Folk / Roots

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

 

Soul Step Records Announces the Second Pressing of SSR-066!

Soul Step Records is proud to announce that the stone country classic album “Hell of a Woman” by Nashville-based Emily Nenni is coming to vinyl again after being out of print for years!

“Hell of a Woman” was released to critical acclaim in 2018. This album is a quintessential Nashville Stone Country record. This album is something that country purists will love.

“Hell of a Woman” is a record made for those who long for those smokey Nashville barrooms where the neon lights shine bright into the night and the pedal steel guitar rings loud. 

Emily Nenni is a singer-songwriter from the Bay Area and recently set roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Emily’s musical inspirations range from the girl groups of the 1960’s to the outlaw Country of the 1970’s. Emily Nenni sang her first songs on stage at Robert’s Western World in Nashville by bribing the band and doorman with cookies. She has since honed her Honky-Tonk skills in double-wide trailers on Sunday nights, clubs across the south, as as well playing for ranchers and wranglers in Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado.

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Reverse side print. Re-issue of the Canadian band's only album released back in 1973 on the small Kot'Ai label. Moonstone came from Winnipeg, Manitoba and were a small cult band active in the early 1970s. They played mainly acoustic folk rock with psychedelic overtones and beautiful harmonies.

Most of this recording was made during a single early evening in Southern California, outdoors, with the San Bernardino Mountains in view. Sam Wilkes played bass guitar, Craig Weinrib played trap drums, and Dylan Day played electric guitar. Eight months after that dusk recording session, the trio reconvened to capture a few more pieces. Wilkes wanted to hear Dylan play a Jobim melody (How Insensitive), Dylan wanted to hear Craig play a funeral march (When I Can Read My Titles Clear), and Craig wanted to play nice and gentle. The resulting record, a document of an initial and seemingly fated musical encounter, conveys the ease and the intensity of the trio’s chemistry. Their shared sonic affinities, while essential to the record’s sound, feel secondary to the integrity, confidence, and mutual regard that suffuse each note and every beat. Atop standards, folk songs, and hymns, Wilkes, Weinrib, and Day unfurl a series of cascading improvisations. Joyful and precise music. Sam Wilkes is from Westport, Connecticut and lives in Los Angeles, California. Craig Weinrib is from New York and lives in New York. Dylan Day is from Fletcher, Vermont and lives in Los Angeles, California.

A singer-songwriter who wrote for the Turtles, Judee Sill -- in her early 1970s heyday -- was compared to Asylum label contemporaries like Joni Mitchell, though her music had stronger spiritual overtones. This nearly forgotten performance reveals a true talent that deserved so much more during her short lifetime. Judee Sill grew up in a very troubled home and came through it with some truly great music to tell so many stories that many of the more sentient listeners will appreciate.

Downtempo, Folk, Pop … Just a little over two years since the release of his debut album Opening the Door, Jack re-emgerges with a new full length album. On Blue Desert, the Australian-born Vancouver-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer wades deeper into the stylistically prismatic pool of his own creation.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Japanese two-piece rock band Taika's third album “On Chitou Jichi”, released in 2023, will be made into a record. Their music is more earthy and eerie than Kikagakumoyo's, and they can't dance like Khruangbin. When you listen to their music, you will have a magical landscape in your mind, as if Les Rallizes Dénudés were playing in the great outdoors. In this album, the post-Force World Revival soundscape intersects with the muddy physicality that is etched into their fundamentals, creating a unique ecosystem. In the Far East, Taika localizes the rock band form of expression by exploring and reexamining the residual, imported discomfort in a form of expression that has become commonplace even in Japan, and arranges it so intensely that the original form is no longer preserved. Japanese folk-like singing and krautrock-like repetition swirl and explode, accompanied by environmental sounds. This product comes with a DL code for a subversive remix track by Japanese abstract dub musician Yo.

Nasim-e Sahar (The Breath of the Dawn) by Asareh Shekarchi (on tombak and āvāz), and Bahareh Fayazi (on tar) is a reinterpretation of works by master Iranian singer Reza-Qoli Mirza Zelli (1906 - 1946). This recording features a variety of modal divisions of Iranian music with poetry that speaks of both earthly and mystical love stories. Sparse and powerful, Nasim-e Sahar showcases the technical virtuosity and improvisational mastery of these two artists. By reinterpreting the masterpieces of a male singer, Bahareh and Asareh, two young women, promise the dawn of a new age in which women claim their rightful place in the history of Iranian music.

PSYCHEDELIC ROOTS FROM ADDIS ABABA from the sizzling Addis Ababa nightlife scene, this group shines an experimentalism based in the virtuosity of rooted traditions. swirling masinko (one-stringed fiddle), wah-wah violin, bass krar grooves, heavy riffs of goat skin kebero beats, and powerful mellismatic lead African diva vocals, QWANQWA keeps the people rapt in celebratory attention.

This is a work released in 2008 by Dragging an Ox through Water, a solo project by Portland-born musician Brian Mumford, and was later released on CD by Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson's label Freedom To Spend and the famous Japanese indie label Sweet Dreams Press! It's a masterpiece of deviant, underground country music, filled with a penchant for industrial, noise, and punk, and exuding an outsider atmosphere throughout!

A trio of Moroccan brothers, coming together here with a very groovy sound – rock at the core, with some very trippy elements and harmonies on some of the best cuts – but also tinged with some slight traditional instrumentation as well – used to flavor the tunes and really make them stand out from more Anglo styles of the time! The songs are all original, and nicely different than other Mid-East pop work we know from the time – maybe a bit headier overall, on titles that include "Hey Di Dam Dam", "Leili Twil", "El Harib", "Sebar", and "Galouli Ensaha"

Karen Dalton was a remote, elusive creature. A hybrid of tough and tender with an unearthly voice that seemed to embody a time long past. As is often the case with such fragile beings, she instinctively understood that the only way to survive the harshness of the world around her, was to keep herself hidden. So it comes as no great surprise that she rarely sang in public or ventured into the unnatural setting of a recording studio. Only twice, for 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best and then again for 1971’s In My Own Time, was she coaxed from her habitat into the studio. Other times she made music in casual settings, sitting around a kitchen table or wood burning stove with her friends, singing and playing until daybreak. In 1966, Carl Baron brought his reel to reel over to her remote cabin in Summerville, Colorado and recorded one of those exquisite musical evenings. Karen and Richard Tucker were rehearsing for a gig when Carl hit the “Record” button. The result is a 45-year-old tape, carefully exhumed, documenting Karen at her most raw and unfiltered. On it are Fred Neil and Tim Hardin songs we’ve never heard Karen give voice to before, as well as traditional songs she uncannily makes her own, including a devastating version of ‘Katie Cruel’, that is so powerful, it is as if the ghost of Katie Cruel seeped into her blood. This recording is a window to her Summerville cabin opened, allowing us to eavesdrop on Karen Dalton at her most pure and unaffected.

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.”
 

K.W. Cahill records and plays acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, karimba, melodica and an AM/FM portable radio on March 2024 time. Mastered by James A. Toth in Toronto. Synchronicity, or plain trying to find connections, or maybe spirits in muted gathering, or fuck it, it’s ghosts getting stirred up and they need to be released. These (ghosts) are mingling and hanging around, peripherally present, lingering and floating off. The (ghosts’ll) waltz in and act like (they) own the place. (I’m) ultimately just trying to get to a zone to let the (ghost) melodies speak, let the wood and metal resonate and ring, playing all the parts that sit in shadow, shapes and notes and patterns, overtones, emotions, hanging by a thread. (I’ll) waltz in and act like (I) own the place.

Glory Fades is a song book written using a common collaborative musical language developed by Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson, building intimate musical spaces, primarily focused on acoustic instrumentation with electronic counterparts contributing light and shade. Throughout the eight songs on the record, each piece unfolds according to its own logic while simultaneously reflecting the overarching tonality of the song book as a whole. The music focuses on the topography outlined by a melodic and harmonic modal framework and the exploration of the negative space found in the decay and in between the notes. There is a tension in this music caused by a reduced and stark emotional expression on the surface and the complex structures hidden underneath, where the harmonic material shimmers and shifts, and tempo and time signature modulates imperceptibly. The instrumentation forms a non-traditional chamber ensemble consisting of plucked and bowed acoustic guitars, zithers, bells, double bass, violin and percussion with additional treatments through manipulated tape and reamplification techniques. Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly re-emerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound. Utilizing synthesized and recorded analog and digital sound, contaminated field-recordings and extensive tape processing his music slowly unfolds sets of precisely tuned harmonic material while textural properties of the imaginary rooms where the music takes form shifts, shimmers and moves from sparse and open to dense and claustrophobic. In addition to his own artistic practice, Erlandsson holds a position as studio technician at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and has frequently presented electroacoustic music and new music from Sweden in concert. Yair Elazar Glotman is a composer and a musician based in Berlin. Glotman trained in classical music as an orchestral contrabass player and in electroacoustic composition. His work for film as well as his independent musical releases are informed by both classical and electroacoustic traditions, and employs a range of improvisation, extended contrabass techniques, and a special interest in textural and spatial compositions and in combining analog and digital processing. His compositions for film began through his close work with the influential, late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, writing additional music for Mandy (2018) and co-composing Last and First Men (2020). He also collaborated on two oscar-winning soundtracks (Joker and All Quiet on the Western Front). Glotman also regularly releases and performs his own music, which has been released on notable labels including Deutsche Grammophon, Bedroom Community and Subtext Recordings.

A Colourful Storm presents Tangerine, a collection of songs by Reiko and Tori Kudo. Recorded at Village Hototoguiss, Japan, during autumn, winter and spring 2011 and 2012, the makeup of Tangerine is the culmination of over thirty years of experimentation, improvisation and intimacy between Reiko Kudo and Tori Kudo. Beginning their collaborative musical activities in the late 1970s and documenting their movements as Noise, it would be an earlier Les Rallizes Dénudés gig that would prove influential in shaping the duo’s lifelong impulse for collaboration and free play - it was, after all, where they first met. Over the course of a decade, they became associated with Hideo Ikeezumi’s seminal PSF (Psychedelic Speed Freaks) scene, Tori playing with the likes of Ché-SHIZU and Fushitsusha and self-releasing cassettes before forming the first incarnation of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tori’s storied musical ensemble of an ever-rotating cast of contributors, would perhaps find difficulty with Tori if called his own. First surfacing in 1985 on a Shinichi Satoh-released cassette compilation, the group would spend the next thirty years playing live and recording, their sound finding solace with labels as far-reaching as Geographic and K. Tori would welcome local amateur and professional musicians, neighbourhood children, friends and passersby on stage, while in the studio, the likes of Ikuro Takahashi (LSD March) and Takashi Ueno (Tenniscoats) have joined him and Reiko on seminal sides such as Return Visit To Rock Mass and Blues Du Jour. A deeply human, deeply romantic recording, Tangerine shines as a touchstone of contemporary Japanese folk minimalism and is significantly the last recorded appearance of Reiko and Tori Kudo as a duo. Reiko's voice, plaintive yet playful, quietly commands centre stage and resonates perfectly with Tori's crystalline instrumentation: bass guitar, euphonium, violin and piano evoking echoes of Enka blues. Glacial soliloquies ’The Deep Valley of Shadow’ and ‘When Seeing the Setting Sun Alone’ bare isolation and restlessness before evolving into profoundly welcoming works. A dedication to playwright and former collaborator Jacob Wren, ‘The Swallow II’ struts confidently while ‘Homeless’, delicately adorned and desirous, addresses themes of universal vulnerability: “Will you give me bread when I’m hungry? / Please stay by me like my mother”. A beautiful accompaniment to the intoxicating swirl of ’We May Be’, recorded live by John Chantler at a Cafe Oto concert in 2009. Originally released on CD by Hyotan in 2013, Tangerine is presented for the first time on vinyl by A Colourful Storm with an exclusive alternate digital version of ‘Homeless’. It stands as the final documented interplay of this enchanting, invigorating duo.

김반월키 Kimbanourke is a singer and songwriter born in 1999 in South Korea. Influenced by Korean aerial thieves (Public Morality) and American Sufian Stevens, he began creating sounds with guitar and harmony. He also has another shoegaze project in the works, which has positively influenced his first solo album, 빈자리 (Binjari / Absence), released digitally in 2024, in which he sings about unfulfilled feelings, The album is a wonderful album with new and nostalgic Korean sung over an acoustic sound. It was released on GG RECORDS in Kyoto, Japan, six months after its digital release.

Brast Burn's Debon -- a classic of Japanese Kraut obscurity originally released in 1975 on Voice Records, now digitally-remastered. Brast Burn are often linked with Karuna Khayal, with many aficionados concluding that they were actually the same band. Whether this is true or not remains an unsolved mystery, but one thing is for sure: Brast Burn's one and only recorded outing left an indelible stamp on those who were to follow. Nurse With Wound's Steve Stapleton thought highly of Debon and included it on his "legendary list" that appeared on the sleeve of his band's 1979 debut album. Featuring orchestrated fuzz guitar, echo-drenched percussion, reverbed bass, zithers, assorted taped sounds and vocals that are simply inspired, Debon is an album that's a must for headphones and for devotees of the likes of Faust and Can. A rare musical experience and a vital addition to any record collection.

Exploring late-night, after-hours meditations on sound; ‘Everything Above The Sky (Astral Travelling with Luke Una)’ is a new compilation by the titular DJ, promoter and enigmatic cultural curator. Off the back of the E Soul Cultura phenomena, this compilation comes at a timely point in Luke’s rich career as he soars the heights of playing all over the world. Avoiding any chance of his sound being pigeonholed, Luke has put together a tracklist of songs and music that have a transcendental feel, after coming off the grid, going back to source, outside the city walls . Music has long been believed to aid out of body experiences and many of us have searched long and hard for a combination of those elusive ingredients that might alleviate some of the monotony of everyday life, our daily routines and obligations, and those things that seem to block us from the spirit of the universe. In this collection, Luke selects music with all the right ingredients in just the right quantities, allowing the listener to engage in an esoteric journey of enlightenment through sound. Being a prolific collector of music, Luke initially delivered enough tracks to compile several compilations, making the licensing process the biggest effort to date for the label. The music moves softly and slowly, never becoming too intrusive, exemplifying the wonderful elevating properties of simple songs played from the heart. Luke’s Everything Above The Sky manifesto reads, “Astral Travelling in the meadowlands with acid folk, spiritual jazz, around midnight hocus pocus, cosmic psychedelic soul, magical spellbound whirling swirling love songs, Brazilian ballads of light into machine soul gospel utopia dreaming, Balearic bossa, Outer Space ancient African drum, the breath of trees, escaping the big bad modern world, gathering round winter fires, walking amongst the bracken in Padley Gorge in late summer twilight, overlooking the Hope Valley, escaping ego, detaching and finally letting go amongst the stars with the slowly floating people. It’s beautiful beyond. Everything above the Sky”. Beginning his career as an original Sheffield house young blood in the mid 1980s, Luke’s move to Manchester and partnership with Justin Crawford saw the birth of Electric Chair, a cornerstone cult night in the UK underground club scene. Then came Electric Elephant, a Croatian festival paying homage to their wild eclecticism from Balearic to Brazilian to É Soul, house, disco and techno. Luke’s much loved, long-running Homoelectric night and more recently Homobloc sell out festival for 10,000 souls has been at the forefront of Manchester’s LGBTQ+ cultural landscape. Luke’s Friday evening show on Worldwide FM captured imaginations and became a cult four-hour must-listen monthly journey for fans all over the world. Today, Luke remains, as ever, at the forefront of a changing milieu, pairing the momentous legacy of Manchester’s 80s and 90s scene with the delivery of what today’s club communities need to get down.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Due to unprecedented delays in global production, we are anticipating a May 2022 release date for the upcoming Kazuki Tomokawa releases. In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism—forging a sound and sensibility 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 and the profound alike, eschewing politics and society in favor of an “attitude of total self-containment.” Tomokawa recorded the album over the course of a month—from August 24 to September 25, 1977—at Tokyo’s famed Onkio Haus studio in the bustling Ginza district. The arrangements, accordingly, are amped up: paired with the Black Panther Orchestra, Tomokawa’s “screaming philosopher” vocals find their match with the orchestra’s electric guitar, bass, piano, tuba, and ground-thumping drums played by the Brain Police’s Toshi Ishizuka—who appears on Tomokawa’s first three records and remains his collaborator to this day. “This is Kazuki Tomokawa in the flesh,” concludes Takahara. A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth is, in Tomokawa’s uncanny way, able to cut through facade and artifice in pursuit of truth. “You call that life?” he heckles, exhausted by the melodrama and nihilism of youth counterculture, “try saying you’re alive!” Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Aboriginal Australian blues, country, and gospel by the great Kankawa Nagarra, Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta. These intimate recordings introduce the world outside Australia to Kankawa Nagarra, a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, human rights advocate, and environmental activist. Born in the traditional lands of the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of North Western Australia, Kankawa grew up with the tribal songs at cultural ceremonies. When she was taken from her family to the mission, she was taught hymns and Gospel songs with the choir. On the pastoral lease where she was sent to work, Country music was everywhere. She first heard rock and roll on the station gramophone. But it wasn’t until many years later her musical journey truly began, when she stopped to listen to a busker outside a shop in Derby, Western Australia. It was the first time she’d heard the blues, and it awakened something in her. Through it, she found a medium to express all her thoughts and feelings, and it inspired her to turn these into songs. The empathy of her message extends from those she sees struggling around her to the entire planet being ravaged for profit. These twelve tracks, recorded live near her home of Wangkatjungka, WA, offer a cross-section of Kankawa’s entire musical experience - shifting gracefully between musical styles, languages, and moods, backed by the buzz of night bugs and call of daytime birds. In turns humorous, warm, and real about the hardships of life and the pillage of the land she holds dear, the record is the closest thing you can get to spending time with the great Kankawa herself. We are extremely grateful to release this record alongside Flippin Yeah Records and in collaboration with Kankawa Nagarra. High-quality vinyl comes with a four-page booklet featuring translations, stories, and track notes by the artist.