Folk 360 Items

Elsa Hewitt is a London-based music producer and writer hailing from Sussex, via Yorkshire. Beginning as a young singer-songwriter producing demos on a four-track, she progressed through fronting post-punk bands and solo electronic songwriting, all the while developing a passion for album-making which would ultimately lead her to electronic production, establishing her name producing avant-garde, experimental & ambient, leftfield dance, and lo-fi, psychedelia. Since her 2017 official debut ‘Cameras From Mars’, stepping onto the scene as a Future Bubbler and Lynsey de Paul Prize winner, Hewitt has amassed a series of distinct yet interlinked philosophical worlds; each one holding its own tones of joyful beauty and abstract darkness. With a boundless approach to merging elements of dance & ambient, Hewitt’s adventurous approach remains pinned by her earthy voice, idiosyncratic songwriting style and sharply poetic lyricism.

Megan Siebe is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and arranger from Omaha, Nebraska. She’s cut her teeth as a member of bands such as Simon Joyner & the Ghosts, The David Nance Group, Cursive, Sean Pratt & the Sweats, The Jim Schroeder Sextet, and many others, touring nearly non-stop for the last decade. She’s also written string arrangements for albums by Refrigerator, John Davis, the Renderers, Dennis Callaci, L. Eugene Methe, Justin Townes Earle, and Anna McClellan. But all the while she was writing her own intimate, finely-crafted songs in secret, only breaking them out around the occasional Nebraska campfire amongst friends. A break from touring in other bands these last fifteen months has allowed Siebe more time to focus on a powerful cycle of songs she’s had brewing for some time. Grapefruit and Shrimper are proud to join forces to release Megan’s humble yet astonishing debut. Swaying Steady is a gorgeous collection of literate and evocative singer-songwriter, country-tinged, melancholy pop songs about relationships in crisis, bad seeds, family, and emotional endurance. For fans of Lucinda Williams, Harry Nilsson, Elyse Weinberg, Nick Drake, and Sibylle Baier.

Pinnell Is All Shine And Sparkle On The Forthcoming Goodbye La. Produced By Texan Jonathan Tyler, The Tunes Buff The Wax And Polish The Chrome On Country Music's Deeper Roots. Rooted In His Steady Acoustic Guitar, Pinnell's Songs Are Shot Through With Honest And Classic Elements. The Rhythm Section, All Snap And Shuffle, Finds Purpose In Well-Worn Paths. The Pedal Steel And Telecaster Stingers Arrive Perfectly On Cue, Winking At Jp's World-Wise Couplets . Here Slippery Organ Insinuates Gospel Into The Conversation. You Can Feel The Room Breathe And Get A Sense Of These Musicians Eyeballing Each Other As Their Performances Are Committed To Tape. And Through It All Comes This Oaken Identity, The Devastating Centerpiece Of His Work. Honest And Careworn, Jeremy's Voice Can Touch On Wry, Jubilant, And Debauched - All In A Single Line. At His Best, Jeremy Pinnell Chronicles The Joy And Sorrow Of Being Human, Which Is The Best That Anyone Could Do.

“Antiqua Graecia” is the third of the trilogy of electroacoustic compositions inspired by Greek music culture. It comes to complete a vinyl trilogy of Greek-based themes by capturing the essence of the rural mainland countryside. With a title is taken from an old Italian gravure map, this album combines original acoustic recordings and highly electronic experiments and synthetic compositions, creating an abstract surreal music fairytale. While references of antique folk instruments and voices are present all across the album, the narrative is also conducted by the presence of analogue synthesizers and computer music structures, reassembling the pieces of the originals to a new music collage.

On his debut album Half Mirror, Matthew O'Connell superimposes warm analog synths onto self-described "confessional folk" with a simultaneously cosmic and earthly outcome. Tracked at home in the mountains of North Carolina using a vintage tape delay, electric guitar, and a self-designed synthesizer named `Balsam,' Half Mirror is at once a lonesome push-pull of electronics humanized by folk elements, and folk music made alien by electronic adornments. O'Connell's own story is just as captivatingly segmented. While growing up on a farm in Palmyra, Indiana, he became obsessed with metal drumming and spent most of his free time practicing in the garage, occasionally recording on four-track tape machines with his brother Joe (Elephant Micah). Reflecting on those formative years, O'Connell says, "I think that period instilled two things in me: a long attention span, and the ability to work obsessively on something in solitude." It's these monastic inclinations that helped form the spirit of Half Mirror. While in college, his interest in math led him to participate in a six-month intensive study program in Budapest, Hungary. There, he continued writing song fragments on a borrowed guitar and fiddling with musical electronics at the Kitchen Budapest_a collective of artists, theorists, and coders. In 2011, his interest in electronics and engineering led him to Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked for Moog Music calibrating and building synthesizers, and testing vintage analog delay chips by day. At night he would spend his time building homemade synths and writing songs. It was here in Asheville that he began the bulk of the work on Half Mirror, imbuing his music with the qualities of his environment almost by necessity. O'Connell made a deliberate effort to keep the album's production sparse. His interest in restraint stems in part from his love of albums like Nearly God by Tricky and Ghost Tropic by Songs: Ohia, both of which feature uncomfortably bare vocals and uncanny production that commands the listener's attention. Additional inspiration came from Mark Hollis' striking minimalism, and the freeform songwriting of Arthur Russell and John Martyn. Filtering the poetry of fractured, imperfect memories through a lush, yet sparse palette of sounds, Half Mirror evokes a profoundly moody sense of place: the fog heavy in the mountain peaks, the dew present on early morning walks, and the musky smell of rhododendrons in the air.

SO Duo, Sumru Ağıryürüyen (vocal, mandolin, keyboard) and Orçun Baştürk (panduri, voice, keyboard, electronics, drums) have been creating various projects together, in a spectrum between traditional and avant-garde since 2013. So Far is a collection of the works of SO Duo released on vinyl as a double LP for fans and collectors for the first time.

* First ever vinyl pressing * Brand new artwork * Exclusive Lita color vinyl

With a special knack for balancing bright pop melodies with a drifting sense of melancholy, LA based Johanna Samuels new album Excelsior! is a tender, honest document of the importance of companionship above all else. Named after Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”, Samuels grew up on the classic songwriters of yesteryear (George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young) and after a healthy dose of Elliott Smith and Jon Brion, has spent the best part of the last decade honing her craft.

Excelsior! was recorded in a small cabin in West Shokan in NY State, in the middle of the winter with her band and producer Sam Evian but it's songs are full of West Coast sunshine. It's Evian's first full album production at his own Flying Cloud Studios. Recorded mostly to tape, the album is as a gorgeous combination of vintage instrumentation, strong melodic hooks, killer harmonies and Samuels’ elegant voice.

Samuels seeks those answers through companionship, exploring the depths of her relationships and then calling upon a handful of womxn to provide the album’s backing vocals - a task she’d always performed herself until now. As such, Excelsior! makes a space for the voices of Courtney Marie Andrews, Hannah Cohen, Lomelda’s Hannah Read, A.O. Gerber, Louise Florence and Olivia Kaplan.

The album takes its name from the signature that Samuels’ grandpa would use before he sadly passed away last December. “He was a very important person to me and he helped raise me,” Johanna explains. “He signed all of his letters and emails ‘Excelsior!’, including the exclamation point. It means ‘ever upward’ and that’s what I wish for everyone: to grow from listening with more empathy and from hearing each other out. I hope this record makes people want to be gentler with each other and themselves.”

As we continue our half-joke-verbal agreement of "one album per year" with Taner Öngür, here we go with "Water Cycle". Like many musician in the world, lock down home, early 2020 Taner Öngür got back to his own song books and merge them with some new ideas and brought us this exceptional instrumental album. It's quite hard to classify it within one genre but we can say it takes off from progressive sounds and explore around Öngür's latest band 43,75's own swing-surf-rock style (of course with some little psychedelic touches). These 14 tracks consist 3 special covers such as the Beatles' "I am the Walrus", Bollywood's famous "Mera Joota Hai Japani" and "Ya Mustafa" which featured in various works of middle eastern cinema. Taner Öngür, the legendary bass player of Moğollar (the iconic group of 1970’s Anadolu Pop movement), is producing solo projects since 90's. "Water Cycle" is his 4th opus of his collaboration with his latest band 43,75 and Tantana Records. During lockdown days of 2020, Öngür got back to his own song books and surfed between UK and India -and of course over fly central Asia- got together this very special instrumental guitar trip. Considering he is the "baptist" of the "anatolian rock" movement of 70's, his beyond-genres-eclectic view to the music fits perfectly to the swinging guitars, progressive touches, tribal beats, melancholic moments of “Water Cycle"... It's also a great "introduction to Taner Öngür's universe". Back in 2016 he formed this project: 43,75. Their first album “Elektrik Gramofon” (2017) was a beautiful selection of 20's - 50's Istanbul songs, distilled by Öngür's surf-swing-rocknroll appoach (it's LP's sold out within 48 hours!). Nowadays, most of the vinyl collectors knows about Anatolian Rock; but not many knows that Taner Öngür was on many cult records of the era and the definition of "anatolian pop" and "anatolian rock" are actually Taner Öngür's own wording, that became the name for it - since 70's. So, on "Sayko Ana” (2018) Öngür did not hesitate to have fun with it; browsing between forgotten Turkish folk songs and psych them. In 2019, he got back into archives, to dig "strange stories" from newspapers and vintage novels of 1930's-1960's, which gave birth to "Asrî Sadâ" album, that its LP consisting a superb - rich contented 16 pages tabloid newspaper; with "news" and "articles" related to the songs... and many other bizarre details of our "dusty days”. So, please welcome to Taner Öngür's own psych-surf-swing flavored universe!

I was in Lima, hanging out with collector-extraordinaire Victor Zela, who had spent the previous few years pouring his passion for Peruvian Cumbia into the blog „la cumbia de mis viejos“, a trove of incredible music. But after the birth of his first child, his priorities shifted and he decided to part with some of his rarest LPs. I was one of the lucky few given an early chance to examine his treasures, and when I picked up the album Manzaneando com Manzanita, Victor said: “Take it! its one of the best LPs ever recorded in Perú … easily in the top five”. That was all the encouragement I needed … two years later many of the songs from that masterpiece have made it onto Manzanita y su Conjunto, a compilation of electrifying Cumbia sides from Manzanita’s golden era.

Berardo Hernández – better known as Manzanita – first surfaced during the psychedelic Cumbia craze. At the head of the scene were the magnificent Los Destellos, whose leader, Enrique Delgado, was such a six-string wizard that other guitarists found it impossible to escape his shadow. But when Manzanita arrived, his electric criollo style sent shockwaves through Lima’s music scene and posed a serious threat to Delgado’s dominance as king of the Peruvian guitar.

Manzanita had come to Lima from the coastal city of Trujillo, five hundred miles up the coast – a place where Spanish, African and indigenous populations had been living and making music together for centuries – and came of age at a time when the first wave of psychedelic rock from the US and UK was starting to sweep the airwaves. But the sounds of Cream and Hendrix disappeared from the radio just as quickly in 1968 when Juan Velasco seized control of the country in a military coup. The new regime, which favoured local traditions over cultural ‘imports’ from the north, was a blessing in disguise for the Peruvian music scene.

Record labels flourished as new bands, raised on a hybrid diet of electric guitars and Cuban rhythms, rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the lack of imported rock. A new genre, known as Peruvian cumbia, was born and Manzanita quickly became one of its most original voices.

Starting in 1969, Manzanita y su Conjunto released a steady stream of singles that used Cuban guaracha rhythms as the foundation for dazzling electric guitar lines. After countless 45s and several years on the touring circuit, the band signed to Virrey, an important Peruvian label, and recorded two LPs acknowledged as masterpieces among aficionados of tropical music. Most of the songs on Analog Africa’s new compilation Manzanita y su Conjunto are drawn from those legendary sessions of 1973 and 74.

Although he scored a few more hits in the later 70s, his dissatisfaction with the music industry caused him to withdraw from the scene for several years; and when he finally retired for good, the golden age of Peruvian cumbia was a distant memory. But when Manzanita was at the top of his game he had few equals. Victor Zela was right: this is some of the best music ever recorded in Perú.

Record Store Day 2021 Release. The Waterboys 1990 single has been remixed for 2021, featuring new vocals by Mike Scott. This new version is bring released as new single ahead of an upcoming multi disc box set of the album ‘Room To Roam’. The track was

One could assume that while David Wiffen was standing on the side of the road hitchhiking across Canada in the mid-60s, he was daydreaming of a successful music career.One could doubt that one of those daydreams would be about an album he recorded in Vancouver in 1965 which would still be in demand 55 years later!

The 'Bunkhouse album' was originally going to be a folk sampler which was very popular in those days butthe other artists pulled out at the last minute due to a major snowstorm and David Wiffen recorded It as a solo effort.

'Live at the Bunkhouse” was, in fact, recorded during a 3-hour session at a small studio on West Broadway in Vancouver and 100 copies were released on the Universal International label.

By the early '70s, David would become known as one of Canada's greatest songwriters and manyartists including;HarryBelafonte,The Byrds & Tom Rush,recorded his songs.

Called the 'Holy Grail' of Canadian folk, the 'Bunkhouse' album has become one of the most difficult albums to find for record collectors around the world and we're proud to bring it back to life.

This is the vinyl reissue of the second album by folk singer and original composer of 'If I Had Wings on my Song', Yoon Ji-Young. After having released his debut effort, Yoon turned to Oasis Records for his second album. This work was undertaken with the wholehearted backing of musical partner and legendary Korean folk singer/songwriter Kim Min-ki. This album is unique in that it features an unlikely pairing of the socially critical metaphors of Kim's earlier works against the lush instrumentation of the Oasis studio session musicians. The album, with its arrangements incorporating chamber pop vibes as well as folk-rock elements, has a well-crafted quality to it that sets it apart from most gayo albums of its time. Perhaps due to Kim's outspoken lyrics, only small promotional batches of this album were produced at the time of its release. It soon faded into obscurity, going on to become a 'holy grail' rarity among collectors.