Honest Jon's Folk 16 Items

Release: UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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To Scratch Your Heart: Early Recordings From Istanbul

4LP+Box Set | 2010 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

99,99 €*

Release: 2010 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Classical Music

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Used Vinyl

Medium: VG+, Cover: VG

4 LP compilation of recordings made in Istanbul for Gramophone Company and His master's voice (HMV) during the first years of the 20th century.
Sound restoration at Abbey Road studios.

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Never The Same - Leave-Taking From The British Folk Revival 1970-1977

2LP | 2006 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

26,99 €*

Impossible Love Songs From Sixties Quito

Release: 2006 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Near Mint, Cover: VG+

Vinyl has some paper scuffs. With insert.

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Duo Benitez Valencia

2LP | 2021 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

24,99 €*

Release: 2021 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Near Mint, Cover: Near Mint

Sprigs Of Time (78s From The EMI Archive)

2LP | 2008 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

16,99 €*

Release: 2008 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves, Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: VG+, Cover: Near Mint

Both inserts included. Vinyl with a couple of light scuffs

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Time Wept - Vocal Recordings From The Levant, 1906-1925

2LP | 2015 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

26,99 €*

CD | 2009 | EU | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2015 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Sealed, Cover: Near Mint

Sealed copy.
Cover corners slightly dented.

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Trembling Bells

Carbeth

5,99 €*

Release: 2009 / EU – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: VG+, Cover: VG+

CD | 2010 | EU | Original (Honest Jon's)

Trembling Bells

Abandoned Love

9,99 €*

Release: 2010 / EU – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Near Mint, Cover: Near Mint

CD | 2011 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Trembling Bells

The Constant Pageant

9,99 €*

Release: 2011 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Near Mint, Cover: Near Mint

Holy Tongue / Beatrice Dillon / Lamin Fofana / Labour

Dey Sey / 2020 / Niary Ngorong / Etu Keur

2x12" | 2023 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

25,99 €*

The Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Four dazzling, extended engagements with mbalax master-drumming.

The contribution from Holy Tongue is chase-the-devil steppers — thumping, clangorous, reverberating — super-charged with energy and atmosphere. From the off drummer Valentina Magaletti detonates a hard rain of small bombs, rounds of fire, ticking fuses. Musical co-ordinates are somewhere between classic On-U Sound crew like African Head Charge, The Mothmen, and Creation Rebel, and the experimental funk of the Pop Group and 23 Skidoo, at their funkiest. Thrillingly, the two dubs are increasingly deranged.

Adjusting the same wavelengths as her superb Workaround LP, Beatrice Dillon plays spaced-out, abstract synth-work against the bodily physicality of the ancient, shifting mbalax rhythms. The music is poised, mindful, tentative; but also limber, fleet, and magical.

Phantasmagorical and efflorescent, Lamin Fofana’s one-two is simply stunning. Both excursions are wide-open, beautiful, epic, and propulsive — the first mix is banging and headlong, the second more syncopated and serpentine — teeming with freshly sublime, funkdafied updates on Jon Hassell’s Fourth World possible musics.

The two parts of LABOUR’s Etu Keur Gui engage the same sequence of drum patterns (called bakks) from different perspectives. The duo performed portions of this piece at the opening ceremony of the Dakar Biennial in 2022, at the Grand National Theater, with thirty sabar players from the family of Doudou Ndiaye Rose. This Wolof phrase for the inner-court of a home — a meeting-place — doubles here as a metaphor for inner space on a metaphysical level; and Pan Sonic, Muslimgauze, Zoviet France, early Shackleton… all ghost across the threshold.

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Twenty-One Sabar Rhythms

2LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Impossible Love Songs From Sixties Quito

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Magnificent Wolof drum music, performed by an extended griot family over seven consecutive days, in the mystical setting of Lac Rose, outside Dakar.

Doudou Ndiaye Rose — who died in 2015 — is a key drummer in the musical history of the world. He developed a system of five hundred original drumming patterns, ancient and new. Amongst the modern rhythms here is Bench Mi — ‘under the Baobab tree,’ a spot where where problems get solved. Also Hibar Yi — ‘passing on information’ — the theme-tune of Senegalese TV national news for decades — and Les Rosettes, the signature rhythm of Senegal’s first ever all-female percussion group, convened by Doudou, and named after his grandmother.

These original compositions sit alongside important traditional rhythms, familiar to every Sabar player, such as Farwu Jar (a courtship game sometimes resulting in a wedding), Ceebu Jin (also the name of the national dish of fish and rice), and Gumbé, often played after a successful harvest.

Recorded in joyful single takes, with no overdubs, mastered by Rashad Becker, the music is deep and thrilling, polyrhythmic to the bone, with a complex, pointillistic intensity at times evoking Jeff Mills in full flight.

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Benítez & Valencia

2LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

2LP | 2015 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Gonzalo Benitez and Luis Alberto Valencia were kingpins of the musica nacional movement in Ecuador. Check them out on the cover, on a rooftop in Quito’s Old Town, surveying their dominion. In 1970, when Valencia collapsed onstage during a performance of the yaravi Desesperacion — ‘My heart is already in ashes’ — and died four days later, aged 52, his coffin was carried through those city streets on the shoulders of his fans.

They began singing as a duo in their mid-teens. During twenty-eight years together they recorded more than six hundred songs, for Discos Ecuador, Nacional, Granja, Ortiz, Rondador, Onix, Fuente, Real, Tropical, Fadisa, RCA Victor — and of course Caife.

Their exquisitely romantic harmonising is a sublime blend of collected forbearance and abject self-annihilation, underpinned and elaborated by the heart-piercing, improvisatory guitar-playing of Bolivar Ortiz. Effectively the third member of the group. ‘El Pollo’ sets the tone and intensity for everything that follows: listen to his soloing at the start of our opener, Lamparilla.

Musically a pasillo — a cross between a Viennese waltz and the indigenous yaravi rhythm — Lamparilla draws its verses from a poem by Luz Martinez from Riobamba, written in 1918 when she was 15, under the influence of Baudelaire and Mallarme. Another pasillo here, Sombras is one of the best-loved songs in the musica nacional canon, setting lines about undercover sex and loss by the Mexican poet Maria Pren, which were considered pornographic on publication in 1911.

And Benitez & Valencia looked back still further, to the indigenous roots of Ecuadorian music, as the key to its future. Carnaval de Guaranda is their take on a song dating back to the era of the Mitimaes, a broad group of Bolivian tribes conquered by the Incas and displaced to Ecuador. ‘Impossible love of mine / I love you for being impossible / Who loves what is impossible / Is the truest lover.’

Lovingly presented in a gatefold sleeve with spot-gloss, and printed inners, with stunning photos and expert notes. Excellent sound, drawn from original tapes, by way of Abbey Road, D&M and Pallas.

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Maki Asakawa

Release: 2015 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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A stunning survey of the 1970s heyday of this great Japanese singer and countercultural icon. Deep-indigo, dead-of-night enka, folk and blues, inhaling Billie Holiday and Nina Simone down to the bone. A traditional waltz abuts Nico-style incantation; defamiliarised versions of Oscar Brown Jr and Bessie Smith collide with big-band experiments alongside Shuji Terayama; a sitar-led psychedelic wig-out runs into a killer excursion in modal, spiritual jazz. Existentialism and noir, mystery and allure, hurt and hauteur. With excellent notes by Alan Cummings and the fabulous photographs of Hitoshi Jin Tamura. Hotly recommended.

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Time Wept - Vocal Recordings From The Levant, 1906-1925

2LP | 2015 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Songs From East Africa 1952-7

Release: 2015 / UK – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Stunningly beautiful, poignant music from Bilād al-Shām — ‘the countries of Damascus’, known nowadays as Syria, Lebanon and Palestine — including performances from the very first recording sessions in the region. The legendary, moody Beirut singer Būlus Ṣulbān is here — some historians have him singing before Egypt’s Pasha Ibrāhīm Bāshā during his military campaign in Syria, in 1841 — and Ḥasība Moshēh, Jewish ‘nightingale of the Damascene gardens’. Thurayyā Qaddūra from Jerusalem; Yūsuf Tāj, a folk singer from Mount-Lebanon; Farjallāh Baiḍā, cousin to the founders of Baidaphon Records... Musical directors like the lutist Qāsim Abū Jamīl al-Durzī and the violinist Anṭūn al-Shawwā (followed by his son Sāmī); such virtuosi as the qanun-players Nakhleh Ilyās al-Maṭarjī and Ya‘qūb Ghazāla, and lutist Salīm ‘Awaḍ. Even at the time, notwithstanding such brilliance, public music-making was frowned upon as morally demeaning, especially for women. Musical venues were generally dodgy. Ṣulbān once cut short a wedding performance for the Beiruti posh, after just one song, he was so disgusted with his audience. ‘If I had to tell you about the catcalls,’ one commentator wrote about the musical theatre of the time, ‘the stomping of feet, the sound of sticks hitting the ground, the noise of the water-pipes, the teeth cracking watermelon seeds and pistachio nuts, the screams of the waiters, and the clinking of arak glasses on the tables, I would need to go on and on and on...’

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Something Is Wrong

2LP | 2010 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2010 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves, Rock & Indie

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Precious, stinging selections from an HMV run of more than four hundred 78s, recordings made in Uganda and Kenya from the mid-1930s till the mid-1950s.

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12" | 2007 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Migrating Bird Sampler

12,99 €*