MUSIC

版元完売。Theo Fabunmi Stonn (404 Eros) & Jon Phonics (Astral Black)の2名が主宰しているロンドンの気鋭レーベルであり、Lunch Money LifeやVanessa Bedoretといった面々による先鋭的な作品を送り出してきた〈Scenic Route〉のショーケース的コンピ盤をストック。レフトフィールドでサイケデリックなテイスト抜群のドリーム・ポップやインディ・フォーク、オルタナティヴR&Bを中心に、知られざる現行の地下アクトたちを一挙20組紹介した意欲的な1本！

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

Music From Memory is thrilled to introduce Dead Sound, the collaborative project of Marco Sterk (aka Young Marco) and Berlin-based pop-auteur John Moods. Both artists are no strangers to the label; Sterk forms one third of the trio Gaussian Curve, while Moods released the 2022 album ‘Hidden Gem’ with The Zenmenn. Their collaboration was both planned and spontaneous; Sterk initially reached out in 2022 expressing his desire to work with Moods. The pair finally got together in 2024 to produce ‘Into The Void’, an album that burst into life over the course of a few creatively charged days in each other’s company. Moods’ dream-like, emotionally charged music wears its heart on its sleeve; its very human vulnerability makes it a perfect match for Sterk’s strong sense of melody and textural sonic visions. ‘Into The Void’ carries these psychedelic traits in its DNA, but they exist layered deep amongst the shadows. Painting on a wide canvas that effortlessly skips between genres, the pair weave anything that inspires them into a truly unique tapestry; a bold attempt to touch at the beyond. Exploring the space between perception (level of the mind) and the nature of the universe (actual level of reality) seems traditionally like an impossible task. But there’s gotta be a time and a space for the profound and this album invites the listener to go deep, letting go of concepts such as love and opening oneself up to one’s own authentic journey. This transformative force of healing is a central theme of ‘Into The Void’, a path that is lined with light and darkness in equal measure. But, as Moods says, “do not skip the darkness, let that door open and swallow you. And maybe you’ll find, it's not as dark as you perceived at first."

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.”

Kristin Hayter sheds her Lingua Ignota guise for the debut release under her Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter project. ‘SAVED!’ is inspired by American religious music of the god-fearing past, Southern gospel, and various strains of pre-rock folk and country. It picks up where ‘Sinner Get Ready’ left off, applying degraded audio and stripping the instrumentation down to the barebones minimal of twangy guitars, piano, and her haunting vocals. Imagine a countryfied, infernal spin on the murder balladry of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and Nico, and you’d get this magnificent album.

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.

An official re-issue of the 1996 album, Beyond the Circle, from Dr. Osamu Kitajima presented by Forest Jams on vinyl for the first time. As the title suggests, Japanese music explorer Osamu Kitajima takes the listener beyond the known on a musical voyage into new territory where his compositions are a synthesis of Western electronics and ambient dance rhythms, tempered by the wisdom of ancient Japanese traditions. “Beyond the Circle” is music that is as energizing as it is spiritual and melodic.

“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.”

“Do you dream too?” Tomemitsu’s Martin Roark asks on his sophomore album with Friends of Friends Music out September 20, 2024. The question is also what stemmed from the album title, ‘Dream 2’, a shorthand written in the lyrics. ‘Dream 2’ is quite possibly Tomemitsu’s dreamiest LP, if not his most diverse. It is brimming with both new territory and nods to his past. This record reveals a more buoyant side to accompany his traditionally spaced out productions. Since his 2013 release of ‘m_o_d_e_s’, Tomemitsu has combined calm with chaos to create chilled out nuggets of pop containing an ear for ambience in odes to offbeat artists from genres of all sorts. “Creators like Thelonoius Monk, Joao Gilberto, Daniel Johnston, Brian Eno, Bill Withers, Arthur Russell… they were all immediately inspiring to me. I think I’ve come to appreciate the ‘solo project’ness of tomemitsu without realizing how much i was nodding along to the loneliness of my favorite artists.” says Roark. For ‘Dream 2’, Tomemitsu also added a slew of analog and digital gear, processors and synthesizers, to his private Laveta Loca studio elevating the aural output from his hyper lo-fi origins.

Prospect Hummer, 2005 EP by Animal Collective featuring Vashti Bunyan on three tracks, is reissued on black vinyl

This record began with a funny and sad idea I had about a funeral. I imagined a picture of a funeral with a merch table. Mourners could buy a souvenir t-shirt or a poster. They could purchase a book of the deceased’s writing and artwork and a record of their songs and music. I thought about a bored teenager running the merch table, tired of being on tour and trying to keep up. It was an idea full of darkness and sweetness to me. Immediately I thought about what my merchandise would look like, what it would be. I began to think about what the record for sale at my funeral would sound like. I started to think about the songs I have made up and sung to and with my friends, family, and myself over the years. I noticed how the songs I had sung the longest seemed connected to others from a different time. I had changed some words and how I played them but they were all of me and my time on earth. I heard how these things fit together. Of course I now needed to see this project become a reality. I asked my dear friend Amelia Meath to help me make this record. We have known each other for a while and worked on various projects with her bands over the years but this would be a chance to really collaborate and spend some quality time working on something together. Over the course of several months, we had frequent long telephone conversations about songs, creativity, vulnerability, our own lives and what it means to make art and music. In March of 2023 we recorded this record at Betty’s in Durham, North Carolina. We spent beautiful days playing music, drinking coffee, going for walks, making dinners and laughing all day. Alli Rogers engineered the recording that became a true collaboration and would help turn this idea for a record into a real thing. Some days we were joined by Joe Westerlund on percussion, Matt Douglas playing saxophone and clarinet, and Nick Sanborn on bass, keyboards, drum programming and singing. On other days it was Amelia, Alli and I figuring things out as we went along and adding ideas as they arrived. The balance of the surreal imagery and open nature of the lyrics became an important focus for our project. The words articulate feeling and memory in a way that can keep them close and eternal. We thought a lot about how to make these words into sounds and explored how to reference specific places and moments with tones and textures: the ocean, dirt, worms, loss, flowers, worry, light and shadow. Can the drums be a beach? How can a horn be the sunlight? What notes can appear and then vanish like a cloud or a bird? Nine days after we began I packed up and drove back to Indiana having experienced one of the most meaningful and lovely creative experiences of my life. I am so grateful to Amelia and my friends in Durham for making this record. Art and friendship are true gifts that we can share with each other and it can keep on going forever.

“Music is a very personal thing. How you deal with your music is very closely linked with how you deal with your life. If you misuse your capacities as a musician, you’re misusing your capacities as a human being and you’re taking humanity in the wrong direction”
- Arthur Russell – 03/17/77 Soho Weekly News

“In outer space you can’t take your drums - you take your mind”
- Arthur Russell

In 1986 Arthur Russell was diagnosed with HIV, that same year he released his career-defining masterpiece ‘World of Echo’, the first and only solo album issued during his lifetime.

Arthur had found his voice and a fresh direction with a set of new, transformative material, unlike anything he or anyone else had previously released. His illness ensured that the artistic growth and sense of exploration encapsulated in ‘World of Echo’ would be tragically curtailed. Within six short years Arthur was gone.

Arthur’s final years were filled with a renewed commitment to creativity and unceasing live and recording work. He regularly performed the ‘World of Echo’ material and incorporated several of its compositions in collaborations with choreographers active in New York’s innovative dance community. Arthur worked closely with Diane Madden, Allison Salzinger, Stephanie Woodard and John Bernd, usually playing his cello and effects boxes off stage as the choreographers’ pieces were performed. In 1993 Arthur posthumously received a prestigious Bessie Composer Award for his work in the dance world.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit’ features nine previously unreleased performances from this era compiled from completed masters culled from two unique test pressings, including one, dated 9/15/85 by Arthur, provided by his mother and sister. A further four tracks were discovered in his tape archive. The track listing includes an exceptional and dramatic solo recording of “In The Light of a Miracle” and the enigmatic title instrumental “Picture of Bunny Rabbit”, written especially for a friends pet rabbit. The bulk of the material was recorded with engineer Eric Liljestrand at Battery Sound Studios, New York, which was located directly opposite the World Trade Center and at Arthur’s apartment studio in the East Village. 

NTS presents European Primitive Guitar, a compilation of instrumental guitar compositions, mapping out European analogues of the American Primitive Guitar movement, spearheaded by John Fahey in the 1950s. European Primitive Guitar spans works directly influenced by and responding to Fahey’s approach to composition, alongside works by artists that arrived at similar conclusions independently. The music is, at once, both starkly traditional and contemporary. This is no more evident than with the opening song on the compilation, Spanish guitarist Albert Giménez’s 1982 composition Conte Xinès. The song draws on numerous idioms of music - flamenco, jazz, ambient music, and guitar soli - within its shimmering arpeggios, culminating as a decidedly Spanish music that has collected the ephemera of the guitar’s travels before returning home. The compilation also explores wider ideas around experimentalism happening in Europe during the time of this anthology. German composer Hans Reichel not only developed new ways of playing the instrument, but also new ways of building guitars - pushing the boundary of what a guitar could be and how it could sound. Ahead of its full release, listen/download material from Maurizio Angeletti (Italy, 1983), Albert Giménez (Spain, 1982) and Peter Finger (Germany, 1974). The physical release is accompanied by an extended essay from The Hum’s Bradford Bailey.

An assorted collection of recordings from Constantin Brăiloiu's World Collection of Folk Music archive, originally broadcast on NTS Radio in July 2017, issued here as part of DINTE's 10th anniversary series. Comprising field recordings made by the pioneering Romanian ethnomusicologist of English, Irish, Gaelic, Norwegian, Breton, Japanese, Italian, Swiss, Basque, Fulah, Sardinian, Estonian, Georgian, Greek, Turkish, Judaeo-Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Russian, Hausa, Tuareg, Indian, Corsican, Ethiopian, Romanian, Walloon, Flemish, German, Kabyle, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian and Caribou Eskimo folk songs & dances.

One of the furthest experiments in library music, first official vinyl reissue under Sonor Music Production license. ‘Chitarre Folk’ was conceived in July 1974 and produced by the small publishing company Nike, the album is brilliantly propelled by the two six-string players Bruno Battisti D’Amario and Silvano Chimenti (long-time collaborator of I Gres, Pulsar and Piero Umiliani E La Sua Orchestra), touching avant-folk themes surrounded by Maestro Sandro Brugnolini’s lush arrangements and Edda Dell’Orso’s ghostly vocals. Ethereal psych-folk melodies akin to the imaginary landscapes of John Fahey and Robbie Basho.

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.

Over the past decade, the visionary musician Arthur Russell has entered something close to the mainstream.

Sampled and referenced by contemporary musicians, his papers now open to visitors at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York, and his name synonymous with a certain strain of tenderness, Russell is as widely known as he’s ever been. Thanks to Russell’s partner Tom Lee and to Steve Knutson of Audika Records, who have forged several records from Russell’s vast archive of unfinished and unreleased work, the world now hears many versions of Arthur Russell. There’s the Iowa boy, the disco mystic, the singer-songwriter and composer, and the fierce perfectionist deep in a world of echo. While all of these elements of Russell are individually true, none alone define him.

Now, after ten years of work inside the Russell library, Lee and Knutson bring us Iowa Dream, yet another bright star in Russell’s dazzling constellation. Blazing with trademark feeling, these nineteen songs are a staggering collection of Russell’s utterly distinct songwriting. And although Russell could be inscrutably single-minded, he was never totally solitary. Collaborating here is a stacked roster of downtown New York musicians, including Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Steven Hall, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Saltzman, and David Van Tieghem. Musician Peter Broderick makes a contemporary addition to this list: more than forty years after Russell recorded several nearly finished songs, Broderick worked diligently with Audika to complete them, and performed audio restoration and additional mixing.

Several tracks on Iowa Dream Russell originally recorded as demos, in two early examples of his repeated brushes with potential popular success—first in 1974, with Paul Nelson of Mercury Records, and then in 1975, with the legendary John Hammond of Columbia Records. For different reasons, neither session amounted to a record deal. Russell kept working nearly up until his death in 1992 from complications of HIV-AIDS.

At once kaleidoscopic and intimate, Iowa Dream bears some of Russell’s most personal work, including several recently discovered folk songs he wrote during his time in Northern California in the early 1970s. For Russell, Iowa was never very far away. “I see, I see it all,” sings Russell on the title track: red houses, fields, the town mayor (his father) streaming by as he dream-bicycles through his hometown. Russell’s childhood home and family echo, too, through “Just Regular People,” “I Wish I Had a Brother,” “Wonder Boy,” “The Dogs Outside are Barking,” “Sharper Eyes,” and “I Felt.” Meanwhile, songs like “I Kissed the Girl From Outer Space,” “I Still Love You,” “List of Boys,” and “Barefoot in New York” fizz with pop and dance grooves, gesturing at Russell’s devotion to New York’s avant-garde and disco scenes. Finally, the long-awaited “You Did it Yourself,” until now heard only in a brief heart-stopping black-and-white clip in Matt Wolf’s documentary Wild Combination, awards us a new take with a driving funk rhythm and Russell’s extraordinary voice soaring at the height of its powers. On Iowa Dream, you can hear a country kid meeting the rest of the world—and with this record, the world continues to meet a totally singular artist.

Over ten years ago, Audika Records began releasing the exceptionally varied, long sought-after music of Arthur Russell, and in the process has succeeded at helping the beloved, late artist find the broader audience he always believed he would reach. A new generation of listeners and critics has come to appreciate Russell as a visionary and an influence upon a broad range of today’s most compelling musical artists. On October 28, Audika will bring to light an as-yet-unavailable side of Russell’s body of work- the most rare and, at the same time, arguably the most accessible part- in Love Is Overtaking Me, which comprises 21 demos and home recordings of unreleased pop, folk and country songs from his vast catalog.While much critical and popular affection for Russell’s music has come about well after his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, many fellow artists believed in his genius and were drawn to collaborate with him during his lifetime. The legendary producer John Hammond (Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen) recorded Russell on several occasions; a number of these recordings will finally heard on Love Is Overtaking Me. So, too, will songs recorded with various incarnations of The Flying Hearts, a group formed by Russell and Brooks whose shifting lineup included, by turns, Jerry Harrison, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon and Peter Zummo as well as Larry Saltzman and David Van Tieghem. Several other Russell projects are represented on Love Is Overtaking Me, including The Sailboats, Turbo Sporty and Bright & Early.

Compiled from over eight hours of material, three years in the making, Love Is Overtaking Me reaches back further to Russell’s first compositions from the early `70s and spans forward to his very last recordings, made at home in 1991. Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear contributed mixing, restoration and editing to the album, whose tracks were selected by Audika’s Steve Knutson, Ernie Brooks and Russell’s companion, Tom Lee. A number of the songs feature prominently in Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Matt Wolf’s film, which had its world premiere this year at the Berlin International Film Festival and will be released theatrically and on DVD this fall by Plexifilm.

Love Is Overtaking Me is the fifth release of Russell’s material by Audika Records, whose work has proven that the music remains as contemporary today as when it was first recorded. The label launched with the disco/new wave collection Calling Out Of Context (2004) and continued with a reissue of the cello-and-voice masterpiece World Of Echo (2005); the instrumental compositions double-disc First Thought Best Thought (2006); and the hip-hop-inspired Springfield EP (2006), which includes a DFA remix of the title track.

Extensive Love Is Overtaking Me liner notes by Tom Lee provide an intimate perspective on Russell’s diverse catalog, which spanned an extraordinary diversity of styles and won the love of artistic communities that would seem utterly disparate, from Philip Glass, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg to rock bands like The Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers; the pre-Studio 54 disco-party scene of Nicky Siano’s Gallery and David Mancuso’s Loft; and DJ-producers like Francois Kevorkian and Larry Levan, among others. 

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.”