MUSIC

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was a legend in collecting and documenting folk, blues, and folk music from all over the U.S. from his very early days. These legendary performances by RL Burnside, Napoleon Strickland, Boyd Rivers, Tommy Jarrell, and many others have been overlooked in the history of American folk/blues. This is the first time they have been recorded. Traveling through the South and Southwest of the United States with a video crew, he captured over 350 hours of folklore from Kentucky coal miners, fiddlers, string bands, gospel quartets, and pre-war blues circuit players. In 1991, it was edited into the "American Patchwork" series and broadcast on American public television. However, because of the format, hundreds of individual performances and fascinating scenes went unheard. This set is a selection of notable recordings made to document the last of the "local surrounds" in Mississippi, Appalachia and Louisiana. The booklet includes lavish liner notes by Nathan Salsburg of the Alan Lomax Archive.

John Levy, a London ethnomusicologist and devotee of Tibetan Buddhism who recorded both sacred and secular music on Nagra stereo, left this masterpiece in the mid-1970s for Lyrichord, a prestigious American label with a catalog of recordings of traditional music from around the world. This work is the second part of Levy's entire project to capture not only the sacred music of the Tibetan rituals in the small South Asian country of Bhutan, but also all indigenous folk music. This fully remastered traditional folk/instrumental album features Tibetan and Bhutanese lute and fiddle playing, beautiful folk songs, and some of the yaks and Tibetan-originated dramas of Eastern Bhutan. This is truly a selection of 20 authentic blues songs from the top of the world.

"When asked what were my early influences in music, I get reminded of my teenage years in Parisian suburbs, simultaneously discovering from public libraries two important French record labels: OCORA and GRM. Then the roots of my interest in traditional music and electro-acoustic experiments grew into doing it myself, recording ethnic minorities of the zomian plateau of south-east Asia and composing a soundscape around it. This is what is happening here."

— Laurent Jeanneau aka KINK GONG

Kink Gong works with what is unknown to him, as an artist who’s attracted by beauty and strangeness.
Like a stranger, he has been deeply curious about recording ethnic minority music isolated from dominating cultures within South-east Asia, thus working with musicians taking part in specific cultural communities to make almost 200 albums.
Like an artist, he has been leaning towards strange marriages, building on these raw materials. They are lived moments that combine space, people and music, as if they were blocks made out of the same material.

Music and Poetry of the Kesh is the documentation of an invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time, and the soundtrack of famed science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. In the novel, the story of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Kesh, is woven within a larger anthropological folklore and fantasy.

The ways of the Kesh were originally presented in 1985 as a five hundred plus page book accompanied with illustrations of instruments and tools, maps, a glossary of terms, recipes, poems, an alphabet (Le Guin’s conlang, so she could write non-English lyrics), and with early editions, a cassette of “field recordings” and indigenous song. Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined; she embarked on an elaborate process with her friend Todd Barton to invoke their spirit and tradition.

For Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the words and lyrics are attributed to Le Guin as composed by Barton, an Oregon-based musician, composer and Buchla synthesist (the two worked together previously on public radio projects). But the cassette notes credit the sounds and voices to the world of the Kesh, making origins ambiguous. For instance, “The River Song” description reads, “The prominent rhythm instrument is the doubure binga, a set of nine brass bowls struck with cloth-covered wooden mallets, here played by Ready.”

According to writer and long-time friend of LeGuin, Moe Bowstern (who pens the liners for the Freedom To Spend edition of Kesh), Barton built and then taught himself to play several instruments of Le Guin’s design, among them “the seven-foot horn known to the Kesh as the Houmbúta and the Wéosai Medoud Teyahi bone flute.” Barton’s crafting of original instruments lends an other-worldly texture to the recordings of the Kesh, not unlike fellow builders Bobby Brown and Lonnie Holley. Bowstern notes, “Other musician / makers have crafted their own Kesh instruments after encountering the earlier cassette recordings that accompanied some editions of the book.”

Both Barton and Le Guin are sensitive to the sovereignty of indigenous Californians and were careful not to trample the traditions of the Tolowa people who lived in the valley long before the Kesh. “You research deeply, and then you bring your own voice to the table,” said Barton. Within the Kesh culture, the numbers four and five shape the lives, society and rituals. Barton composed loosely around these numbers, patiently listening to the land of Napa Valley for signs and audio signals from the natural elements. Todd incorporated ambient sounds of the creek by Le Guin’s house and a campfire they built together.

The songs of Kesh are joyful, soothing and meditative, while the instrumental works drift far past the imaginary lands. “Heron Dance” is an uplifting first track, featuring a Wéosai Medoud Teyahi (made from a deer or lamb thigh bone with a cattail reed) and the great Houmbúta (used for theatre and ceremony). “A Music of the Eighth House” sends gossamer waves of the faintest sounds to “float on the wind.” Like the languages invented in the vocal work of Anna Homler, Meredith Monk, and Elizabeth Fraser, the Kesh songs and poems play with the shape of voice.

The Music and Poetry of the Kesh cassette was meant to accompany and enhance the experience of reading Always Coming Home. Presented in this edition as a long-playing album, where only traces of the book linger (the jacket offers some of Le Guin’s illustration, and a letterpressed bookmark featuring the the narrative modes of western civilization and the Kesh valley is included), the music alone breaking the silence of what might be. It can transport—offering a landscape for imagining a future homecoming. One in which we are balanced, peaceful, and tend to the earth and its creatures.

A line from “Sun Dance Poem” reminds us, “We are nothing much without one another.” Freedom To Spend gives new life to the recordings of the Kesh people in the first ever vinyl edition of Music and Poetry of the Kesh also availably on digital formats on March 23, 2018. The LP will include a spot printed jacket with Ursula’s illustrations from Always Coming Home, a facsimile of the original lyric sheet, liner notes by Moe Bowstern, a multi-format digital download code and a bookmark letter pressed by Stumptown Printers in Portland, OR.

First edition limited to 1,000 copies.

This is the final stock out of print. A new age hymn born from a tape collage of natural sounds. "Songs Of Gold, Incandescent", a masterpiece cassette released in 2014 by Lieven Martens Moana, also known as Dolphins Into The Future, has been released on CD as an Expanded Edition.

here5It was recorded over the years, and in parallel with the ambient and electronic music works of the New Age vein, many field recordings have been released so far, but in this work, I get lost in the fictitious island country. The feeling is especially wonderful.Dolphins Into The FutureMarked pocopoco electrons ensemble with animal breathing1Beginning with the song, the recording of the water that springs from the fumaroles of the volcano, gospel, piano tunes, and the transition to environmental sounds are exquisite.Sweeten The MangoNot only collecting environmental sounds and related sounds, but alsoDolphins --LievenThe love of nature, the island and the sea is reflected in the gentle and mysterious color of the sound, and the core part is stronger than ever.