain songs reflect, in ways, Grenoble’s natural surroundings. ‘Drac’ is named after the river that flows from the mountains down to the city… ‘Dru’ is the name of a well-known peak near Chamonix”. And from the city’s strange humidity, alpine surroundings and significance in the lives of, say, Henri Fantin-Latour and Stendhal, feelings at once hopelessly romantic and deeply melancholic permeate throughout the album. Opener ‘Largo’ sets the mood, its primitive samba rhythm concealed by a cloud of saudade, guided by the spirit of Wes Montgomery. “I take inspiration from Wes’s disregard for conventional technique and his insistence on feeling above all else,” reflects Davis, who also cites the multifaceted dexterity of Toninho Horta and lucid expressionism of Maurice Deebank as influences on his work. The bebop sensibility follows suit in the title track, the tension between its angular picks and percussive shuffle a wondrous balancing act, while the intoxicating sway of ‘Rambler’, an updated version of a track Davis self-released in 2020, is perhaps the most poignant expression of longing and loss we’ve heard in recent years. Pure atmospheric bliss floating into the clouds, Gabbeh captures a longing for endless, hazy days.

Released in late 1968, the second Pearls Before Swine record continued to deliver music with a preternatural sense of what the youth of America wanted to hear. One Nation Underground had been a surprise hit when released in 1967 by the hipster free-jazz indie label ESP, receiving an incredible organic response, with continuous underground radio play and sales. Coming from obscurity in Florida into a position of speaking to people everywhere, Tom Rapp and his bandmates felt emboldened to embark upon an evolved piece of record making. The music of Balaklava strips away the manic, post-garage band diversity of the first album, instead grounding the production around Tom Rapp's guitar and singing, with the touches of instrumental color all the more dramatic and striking. Producer Richard Alderson utilized breathy sweeps of reverb, sound effects, tape manipulation and spoken word recordings along with an array of instrumental overdubs including banjo, marimba, organ, clavinet, flute, English horn and strings (played by the band along with New York jazz session players Bill Salter and Al Schackman, plus The Fugs' Lee Crabree and legendary saxophonist Joe Farrell, with Selwart Clarke and Warren Smith contributing string arrangements) to reach for the universal space sought in Tom Rapp's meditative, existential songs. The message writ between the leaves of Balaklava -- WAR NO MORE -- is elegantly written . . . Musically, the message is conveyed with one or two passing lyrical references, letting Tom Rapp's use of literary reference and allegory dwell on the transcendence of love and pastoral beauty in life, achieving a stinging impact, as much by what isn't said as what is. This sets Balaklava apart from much of other protest music from the Vietnam era -- and it has allowed it to age gracefully into the 21st century. Like One Nation Underground before it, Balaklava celebrates 50 years of life in stunning fashion. Original producer Richard Alderson has remastered the album, restoring the precision of the original mix -- and in the process, revealing fantastically dynamic performances and dispersing the haze of the years that had gathered over latter-day editions of Balaklava. The music and message it intended to deliver to the world are still needed, the peace still sought. The fight to understand and to change is still ongoing. And so, Balaklava has fresh purpose, after all this time...