‘New levels of excellence… a poetic incantation of British identity far brighter than Michael Gove’s proposed GCSE history syllabus *****’ (The Sunday Times). ‘Magnificent ****’ (The Guardian).

‘Hair-raisingly good… incandescent’ (The Observer).

Entirely exclusive music, unique to this release, with a radiant silk-screened sleeve: four from The Marble Downs sessions with Will Oldham, a Scott Walker to start; and a side of unaccompanied folk singing.

Gorgeous, downbeat, giddy with reverie, longing and loss. Led by Inigo’s guitar, banjo, ukelele or harmonium; with classic brass-band charts. Recorded by James Blackshaw’s engineer; mastered by Rashad.

Superb first album from Andy Cabic, Devendra Banhart, Otto Hauser et al.

‘Bridging the gap between American primitive pioneers John Fahey and Leo Kottke and the California Modernists… the private side of the solo guitar movement from 1966-81.’ 40-page booklet, usual Numero class.

Male folk singers mithering and dithering all the way from 1970 to 1983: very introspective, sombre, spare and intimate, most of it originally pressed privately, plenty of it beautiful and haunting.

‘Gram Parsons had been orbiting the idea of Cosmic American Music for some time. In ‘68, he’d parted ways with the Byrds and was looking to take air with a new project. “It’s basically a Southern soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar” he told Melody Maker, on the subject of The Flying Burrito Brothers. So it was that when A&M’s Burrito Brothers debut The Gilded Palace of Sin made it to shelves in February of 1969, early adherents to the Cosmic American gospel were already echoing its message from areas flanking Gram Parsons’ Southern California hills and canyons. There was F.J. McMahon in coastal Santa Barbara, Mistress Mary further inland in Hacienda Heights, and Plain Jane of Albuquerque, New Mexico…’

A trippy, littoral compilation of blissed-out folk-funk, Balearic, AOR, and softly fizzing electronica, from long-forgotten early 70s cassettes, right up to date.

‘A psychoacoustic odyssey through the American South, influenced as much by Dock Boggs as by Luc Ferrari. This isn’t ‘avant-folk’ as per, but more expansive avant-garde compositions using components of traditional music as tools for storytelling. There are banjos, but they bounce around the stereo field in hypnotic patterns; there are autoharps, but they’re bowed, left detuned by time and humidity, and augmented with sounds of screeching cicadas.
‘Check out the haunted, ambient interpretation of the murder ballad Omie Wise, featuring fourteen different versions of the song time-stretched and overlaid with pedal steel by Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey. It’s a wild listen!’

Wonderful, half-enraptured, half-stoned, full-blown re-imagination of vintage country soul sublimity. (He likes Washington Phillips; you can hear Curtis.) Five star reviews everywhere.

The Nordan Project, combining Swedish folk and jazz improvisation. With Palle Danielsson on bass, from various Charles Lloyd, Keth Jarrett and Jan Garbarek lineups.