Folk Sale 299 Items

Dendê Macêdo is a percussionist, singer, composer, bandleader, teacher, and multi-instrumentalist. He’s been a professional musician since the age of 14, when he appeared in the frontline of Timbalada, Carlinhos Brown’s superstar percussion ensemble. Since 2001, he’s been developing his solo career, splitting his time between the US and Bahia and working with his folkloric group Ologundê and his flagship band Dendê & Band. Now on their second album, Dendê & Band have cultivated a unique sound where Afro-Brazilian traditions like samba de roda and candomble have been seamlessly melded with world rhythms like rumba, afrobeat and mbalax. Dendê & Band have recently performed at venues such as the Glastonbury Festival in the UK, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles; the KW Latinfest in Canada; the Penang World Music Festival in Malaysia; Summerdance in Chicago and the Chile Pepper Fiesta at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

On Bridge Variations, the now Stockholm-based English guitarist Jon Collin changes his guitar for a keyed fiddle. Mostly recorded to tape under different bridges around Stockholm during 2021, partly for the sound but also because of their importance to the geographical make-up of the place, the album is like a modern take on traditional Swedish folk music made by an outsider looking in. The sound is pretty much a continuation of the palette explored on 'Dream Sequence, End Of Summer', Collin's contribution to the Contemporary Homemade Music compilation put out by Discreet Music last year. Slowly moving and drawn-out melodies evolve into immense droning beauty, rich of texture and with the environmental sounds from the sites becoming an integral part of the recording. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and pressed in an edition of 1000 copies. Comes with a 12-page colour-coded booklet of photos of the recording locations.

"One of the great joys of the ever-evolving catalog of DAN Melchior is hearing where in the spectrum of styles that he has mastered each record falls. From studio recordings to lo-fidelity home experiments, full band rockers or plaintive solo excursions, fans never know what they are going to get until the needle drops. Those of us who have followed Dan on his prolific pathways are ready for anything but always assured that the spirit of the artist himself, one unique enough to be its own in any form, will deliver and somehow deal with the ramifications of an increasingly maddening world. Dan's first full length of 2021, CB Odyssey, (co-released by the Feeding Tube/Sophomore Lounge) continues in his fine tradition of excellence, this time finding the middle ground of his stylistic extremes. A master of modern song-craft, Melchior returns with CB Odyssey to deliver a further treatise on the agonizing futility of contemporary life. Neither pandering to sentimentality nor cultural trends, Melchior embraces the crass absurdity of modern existence, delivering a multi-faceted view of the everyday. These scenes offer illuminations into the hilarious, the macabre, the pointlessly hip, and most elegantly, the details of the normalcy that few writers of our time seem to be able to capture. The cast of characters on CB Odyssey range from middle-aged self-satisfied artists who have never courted popularity to woke millennials trying to teach mosquitos that it's not nice to bite. The listener is taken to vistas never before traveled such as encounters at the only Wendy's in North America that employs a real live sloth who can grow a beard while you wait for your fries. Melchior delivers these psychedelic visions, not ones of utopia or escapism but of a painfully blinding truth. And such is a truth that can only really be delivered in such a voice by Dan Melchior and CB Odyssey is among his finest examples of his craft. There will most assuredly be more. That is if the mosquitoes don't be the death of him."—Steve Lowenthal , 2022

Art Of Primitive Sound is a sensational journey to the origin of Music. In his crucial research chapter on the Paleolithic, Walter Maioli between 1986 and 1991 investigates the soundscape of different geographical, climatic and botanical environments, in which the mystery of the ancient human-nature relationship resides. What emerges is an expanded and unprecedented Paleorganology, with a range of acoustic and natural instruments from all over the World. Rubbing of fossils, animal artefacts, plant elements of all sorts, everything becomes sound and each object opens up forms of imaginary communication, psychic effect and unexplored languages. Whistles, flutes, leaf and shell rattles, rhombuses, horns, bone pipes, slate slabs, bamboo arches, stones, vertebrae, seeds, stalagtites etc...how great can be the Natural Orchestra inherent in the spirit of forests, rivers, caves, seas, swamps or Amazon jungles? Thanks to an interdisciplinary partnership (Anthropology, Archaeology, Botany, Ethnomusicology) of collaborating friends, Maioli directs an Opera of universal character inspired by the archaic essence of sound and infrasonic dimension.

Everest Magma rediscovers the folk roots of his dreamy alter ego Woodcutter. Once again he appears as a minstrel crossing moonstruck woods inhabited by gnomes, butterflies and crawling creatures. Nature is sublimated into a personal alien vision in which a lysergic approach triumphs in the arrangement of sound material and immersive musique concrète. Pure acid-folk fingerpicking communicates directly with the forest’s humus, steeped in wild and ethereal moods. Between schizoid or more lyrical moments, a persistent taste for subtle subterranean noises, electric flashes, radio and ufological interferences, deviant scents and psychological drifts permeates the flow. The abstracting structure of voices and singing expresses the cyclical beingness of living, a decontextualizing dimension of space and time. It's the pantheistic feeling of a parallel naturalistic universe, which also takes cues from the psychedelic eccentricity of Claudio Rocchi’s ‘Suoni di Frontiera’, the Incredible String Band or Holy Modal Rounders. Co-produced with Maple Death Records

Twin Cosmos is not only the name of the musical output of fraternal twins Morihito & Yasuhito Ito, but more philosophically, an album that encapsulates, “the universe of twins”.

The pair were born 1953 in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture. A port city 50 kilometres west of Nagoya, famous for its chemical plants. Despite their surroundings, they grew up in an environment that fostered learning and self-expression. From an early age, they began to carve out their own paths.

Morihito was fascinated with scientific endeavours, space travel and spirituality. His father, an electrician by trade - motivated him to build his own musical equipment. This led him to attend an acoustic engineering school in Tokyo from 1972-1974, after which, Morihito returned to Yokkaichi where he worked in the instrument and audio section of a department store. This helped him keep up to date with the latest equipment, while allowing him to simultaneously work on his own musical endeavours.

Morihito’s side of the ‘Double Action’ LP is a cohesive piece, which effortlessly drifts from one song to the next through samples of flowing water and rockets launching into space ,that were recorded while visiting his brother in the States. His music is carried by flowing vocal harmonies, guitar strums, and floating synths to create an eternal dreamlike ambiance.

In contrast, Yasuhito gravitated towards philosophy and the arts and in 1976 followed his Englsih teachers’ advice and moved to the ‘foreign world’ of the United States. It’s here that he further explored his interests in Christianity, sadomasochism and poetry. He was exposed to artists like John Cage and Sun Ra, as well as a variety of ‘Do It Yourself’ recording techniques that enabled him to record remotely.

Using samples, poetry, and an original approach to traditional folk & rock songs, he recorded his side of the LP. The outcome being provocative, dark and confronting realisations, which solely used English lyrics to represent his experiences in the ‘Western world’. In 1980, Yasuhito was wooed back to Japan by his brother and the prospect of a combined record release.

The self-released album ‘Double Action’, was completed at Victor studios in Japan. Without a distribution network, the release was sold mostly to family and friends and fell into obscurity. Despite not reaching commercial success, the pair have continued to make music over the past four decades, crediting it as their driving force in life. This 2022 release includes an insert with archival images & liner notes in both English & Japanese.

Purple Vinyl Edition. Still sealed with hype sticker. Gatefold cover has seam split and slight corner wear.