His lovely Folkways LP from 1965, when he was just 22, with classics-in-the-making like Blue Mountain and The Werewolf Song.

This is terrific; warmly recommended.

‘Brìghde Chaimbeul is a leading purveyor of celtic experimentalism and a master of the Scottish smallpipes; a bellows-blown, mellower cousin to the famous Highland bagpipes. A native Gaelic speaker, Brìghde roots her music in her language and culture. She rose to prominence as a prodigy of traditional music, but has since begun a journey to take the smallpipes into unchartered territory. She has devised a unique way or arranging for pipe music that emphasises the rich textural drones of the instrument;  the constancy of sound that creates a trance-like atmosphere, played with enticing virtuosic liquidity. She draws inspiration from the world of interconnected piping traditions, but her most recent album brings in influence from ambient, avant garde and electronic music.’

With Arthur Russell, Bob Dylan, Anne Waldman, Perry Robinson, David Amram and co, having a whale of a time in sessions which sound like the best kind of parties, between 1971 and 1981.
‘Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs. Chanteys, Come-All-Ye’s, Aborigine Song Sticks. Gospel, Improvisations, Renaissance Lyrics, Blake Hymns, Bluegrass, Hillbilly Riffs, Country & Western, 50’s R&B, Dirty Dozens & New Wave.’
The first-ever full vinyl reissue; gatefold sleeve. Photography by Robert Frank!

Startling 1975 excursions into Tarantism — a kind of hysteria ostensibly triggered by spider bites, for which dancing is the only cure, with its own set of cultural traditions based in Basilicata, Apulia, Sicily.
Obsessive, hypnotic chants, rhythms, and drones, mixing together folk, avant-gardism, and psych, with shots of Dylan and North African drumming.

Laid-right-back — with old buddies Dave Reisch and Lewi Longmire, and Tara Jane O’Neil; a Blind Willie McTell and a Lightning Hopkins; and unmissable goes at favourites like Light Green Fellow. One of the very best Hurleys of them all.

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.

Trá Pháidín are a nine-piece from Conamara, Galway, a wild coastal region of West Ireland, where Gaeilge remains the first language. They make a joyful noise — a unique and unpredictable blend of traditional Irish folk, post-rock, jazz, and Dadaist absurdity. 
Their album An 424 is a freewheeling, dialectical consideration of the 424 bus route and its passengers, passing up and down the coastline from the Gaeltacht into anglophone Ireland, and vice versa, and taking in wondrous locations like Cuan na Gaillimhe / Galway Bay, An Bhoirinn / the Burren, na hOileáin Árann / the Arann Islands, Aillte an Mhothair / the Cliffs of Moher, Portach Mhaigh Cuilinn / the bogs of Maigh Cuilinn, Bóthar Loch an Iolra / Eagle lake road, Cuan Casla / Casla Harbour, Cuan an Fhir Mhóir / Greatman’s Bay, Cnoc Mordáin / Mordáin hill, Sléibhte Mhám Toirc / the Maamturk Mountains, Na Beanna Beola / the twelve pins…
‘This is a topic you could write a PhD about (and maybe someone already has),’ says the band. ‘But if you are someone who grew up or lives in this region, you have a particular understanding at this stage of how complicated Gaelic psyche is and the kind of spectrum of identity along bóthar Choise Fharraige. With the landscape in mind, this bus journey is a great meditation on the various topics of life.’
Listen out for flights of wild improvisation filled with brass, woodwinds, harp, and fiddles… and hard-nosed grooves.

First-time-out for these early-seventies recordings — countrified drafts of some classic Hurley, with backing from Vermont mates the Fatboys, aka the Deranged Cowboys.

Precious 1964 recordings, top-notch though never previously released, part of the First Songs sessions for Folkways.

A singing trio from Charente-Maritime, reviving folk songs from the neighbouring department of Vendée, on France’s western seaboard. Mostly recorded at home, with guests playing accordion, violin, piccolo and contrabassoon, and cigar-box guitar.

In his liner notes, old admirer and collaborator Alasdair Roberts registers ‘a deepened richness’ in these new recordings, ‘unfolding with a patient confidence… considered and poised.’
‘There’s a greater complexity and subtlety to their unique three-part harmonising, too. Their voices mesh in even stronger — almost telepathic — ‘fraternité’ than ever before: now commanding and mighty as a full-rigged counter-vessel, now gentle and lulling as a mother’s cradle-croon, or a whisper in a lover’s ear.’

‘Returns to original composition and the blues… with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver… Three songs (Odds Against Tomorrow, The Writhing Jar, Already Old) are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt’s stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker’s double-track experiments on 1952’s Walking the Boogie, the steady chord vamps of Odds Against Tomorrow and Already Old form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon. The Writhing Jar’s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of Stray Dog’ and the Layla-finale-like haze of All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak, the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt’s previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode or vibing up the standards (Moon River)...  Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction” (Tom Carter).