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Like a long journey this record unfolds itself through many layers.
Fans of Kikagaku Moyo will be comforted by the soft vocals harmonies and warm Sitar but what sets this release apart is the refinement of the band’s songwriting and their delicate execution.
Side A begins with a pair of travelling songs where the interplay between the vocals, guitar, and sitar lift and suspend you on an unexpected journey.
The patient listener is rewarded by tracks like “Trad” and “Silver Owl” that demonstrate the masterful balance the band has between soft and loud; chaos and order, or being both cold and tender at the same time.
“House in the Tall Grass” takes the listener by the hand on a comfortable quest through destinations both familiar and unknown.
It is a natural step forward for the band and perhaps the most refined example of their style to date.
Kikagaku Moyo's debut album exerts an elemental power. Enlivening their sound with sitars, percussive drums, theremins, wind instruments and ethereal vocals, the band manages to sound powerfully spacious and lazily serene all at once. Their songs can be light as air, or heavy as earth. Many evolve out of intense experiences of engagement with the natural world. The album’s first track, “Can You Imagine Nothing?” was written over a night spent jamming on a suspended footbridge in remote mountains. As the song progressed the bridge began to sway, making band members feel as though they were floating weightless in midair. =Band Description= Kikagaku Moyo started in the summer of 2012 busking on the streets of Tokyo. Though the band started as a free musiccollective, it quickly evolved into a tight group of multi-instrumentalists. Kikagaku Moyo call their sound psychedelicic because it encompasses a broad spectrum of influence. Their music incorporates elements of classical Indian music, Krautrock, Traditional Folk, and 70s Rock. Most importantly their music is about freedom of the mind and body and building a bridge between the supernatural and the present. Improvisation is a key element to their sound.
Previously released on May 20th 2014. Kikagaku Moyo here sound anything but lost, their child-like wonder manifested in a confident, courageous exploration of sound. Labels – psychedelic, folk, prog-rock, psychedelic-folk-mixed-with-prog-rock – do little to accurately reflect the spectrum of influences on display, let alone the more impactful realization of completeness in Kikagaku Moyo’s songs.
'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.
With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.
Netherlands-based artist Jonny Nash returns to Melody As Truth with his new solo album, ‘Once Was Ours Forever.’ Building on 2023’s ‘Point Of Entry,’ this collection of eleven compositions draws us further into Nash’s immersive, slowly expanding world, effortlessly connecting the dots somewhere between folk,
ambient jazz and dreampop.
While ‘Point Of Entry’ was characterised by it’s laid-back, daytime ambience, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’
arrives wrapped in shades of dusk and hazy light, unfolding like a slow-moving sunset. Built from layers of gentle fingerpicked guitar, textural brush strokes, floating melodies and reverb-soaked vocals, moments come and go, fleeting and ephemeral.
From the cosmic Americana of ‘Bright Belief’ to the lush, layered shoegaze textures of ‘The Way Things Looked’, Nash’s versatile guitar playing lies at the heart of this album, gently supported by a cast of
collaborators who each add their unique touches. Canadian ambient jazz saxophonist Joseph Shabason makes a return appearance, providing his delicate swells to ‘Angel.’ Saxophone is also provided by Shoei Ikeda (Maya Ongaku), cello by Tomo Katsurada (ex-Kikagaku Moyo) and Tokyo acid folk artist Satomimagae (RVNG) lends her haunting multilayered vocals to ‘Rain Song.’
As with much of Nash’s work, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’ deftly finds an equilibrium between softness and weight, offering the listener ample space to interpret and inhabit the music on their own terms. Through his uncanny ability to blend the pastoral and the profound, the idyllic and the insightful, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’ arrives as a tender and understated offering, infused with warmth and compassion.
It began somewhere between sleep and memory. After first meeting in dreams, in Brussels and Berlin, on landscapes that felt strangely close to Vilnius, Marija Rasa aka emer and Ugnė Uma leisurely rewrote those visions into songs. What followed became a collection of moments suspended in idle summers, familiar faces, gentle motions, skin touched by golden sun. These songs wander through closeness and distance, tracing the delicate emotional shifts between us, who almost understand each other completely. ‘you and me’ lives in the space where magical realism meets everyday intimacy: honey-colored evenings, recurring thoughts, and the slow surrender to things unfolding on their own.
Bo Harwood (1946–2022) was one of those behind-the-scenes figures of American independent cinema: a self-taught musician, composer, sound editor, sound mixer and songwriter. Harwood started out as the lead singer and guitarist of a Southern California rock band before a chance meeting with John Cassavetes changed the course of his career. He scored his first feature, The Bach Train, in 1969, and later joined Husbands as an inexperienced assistant in the editing room. He gradually became Cassavetes’s sound editor, music supervisor, composer and sound mixer, eventually working across six of his films, from Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence through The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and Love Streams. Harwood’s music is inseparable from the peculiar emotional universe of those films: strange, romantic, funny and often devastating. Harwood and Cassavetes worked closely and instinctively together, developing music in the process of making the films. The surviving master tapes reveal something of this exchange: alongside finished pieces are improvisations, experiments and conversations, capturing the two of them working through ideas in real time. Harwood’s compositions were often recorded as rough “scratch tracks”, with Cassavetes preferring their immediacy and vulnerability to more polished arrangements. This nine-track LP brings together some of that work. There is something wonderfully intimate about hearing these recordings outside the films: the songs stand on their own, while retaining the rawness and emotional charge that made Harwood’s collaboration with Cassavetes so distinctive. A small document of a remarkable and largely overlooked body of work.
By popular demand, Hype Williams/Dean Blunt collaborator Joanne Robertson’s early side of slanted, detuned and enchanting lo-fi productions returns to vinyl in an expanded new edition via theeee untouchable Escho label. If you've been snagged by her stunning 'Blue Car' album for AD 93, or indeed her unforgettable turns on much of Dean Blunt's output this last decade, or into classic Throwing Muses, this will rule your world. Among the best in her cult class of contemporary singer-songwriters, Joanne Robertson has built her rep from the ground up thru more than 15 years working with everyone from David Cunningham (The Flying Lizards, General Strike), to Gnod’s Paddy Shine, who appears twice on this record, and a role in the mysterious Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family band - an early vehicle for Hype Williams’ Dean Blunt and Alina Astrova. ‘Wildflower’ is her 3rd solo session and now regarded a classic in her sparing catalogue that clearly bridges ’80s post-punk jangle, ‘90s indie scuzz, and its modern iterations in the likes of bar italia. However Robertson transcends with a singular blend of timeless, folk pop-intoned vocals, highly personalised (de)tuning systems and ascetic recording tekkerz that indelibly watermark her work and prickle the listener’s spine. A case in point for her uncanny hooks is ‘Heven’, with typically unadorned vocals set to open fret strums and devastating drone discord that seems to seep off the page, and which we could happily rinse and repeat for days, while Paddy Shine finely chimes with her sound on the naked room recording snapshots of ‘90s grunge residue in ‘The Motor’ and psych billow to ‘You Hear Me Go’. Practically anyway you turn, from the pharmaceutically faded ‘Late at Night’ to the shivering wheeze of ‘Dance With Me’ or motorik drone-pop of its title song, going like Stereolab recording in a Blackpool boarding room, or the £1 burger version of Mazzy Star-like steak in ‘There and Here’, hit the mark dead on, if you know what’s good.
Melodies based on Lithuanian folk songs - A label collaboration with Granvat, Merope and THE Vilnius chamber choir Jauna Muzika .
in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music Recorded 2019-2024 'the gold metal must be wrung a bore is a well lit mine where everything belongs to me' Dagmar Zuniga makes music that feels both intimate and expansive: songs drift like disrupted signals, carried by harmony, tape hiss, and a strong sense of touch. Her debut solo album in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music — written and recorded in New York, Norway, and Athens, Georgia over a period of five years on her longtime companion, the Tascam 424 — was uploaded to Bandcamp and YouTube in January 2025 through Dagmar’s friends People's Coalition of Tandy. The project quickly garnering over two hundred thousand views and the attention of artists such as Mount Eerie, who invited her to tour with them that summer. This year, what was once a jewel of tapped-in algorithms and message boards will meet the world at large, with in filth arriving digitally on March 4, and physically on April 10, via AD 93.
»Carpet Of Fallen Leaves« is an introduction to the folk-pop world of Eddie Marcon. It follows in the footsteps of other collections of Japanese artists on Morr Music, such as yumbo, Andersens, and the »Minna Miteru« compilations, »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves« draws together songs from Eddie Marcon’s twenty-two-year history, including fragile, yet rich in melody material, collected from a prodigious run of limited edition, self-released CD-Rs.
Eddie Marcon is the project of Eddie Corman and Jules Marcon, who met through their involvement in Japan’s underground music scene. Eddie was a member of noise-rock duo Coa, while both Eddie and Marcon were part of psych-rock collective LSD-March. Forming in 2001, Eddie Marcon’s sound is markedly different from these groups, though they do, at times, share a sense of psychedelic dislocation, through the gentle, limpid pace of their songs. But with Eddie Marcon, melody and gentleness is at the music’s core.
They’ve long marked out their own, unique territory within a worldwide community of psych-folk and folk-pop artists; sharing their music through a subterranean network of colleagues and friends, they count groups like The Pastels and The Notwist as their fans, and Eddie has collaborated with the likes of Shintaro Sakamoto, and Aki Tsuyuko (in Tondekebana, and with Marcon and Ippei Matsui in the quartet Wasurerogusa). Eddie Marcon have also recently worked with drummer Ikuro Takahashi, who’s played with groups such as Fushitsusha, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and Nagisa Ni Te.
Across the songs on »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves«, Eddie Marcon’s songs are performed by Eddie on guitar, organ and vocals, and Marcon on bass; they’re variously joined by Takahashi, Yojiro Tatekawa (drums), Tomoko Kageyama (vibraphone), Yasuhisa Mizutani (flute), Madoka Asakura (vocals), and Ztom Motoyama (pedal steel). The arrangements are pared back to best serve the core of each song, and the playing is gorgeous – fluent but not showy; capable of great intricacy, but aware that simplicity is key to direct communication.
Songs like »Mayonaka No Ongaku« stretch their limbs languidly, the music shivering with beauty as guitar and cymbal drift across Eddie’s poised vocal delivery. »Tora To Lion« began as an improvisation, but it’s become a firm favourite of the group’s fans: as Eddie says, »it has become a very important song for us, to the extent that it can be said to be our representative song.«
Perhaps the most moving thing about »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves«, though, is the way it captures the subtle yet significant moments of everydayness that ask for our attention. »Shoujo«, a song for a beloved cat who passed away, possesses rare emotional resonance. »At the end of the song,« Eddie remembers, »I wanted to have her throat rumbling endlessly.« When the song was cut, a television voice appeared behind the purring, saying ›thank you‹. »For us, it felt like words from Poco-chan, and tears came to our eyes.«
Asthmatic Kitty Records will release 'Worst Christmas Ever!,' a single-LP collection that distills Sufjan Stevens' expansive holiday catalog—drawn from the box sets 'Songs for Christmas' and 'Silver & Gold'—into one definitive collection. The album pairs fifteen favorites, selected from more than one hundred Christmas recordings, with the newly released original song "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," Sufjan's first new Christmas song in nearly fifteen years.
Asthmatic Kitty Records will release 'Worst Christmas Ever!,' a single-LP collection that distills Sufjan Stevens' expansive holiday catalog—drawn from the box sets 'Songs for Christmas' and 'Silver & Gold'—into one definitive collection. The album pairs fifteen favorites, selected from more than one hundred Christmas recordings, with the newly released original song "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," Sufjan's first new Christmas song in nearly fifteen years.
Released in 1972 and long out of reach, Belle Gonzalez’s only album is one of those rare records that feels like a secret passed from hand to hand. Her voice is gentle yet full of presence, carrying songs that drift between British folk and the soft sway of Brazilian rhythms. It’s music that feels both of its time and strangely timeless, the kind of record you play once and then can’t forget. After decades in obscurity, Belle finally returns, restored with care and ready to be heard the way it always should have been.
An album by a little-known guitar duo released in 1999. Their songs—composed solely of guitars and making heavy use of harmonics—are beautiful pieces that evoke an ambient-like tranquility; during their live performances at the time, they even collaborated with 8mm film projections. However, while the album received high praise from a select few, the overall response was very limited. At the time, the indie scene had not yet re-evaluated ambient sounds, and there were virtually no other groups performing such simple instrumental music live. I believe this made the music extremely difficult to categorize and left it in a precarious position. However, once Japanese ambient music began to be re-evaluated globally in the 2010s, this album was rediscovered, and the remaining stock of CDs sold out instantly. Amid calls for a reissue, we’d like to unleash this music anew with this first-ever vinyl release. KENKEN—now known as URBAN VOLCANO SOUNDS—also makes a guest appearance. Whether you want to take your time exploring this little-known hidden gem or use it as everyday background music, this acoustic guitar instrumental album creates beautiful moments that seep into the very air around you.
Homer Steinweiss, the Brooklyn based soul/funk drummer, always had a soft spot for folk music. Paul Spring, a young idealist folk singer traveling the country with his guitar, always had a beautiful falsetto in his back pocket. A family introduction would lead to Homer producing a few solo records of Paul’s, which would eventually lead to the creation of Holy Hive. The two enlisted Joe Harrison on bass and started out recording their first tunes as a group. A tour with soul legend Lee Fields would turn out to have an unexpected effect on their sound as they played their material to crowds of soul fanatics looking to dance. It was this realization that forced the next step in their evolution and gave birth to a sound unique to Holy Hive, a sound that walks a line so perfectly it necessitated a new genre, Folk Soul. Homer has been drumming professionally since 2000 and has provided the back beat to records by Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, The Jonas Brothers, and Lady Gaga to name a few. He has toured the world over with soul acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and The Arcs. With all of that under his belt, Holy Hive is the first band that is truly his own and you can hear that it is close to his heart. Paul is from a small town in Minnesota where he spent his formative years studying Ancient Greek mythology and practicing classical guitar. He toured the states for years with only the company of his guitar, playing solo shows to make ends meet and occasional library gigs promoting his self released children’s record, Home Of Song. Listening to their debut album, their different experiences and influences have all shown up. From the heavy downbeat of the lead single “Broom” to their intimate cover of Honeybus’ “Be Thou By My Side,” Float Back To You showcases their songwriting prowess as well as their impeccable musicianship. Spring’s fondness for ancient mythology shows up in a few places on the album as well adding another level to their work. They adapt the Greek poet Sappho’s “Fragment 31” to music on “Embers To Ash” and completely rework the Irish folk tune “Red Is The Rose” into a modern day two stepper. Another standout track is the already classic “Oh I Miss Her So,” which first showed up on their 2018 Harping EP and features accomplished harpist Mary Lattimore and trumpet by Dave Guy of The Roots. The symbiotic relationship of Homer and Paul has been likened to that of an oxpecker and a black rhino. Paul’s delicate falsetto and fluttering guitar rests atop Homer’s brawny drums in perfect harmony. There are many levels to Holy Hive, some of them show up on the surface, but some of them are like the album’s title track; you listen to a gorgeous love song only to find out later it is about coming home to your cat. This is perhaps the most telling of Holy Hive, they are easy to like on first listen but spending time with their music will reveal a much deeper experience.
Bonnie Dobson’s self-titled 1969 album is a striking blend of folk-pop and psychedelic nuances, marking a move beyond the traditional acoustic style that made her famous in the early 1960s. The album’s mood is often reflective and melancholic, balancing pastoral beauty with darker themes of change, loss, and uncertainty. One of the hidden gems of the album is track B4 “Pendant Que” by the celebrated Quebec songwriter Gilles Vigneault, which stands out since it is sung in French and reflects Dobson’s long-standing interest in French-Canadian repertoire. Today, Bonnie Dobson is often regarded as a cult favorite among fans of Canadian and psychedelic folk and one of the strongest albums in Dobson’s catalog. This new release on vinyl is the first since early 70s.
Ulla’s 28912 label returns with a gorgeous bouquet of lowercase wonders that'll cast a gentle spell over anyone on the line from Vincent Gallo to The Humble Bee, Sofie Birch to Tenniscoats. The fourth release on the label following Naemi's 'Breathless, Shorn' and Ulla's own 'Hometown Girl', and its ‘Other Girl’ companion piece, 'Puff' is a new album from Justin Cantrell aka J and the Woolen Stars, a core member of Naarm's underground scene as part of local supergroup Picnic, and the brains behind the excellent Daisart and se Dessaisir Publishing labels - we recommend you check in on both if you haven't already done so. ‘Puff’ is a glistening pool of lush refractions and music-box lullabies, featuring an array of acoustic instruments and fragile foley sounds that are gently peeled away until all we’re left with are the faded outlines of half-remembered songs. A sound that roots itself in the prophetic machinations of artists like Fennesz and the languid Japanese minimalism of Fourcolour or Moskitoo, 'Puff' strikes a delicate balance, sounding as bewitchingly informal as a Tenniscoats set, but also consistently muddling the perception of high and low-brow sound. Cantrell's skill lies in a sort of sonic conjuration, bamboozling the brains of those of us who grew up listening to stepped-on audio via ramshackle RealMedia streams by alchemising the content, turning found sound into gold. Just tell us you don't get chills from hearing the bitrate-impaired acoustic guitar on 'Dirty like an angel', set against a backdrop of windy, harmonic detritus. It's both meticulously contrived and gloriously off-the-cuff, like one of Vincent Gallo's classic 'When'-era demos reduced down to 96kbps. Similarly, 'She knows just what to say' provokes faint memories of folk music, with impromptu fiddle parts gently steamrolled to create a sound that’s nothing short of exquisite, like pressed flowers rediscovered in an old, discarded book. Even the more palpably electronic elements are hand sculpted in a way that belies the era we're living in - it's music for a digital age that sounds oddly unplugged, flawed and human. An unmistakably lovely antidote to the opiating nostalgia of our time.
CocoRosie is the Casady sisters, Bianca and Sierra. Born in different states, the girls grew up apart until fate brought them together again in 2003: once disconnected, now inseparable. After the mysterious and beautiful La Maison de Mon Reve surfaced in early 2004, CocoRosie lived a nomadic existence, spending months traveling the world with a myriad of acts, including Bright Eyes, TV on the Radio, Antony and the Johnsons, Devendra Banhart, and Blonde Redhead. Along the way, Noah’s Ark began to breathe. It happened anytime, anywhere, everywhere: in a barn in France, at their home in Brooklyn, in a Parisian studio, in a grungy hotel room after a show. The songs were formed and fashioned in various ways, using anything from prehistoric recording methods to more modern techniques. Heart-offerings of friends, family, loved ones and lost ones surface gracefully throughout Noah’s Ark, contributing depth to the narrative journey. A mother's chant, a nephew's cry. Antony’s angelic falsetto floating across “Beautiful Boyz.” The texture and flow that French MC and beat boxer Spleen adds to "K-hole," "Bisounours" and more. Originally released in 2005, Noah’s Ark is the result of a rootless reality, a drifting consciousness across state lines, date lines, time lines...connected to the past, vague about the future. But the heart of these songs is always issued from a tender present.
‘I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label I wanted to be on. That was the label that put out all the great records.' Bob Dylan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "At Folkways Records, the art on an album cover was a portal and an invitation, hinting at the audio to be found inside, a tradition we continue today at Smithsonian Folkways. It is a true honor to be treated to Soul Jazz Redords's deep and thoughtful exploration of the iconic album art from one of America's most consequential record labels” Maureen Loughran, Director and Curator Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Smithsonian Institution ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soul Jazz Records new book 'Folkways Records: A Visual History of Folkways Records Cover Art' is out on Oct 19. Deluxe new large-format hardback book featuring 100s of striking and beautiful record sleeve designs from Folkways Records, one of the most important and iconic record labels in the world. Featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, John Cage, Pete Seeger, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Mary Lou Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Ives and many more. 208 Pages, 12"x12", Hardback includes extensive introduction and accompanying text. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Folkways Records and Service Corporation was founded in 1948 by Moses Asch after Albert Einstein first encouraged him to document the ‘sounds of the world’. From 1949-1987, Folkways released over 2,000 recordings of jazz, folk, avant-garde, world, sounds of nature, spoken word, electronic modernism, civil rights speeches and more. Folkways stands head and shoulders above all ‘world music’ record labels in its depth of representation of cultural diversity and its understanding of the nature of sound itself . Asch’s vision of presenting ‘other music’ in all its myriad forms alongside the homegrown indigenous music of the United States of America (jazz, blues, folk and more) showed an unparalleled vision of modern cultural representation. Much of the success in bringing together such diverse subjects into one cohesive unique and visual identity for Folkways Records is down to the 100s of stunning artwork designs of Ronald Clyne, the primary designer at the record label. Through typeface, colour and design Clyne gave Folkways record covers both an incredibly stylish and unique look and an underlying seriousness of intent and vision, the perfect match to that of founder Moses Asch. The book focusses on the numerous stunning and striking record designs that feature across Folkways’ vast and idiosyncratic musical landscape – from The Music of Equatorial New Guinea to The Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, from The Songs and Dances of The Flathead Indians to The Sounds of The Tropical Rain Forest in America. Other diverse music you will find here include: Outer Space Music, Chinese Classical Music, Sea Shanties and Loggers Songs, Drums of the Yoruba of Nigeria, Street Games and Songs of The Children of New York City, Experiments in Computer Music and more. Folkways recorded some of the greatest names in American music across the fields of jazz, folk, poetry, blues and classical music, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Nikki Giovanni, Pete Seeger, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, John Cage, and Charles Ives, all of whom are featured here. As a wholly independent record label with a focus purely on music outside of the mainstream, Asch found unique and innovative solutions to keeping his record company alive for almost 40 years, maintaining the vast catalogue of 2,000 recordings always in print. Smithsonian Folkways when the entire catalogue became part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
This album was compiled from original sources that have been lovingly restored and mastered. It represents a mere fraction of Connie's recorded repertoire.
Isik Kural’s Motorcycles and Cherry Wind is a sonic travelogue of stories waiting and wanting to be told, of seekers passing through a loop of time as they become witnesses to the glories of the ancient ruins. The album holds sounds of timeless quality—like inherited folklore, draped with secondhand nostalgia—taking the shape of whoever is eager enough to claim it as their own. Rich and full of character like the dusty mystery of an archeological site, Kural whispers to the living and the long gone alike in the poetic embrace of Motorcycles and Cherry Wind.