Nine tunes copped from the archives of the legendary 78s collector Harry Smith — ‘pointedly taken from regions shaped by major US conflicts since Anderson’s birth in 1970. While her fascinating liner notes track what is lost and found when trying to translate these compositions, their universal musicality still cuts through. Opener Quodlibet is beautiful: an intricate, minor-key medley of Uzbek tunes originally performed on the dambura (a fretless lute), on which Anderson adds bluegrass techniques to counter her inability to play quarter-tones on her guitar. Her take on a qawwali vocal tune, Hamd, is also a highlight, her stacked guitar layers ringing with warmth and emotion. Gisela Rodríguez Fernández adds violin to Sarvi Simin, a shimmering tune from Soviet-era Afghanistan, while a Yemeni tune, Zar, intended to exorcise evil spirits from the sick, sees Anderson and Fernández constantly rearranging five notes without repetition. Dark ambient moods are also conjured in Pair of Duduk, on which Anderson shifts the drones of Armenian woodwinds on to reverb-heavy guitar and bassy synths, while in Vietnamese tune Whistle Song, transferred from bamboo flutes to electric piano, the composition’s closeness to minimalism sings out.’

Wonderful. Here’s to volume two.

‘Dissonant, ghostly, and otherworldly, summoning complex emotions with sparse tools…
‘The songs are nested in tape hiss and arranged with vocal harmonies she layers like falling snowflakes and drones that fill up the crevices of your lungs. It has the tactile intimacy of 1970s folk musicians like Vashti Bunyan and Karen Dalton, music that feels tied to the natural world it dreams of…
‘This out-of-time music comes to us when the natural world is deteriorating and the ever-present internet is a tool of mass surveillance and a lens to witness multiple global atrocities at once. In her endeavor to exalt such a bleak world, Zuniga seems to be battling herself. She acknowledges that “memory always sees the loved one smaller” and then also shares “why I remember,” citing “white ripe strawberry bruise / beats in the heart” as her reason. She lays bare her pain but ends the record with a wordless composition of stormy static and crystalline piano notes titled To Live Happily. Zuniga allows these disparate perspectives to coexist without overexplaining. A star can be shining now and gone tomorrow, a memory beautiful and still insufficient. Her comfort with dissonance creates a sense of expansiveness and richness to songs that often only feature a handful of instruments at a time’ (Pitchfork).

Something special. Very warmly recommended if psych-folk from the same amphora as Joanne Robertson is your poison.

Legendary stoner folk by former Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape member (who dropped some LSD and motorcycyled from California to the Nashville studio in his pyjamas).

Wonderful album from 1969. Michael Hurley is an American original who first recorded for Folkways in 1965; more recently for Honest Jons’ Lal Waterson tribute, Migrating Bird. Play-and-play-again stuff.

Eight poetic songs attuned to the early 1970s chanson of Brigitte Fontaine, performed by Mauricio Amarante and Marine Debilly Cerisier.

Ignatz is the alter-ego of Belgian musician Bram Devens, who has released a string of albums for labels like (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema, Fonal, Mort aux Vaches, and Okraïna, over the last twenty years.
Devens recorded this wonderful, haunted music at home in Landen, on the family piano.
There is pervasive, ambient Dub, mesmerically shifting; sometimes aghast. Somewhere in the swirling mist are the guitarist Hans Reichel, and blues pianists like Jimmy Yancey, amongst other ghosts. Time Well Spent even musters a kind of motorik energy, determinedly mis-firing.
It is quite unlike any other piano record.
Beautifully presented, too, to the customary high standards of this label.
Check it out!

‘Their ability to harmonize together is stunning, their reedy voices coming together and pulling apart amid delicate fingerstyle guitar and concertina deployed in just intonation, which imparts a deeply resonant, almost glowing harmonic presence. It’s all quite subtle, and if you only listen to the way the voices of Cater and Rasten blend you might even miss it—but the full sonic spectrum is what distinguishes and, in certain ways, connects it to traditional practice… Although the album is pure balladry, unfolding with exquisite patience, each song contains nifty little flourishes or instrumental elements that set them apart, such as the slide guitar and wheezy bass harmonica on For the Ear That is No More, or the slow peal of trumpet on Death and the Lady, courtesy of Rasten’s partner in Pip and Oker, Torstein Lavik Larsen. (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street).
‘All done with such grace and elegance, without a note wasted or any required. Wonderful… faultless and deeply considered’ (Glenn Kimpton, KLOF).

Three high English and Scottish ballads, and three original settings of European folk tales.
Matt gatefold cover; gloss spot varnish.
Check it out!

Beautiful, stoned, outsider American folk, remastered from the original tapes (with superior sound quality to the super-rare original). From the eight years between First Songs LP in 1964 and Armchair Boogie.