Folk 278 Items

Niandra LaDes And Usually Just A T-Shirt is the first solo record by John Frusciante. Between 1990 and 1992 the guitarist made a series of 4-track recordings, which at the time were not intended for commercial release. After leaving the band Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1992, Frusciante was encouraged by friends to release the material that he wrote in his spare time during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions.

Originally released on Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label in 1994, Niandra LaDes is a mystifying work of tortured beauty. Frusciante plays various acoustic and electric guitars, experimenting with layers of vocals, piano and reverse tape effects. Channeling the ghosts of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, his lyrics are at once utterly personal and willfully opaque.

Frusciante’s rapidfire, angular playing shows how key he was in the Chili Peppers’ evolution away from their funk-rock roots. His cover of “Big Takeover” perfectly deconstructs the Bad Brains original with laid-back tempo, twelve-string guitar and a fierce handle on melody.

The album’s second part—thirteen untitled tracks that Frusciante defines as one complete piece, “Usually Just A T-Shirt”—contains several instrumentals featuring his signature guitar style. Sparse phrasing, delicate counterpoint and ethereal textures recall Neu/Harmonia’s Michael Rother or The Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly.

On the front cover, Frusciante appears in 1920s drag—a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s alter-ego Rrose Sélavy—which comes from Toni Oswald’s film Desert in the Shape.

This first-time vinyl release has been carefully remastered and approved by the artist. The double LP set is packaged with old style tip-on gatefold jacket and printed inner sleeves.

The debut-EP of this Anatolian psych-pop sensation consists of four heart-melting gems in which Turkish folk music meets groove and electric action! Singer/multi-instrumentist Derya Yildirim teams up with fantastic drummer Greta Eacott (G-Bop Orchestra, One-Take Records) and three-quarters of Orchestre Du Montplaisant (Antonin Voyant, Graham Mushnik and Andrea Piro). With members originating from Turkey, Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain, Grup Simsek encapsulates the Outernational generation. Unlike in western pop culture, Turkish pop music is often focused on traditionalised songs and endless ways of reimagining these. Grup Simsek take the righteous and rich Turkish poetry to the future whilst not losing awareness of the past.

A new Mount Eerie album unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie or Microphones back catalog. Eleven stark songs about basic deep grief, loss, real death, love, significance and non-significance, reality. Nothing wise or learned, just the described experience of living through unimaginable domestic obliteration, with names and dates.

contains: 11 songs, 42 minutes, very nice sounding vinyl, foil stamped front and back covers, heavy old style gatefold tip-on jacket with special Neenah “Slide” paper as the inner liner, silver on black, all the lyrics, double sided art poster, free download card

The trails that Brooklyn's Big Thief take us down on Capacity, the band's highly anticipated second record, are overgrown with the wilderness of pumping souls.

After last year's stunning Masterpiece, Capacity was recorded in a snowy winter nest in upstate New York at Outlier Studio with producer Andrew Sarlo.

Resurgam– meaning “I shall rise again” – is the hotly-anticipated sixth studio album from Fink: UK-born, Berlin-based founding singer-songwriter musician Fin Greenall, alongside long-time bandmates Tim Thornton (drums, guitar) and Guy Whittaker (bass). It continues an acclaimed and distinctly adventurous catalogue, from the sample-splicing debut Fresh Produce (2000), through to the beautifully heady expressions of their last album, Hard Believer (2014). Greenall has also earned global props as a film music composer, songwriting collaborator (including works with John Legend and Amy Winehouse) and solo innovator, with recent side-projects spanning the electronic Horizontalism (2015) to Fink’s Sunday Night Blues Club Vol.1 (2017). Fink have never been afraid to experiment; on Resurgam, they arguably sound more fearless than ever.

Resurgam derives its title from a Latin inscription in a 900-year-old church in Greenall’s native Cornwall. Its vital, insistent spirit pulses through the entire album, which was recorded with ground-breaking producer Flood (PJ Harvey, U2, Foals, Warpaint, The Killers) at his Assault & Battery studios in North London. Its ten new tracks were created over two months, a relatively luxurious stretch of time compared to previous Fink albums, resulting in a collection that is both assertive and richly immersive.

Back IN Print!!! An almost mythical giant of African guitar, whose reinvention of acoustic fingerstyle quickly spread from western Kenya throughout East Africa, before his tragic death in 1963. Spellbinding guitar lines, sweet harmony vocals, every melody an instant classic, and a life story steeped in legend. Co-released by Raw Music International and Olvido Records. 12-song LP comes packaged in a deluxe spot-color jacket, with a 12-page full color booklet featuring an oral history by George MUKABI's family and peers, and lyrics in English and Swahili.

You take a trio of the fnest traditonal griot musicians from Mali and put them in a studio with Western music's most revolutonary string quartet - and the resultng album is one of the most richly rewarding musical collaboratons you are likely to encounter. Together the Kronos Quartet and Trio Da Kali have created an album that is rich in texture, hauntngly melodic and strikingly inventve as violins, viola and cello combine with balafon, ngoni and the powerful female voice of Hawa 'Kassé Mady' Diabaté in transcendental style. David Harrington, who founded the Kronos Quartet in 1973, describes the album as one of the most beautful Kronos has done in forty years.' All three Da Kali members come from hereditary musical families, Balafon player and musical director Lassana Diabaté was a long-tme member of Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra and has recorded with Salif Keita, Taj Mahal and many others. A musician of great subtlety and inventon he has honed a virtuoso two-balafon technique to perfecton. Bass ngoni player Mamadou Kouyaté is the eldest son of the instrument's greatest exponent, Bassekou Kouyaté and he holds down the groove in his father's band 'Ngoni Ba'. Singer Hawa 'Kassé Mady' Diabaté is the daughter of Mali's greatest traditonal singer, Kassé Mady Diabaté, and the power, range and phrasing of her voice led David Harrington to compare her to the late queen of American gospel, Mahalia Jackson.
Kronos Quartet have earned an enviable reputaton collaboratng with contemporary composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Laurie Anderson and with world music icons from Argentnian tango hero Astor Piazzola to Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle.

A three-disc studio album from Bob Dylan, Triplicate, will be released on March 31, featuring 30 brand-new recordings of classic American tunes and marking the first triple-length set of the artist’s illustrious career. With each disc individually titled and presented in a thematically-arranged 10-song sequence, Triplicate showcases Dylan’s unique and much-lauded talents as a vocalist, arranger and bandleader on 30 compositions by some of music’s most lauded and influential songwriters. The Jack Frost-produced album is the 38th studio set from Bob Dylan and marks the first new music from the artist since Fallen Angels, which was released in early 2016.

For Triplicate, Dylan assembled his touring band in Hollywood’s Capitol studios to record hand-chosen songs from an array of American songwriters including Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (“Once Upon A Time”), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (“Stormy Weather”), Harold Hupfield (“As Time Goes By”) and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh (“The Best Is Yet To Come”). The titles of the individual discs are ‘Til The Sun Goes Down, Devil Dolls and Comin’ Home Late.

180g Colored Vinyl! Hand-picked titles by Françoise Hardy, France Gall. Annie Philippe, Elsa, Violaine, Pussy Cat, Brigitte Bardot, Delphine and Liz Brady!

Why you'll love it...
High Top Mountain certainly leaned traditional, but it also set the precedent that Simpson was not an artist content to coast, was not someone just trying to write the easiest song to ride to the top. He was willing to put in the work, and hire $25,000 worth of studio time and band members to make his vision a reality, and didn’t very much care what happened next. Only that he’d done it. Freedom, as a famous country singer once wrote for Janis Joplin, is just another word for nothing left to lose. The most free performer we’ve had these last 10 years is Simpson, who took a trip to High Top Mountain and never came back down.

Archival reissue of the Afro-prog-psych Zamrock masterpiece Presented For The First Time Ever In An Aged Copper Green Pressing The entirety of WITCH’s fourth album, restored and remastered from master tapes, and presented as an archival reissue in an aged copper green vinyl pressing. WITCH’s musical arc is contained to a five year span and, in retrospect, it is a logical one. The band’s fourth album - recorded after the band toured with Osibisa - makes use of traditional Zambian rhythms and folk melodies alongside progressive rock movements. It is the most "afro-rock" of WITCH’s oeuvre.

Why you'll love it...
Richard Thompson's Music from Grizzly Man accompanies the acclaimed documentary, Grizzly Man, following the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, a documentary filmmaker, environmentalist and bear enthusiast.

This VMP exclusive record is pressed on 1LP standard weight Smoke vinyl at Independent Record Pressing. This reissue is remastered by Bob Olhsson. Limited to 1,000 copies, Music from Grizzly Man will arrive in a foil stamped and numbered gatefold tip-on jacket.

The first-ever compilation of "havagies", the nearly forgotten Hawaiian-influenced music of 1930s Greece, focused on the compositions of Kostas Bezos and his ensemble White Birds. A world-class slide guitarist, political cartoonist and sleepless Bohemian, Kostas Bezos created some of the most unique music of any era: surrealist guitar portraits blending Athens and Honolulu, haunting tropical serenades, wild acoustic orchestras, and heartbreaking steel guitar duets. Incredibly, this is the same musician responsible for the legendary "Kostis" rebetika recordings (see A. Kostis "The Jail's a Fine School" [OLV-002 / MRP-098]).

Neşet Ertaş is a Turkish folk poet, the last great representative of Turkish culture and musical tradition. He is also known as the "Bozkırın Tezenesi ". On the albums he released from the 1950’s onwards, he recorded Central Anatolian folk songs and dance tunes as well as the folk songs he learned from his father Muharrem Ertaş. Starting in the 1960’s, he began to write both lyrics and compositions. He used the pseudonym "Garip", and from the 1970’s onwards, his folk songs were interpreted by many artists of the period. In 2009, he was deemed worthy of being included in UNESCO's Living Human Treasure inventory. This album contains 10 songs performed by the great master in 1998. "Güzel Ne Güzel Olmuşsun", "Hapishanelere Güneş Doğmuyor", "Neredesin Sen" and "Zahide" are the most remarkable tracks on the album

Neon orange vinyl seems unplayed. Tiny wear. Limited edition.

France is the trio of Jeremie Sauvage on electric bass, Mathieu Tilly on drums and Yann Gourdon on amplified hurdy-gurdy. They play one note / one rhythm producing energetic performances reminiscent of the early collaborations between Faust and Tony Conrad. Creativly recycled influences result in intense shows with pounding overtones and repetitive pulsing rhythms. Loud straight and trance-inducing.

The pertinency of the recordings only slowly appear On “Occitanie" in the mass of sound, the rhythmic repetition and the elongated drones. The hurdy-gurdy forces you deeper, highlighting points of microtonal flux, cracking open the single note, the nodding rhythm, to imply the presence of every note, every sound, inside it. The insensible evolution, lurks in a corner of noise and finally imposes itself slowly on careful listening.

The band members of France perform in various other projects: Tanz Mein Herz, Toad and Jérico, all are member of the collective La Novià, an organisation based in Haute-Loire which brings together professional musicians and is a place for reflection and experimentation around traditional and / or experimental music.