Folk CD 340 Items

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

Includes booklet.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

The original album, Remastered by Bernie Grundman
• 12 bonus tracks taken from the original 1996 session tapes
• 64 page booklet including new liner notes, photos, song notes & lyrics

‘Buena Vista Social Club’ is both the name given to this extraordinary group of musicians and the album, recorded in just seven days in 1996 in Havana’s 1950s vintage EGREM studios. It was clear from the atmosphere of the recording sessions that something very special was taking place. However, no one could have predicted that Buena Vista Social Club would become a worldwide phenomenon – awarded a Grammy in 1997 and, at 8 million copies, outselling any other record in the same genre. The acclaim of the original album has elevated the artists (including Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González & Omara Portuondo) to superstar status, inspired an award-winning film by Wim Wenders, and has contributed to popularising Cuba’s rich musical heritage. Produced by Ry Cooder for World Circuit, the timeless quality of the music and the sheer verve of the veteran performers have ensured that this will go down as one of the landmark recordings of the 20th century. To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the album’s recording, World Circuit will release Special Edition Remaster formats of the album in September 2021, featuring previously unheard tracks, previously unseen photos and new liner notes. The releases will be supported by an international PR & marketing campaign, events and digital initiatives.

The CD is included in a hard cardboard 48 paged book filled with photos, handwritten lyrics and more.

Cover has a cut-out.
CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

slight stains on box

cardboard game

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

Ben ’Tukumazan’ Molatzi (1954 -2016), a self-taught singer and songwriter from Tsumeb, Namibia, wrote timeless, beautiful ballads drawing on the distinctive melodies and harmonies of his Damara and Sotho heritage.
His music recordings have been slumbering in oblivion in Namibian radio archives. His songs were consciously censored and damaged as its messages did not please the South African apartheid regime. The album contains field and studio recordings that were made in 1981 by SWABC. To this day, these recordings have never been commercially released. In his liner notes, Thorsten Schütte describes his ultimately successful search for Ben Molatzi and further meetings with the artist, who talks in detail about his life, his songs and the life circumstances in his country.
On these recordings he accompanies himself on the guitar. The lyrics are reprinted in the enclosed booklet in the original tribal language as well as in English translation.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

From 1975, this is Baris Manço’s masterpiece. Stunning cosmic, psychedelic, groovy conceptual album with fantastic electronics use and a strong Turkish folk flavour as usual. Again, this is the first official, proper CD reissue, and comes with a booklet with linernotes and photos.

CD comes in a soft case, instead of the original crystal case. All booklets included.

Sublime Frequencies finally unleashes it’s Essential compilation from 1970’s Egypt. Modal instrumental tracks from Baligh Hamdi - one of the most important Arabic composers of the 20th Century (writing for legends Umm Kalthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Sabah, Warda, and many others). Features his legendary group the “Diamond Orchestra” with Omar Khorshid on guitar, Magdi al-Husseini on organ, Samir Sourour on saxophone, and Faruq Salama on accordion. All of these musicians were discovered and recruited by Hamdi to interpret his vision of a modernized, hybrid Arabic music. Under Hamdi’s direction, this orchestra charted a new melodic direction and created a new musical language. This compilation is culled from a specific era of Hamdi’s long career, a decade where he fully realized an international music which incorporated beat driven Eastern tinged jazz, theremin draped orchestral noir, tracks that feature searing guitar solos from none other than Omar Khorshid, and a selection of buzzing, sitar driven, Indo-Arabic tracks establishing a meeting of mid-east and eastern psychedelic exotica, and a vision that created some of the hippest music coming out of the Middle East from the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s.

Aspidistrafly, the Singaporean duo comprising April Lee and producer Ricks Ang, return with Altar of Dreams, their first studio album in a decade.

While their last album A Little Fable introduced the world to their bucolic and wispy brand of folk songwriting, Altar of Dreams sees the duo – also the founders of Kitchen. Label – harness their experiences over the past decade to create a wholly new and inspired vision. In this new and third album, they drew upon a rich palette of shapes, sounds and movement: straddling between the visionary photography of Serge Lutens and Dora Maar, 80s Japanese ambient pop, musique concrète and the mournful strings of Béla Bartók.

The world in which Aspidistrafly once inhabited was foggy and awash in faded memory. A feeling of being suspended in time felt inescapable with each listen. In Altar of Dreams, the fog is clearing up. At nine songs under 35 minutes, the album possesses all the defining hallmarks of Aspidistrafly – poetic lyricism, cosmic introspection, lush strings, surrealism, tenderness and texture. But what was once seemingly inscrutable has now been explored with astounding clarity, the duo maneuvering through a space-time continuum with delicate leaps.

‘How To Find A Marblewing’, the opening track, is a heady sound collage of early internet sounds, film, anime, and chopped-and-screwed 90s J-pop. It’s a presence deeply embedded throughout the record, a method Lee describes as “a form of environmental/tape treatment”.

The compositions glimmer with sincerity, addressing all at once destruction, mystery, uncertainty, hopes and dreams. The resulting music is backed by an opulence only possible with a line-up of guest musicians. ‘The Voice of Flowers’ is stirring in its balance of flute, clarinet, tenor saxophone and piano, bolstered by a string quartet. Kitchen. Label artist haruka nakamura features on the track alongside Kyo Ichinose (who arranged the strings for the album) and wind instrumentalist Araki Shin.

‘Interlude: Chrysalises and Larvae’ takes the heavy path downward, adopting its name from the 1973 surrealist odyssey The Hourglass Sanatorium. It leads into ‘Companion to Owls’, a gothic pop paean to mortality inspired by the Book of Job.

Before the namesake centrepiece of the album, another interlude arrives in ‘A Ceremonial Ode’, both of which were stirred by a series of regal Shiseido ads from the 1980s starring model Sayoko Yamaguchi. ‘Altar of Dreams’ is haunted by the lucid dreams that once provided escapism for Lee. Its tranquility belies a simmering tension, just as how a lucid dream would offer control in the face of the unknown. “In one of them, I was floating in a vast darkness safe and secure, and then I fell into a turbulent mirage where I willingly allowed myself to be swept away further and further from reality, hoping that I would never wake up,” she says. “Needless to say I did, and ended up writing this song on one of these dead nights.”

If the title track replicates the feeling of falling deep into that spiral, ‘Silk and Satins’ is a direct analysis of the phenomenon. Warped frequencies collide with nature and television sound effects – the latter sourced from 80s Singaporean horror series Mystery – within an inter-dimensional music world. The track was made with featured artist Sugai KEN, whose own work is an endless scroll of intoxicating found sounds.

‘Quintessence’, the sweeping closing track, distills all the elements scattered across the album into a coda that beautifully refuses to resolve. At first an exercise in guitar looping, the song was then written without a beginning and end in mind. “I’d like to think of it as poetry that’s sung,” says Lee.

In Altar of Dreams, Aspidistrafly are renewed and hopeful. They’ve emerged from a decade spent reframing the world they see through vivid dreams and memories. Now, it’s all yours to experience.