• Music

    Daulet Halek (达吾列提·哈勒克) – Daulet Halek: Dombra Solo (达​吾​列​提​·​哈​勒​克​演​奏​的​冬​不​拉​曲)

    This release honors the memory of Chinese Kazakh composer Daulet Halek who passed away in 2008. From the release’s Bandcamp site: “Producer’s Note: This album has its genesis in a precious reel-to-reel tape recording which we discovered in a radio station. It is unfortunate that the tape itself does not contain information on the date of recording, which we roughly speculate to be around the late-1980s to the early-1990s. The recording in this album has two parts. The first is Daulet Halek’s interpretation of folk tunes from other ethnic minority groups, including the Tatars, the Mongols, the Sibe, and the Kyrgyz.…

  • Music

    Svitlana Nianio – Transilvania Smile, 1994

    Though the recording quality is not audiophile quality, this collection of theater music by Ukrainian singer and artist Svitlana Nianio documents the soundtrack to a theater project she was involved in at the time called Transilvania Smile.  From her label Muscut Records’ Bandcamp site: “Svitlana Okhrimenko (artist name: Svitlana Nianio) is a Ukrainian artist, musician, and signer. She is one of the most prominent representatives of the independent music scene of Kyiv in the late 1980s — early 90s. She has repeatedly recorded and performed in collaboration with other musicians and bands, such as Oleksandr Yurchenko, Sugar White Death (Cukor…

  • Music

    Marika Politissa – All Parts Dark

    Much respect to Mississippi Records out of Chicago, Illinois for releasing this magnificent artifact! The back story is explained in great detail on the label’s Bandcamp site: Marika “Politissa” Frantzeskopoulou was a Greek singer from Constantinople, reknowned for her precise, fluid and graceful performances and depth of feeling. Backed by some of the best musicians of the era on lyra, violin, oud, kanonaki and guitar, Marika’s repertoire and techniques drew from Byzantine and Ottoman musical traditions. She possessed an ability to devastate her audience through her expressions of grief, exile, and tragic love, running the gamut of cafe aman, torch…

  • Music

    Southeast of Rain (东南有雨) – 42 Days (四十二天)

    Sophia Shen and Lemon Guo work together as Southeast of Rain (东南有雨), an electroacoustic/field recording project based in the United States, with one living in New York and the other living in the San Francisco Bay area. The album is the result of 42 days of mixing avant-garde experimental music, natural sounds, traditional Chinese instruments and improvisational techniques and sublime vocal work into a gentle, though very experimental album. I request this of everyone, but specifically of my former students in Beijing – take the time to listen to this.  It is a stunningly beautiful piece of work.

  • Music

    IZ Band – 廻声Jangqerek

    The legendary Shenzhen-based Old Heaven Books released a powerful album from the Chinese-Kazakh band IZ Band.  This is listed as folk music, yet the music is brutal, sounding like early 1980s post-punk or Industrial rock.  Think of, maybe, a Kazakh Killing Joke or a Central Asian early-period Current 93.

  • Music

    Saucejas – Dabā

    Our dear friends at CPL-Music have done it again!  This 60-track album by Saucejas is an ethnographer’s dream if you’re into Latvian music, and there is an organic feeling to this album.  Nothing too terribly processed, nothing added that didn’t need to be there.  The album is appropriately titled, as Dabā is Latvian for “in nature.”  This is simply beautiful choral traditional music from one of my favorite regions of the world.

  • Music

    Various Artists – UNESCO Collection Musical Sources – Arabian Music: Maqam (Iraq – Lebanon 1971)

    A reissue specialist label called Rarità Tradizionali have published a fine collection of music from Lebanon and Iraq from 1972, and it sounds brilliant. This album was apparently never released, and it’s surprising considering the quality of the musicianship of these instrumentalists from Iraq and Lebanon (including buzuk player Matar Muhammad), back when both places were far safer to explore than they are today.  There’s no doubt that this comp will be seen as welcome to those who appreciate Arab music. I only have one complaint, and I’m sure many who collect this sort of music will understand the sentiment. …

  • Music

    Various Artists – The Hired Hands: A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne

    We will be celebrating Memorial Day with my family today, and in honor of the holiday, we offer up this compilation dedicated to American guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who influenced so many indie musicians that it’s a wonder so few outside of this select club have heard of him. Byron Coley, whose writing influenced my music selection so much in the 1990s when he wrote for Forced Exposure, then a magazine, now a wonderful distributor of weird music, speaks warmly about Bruce in this essay he contributed for this compilation: An Introduction to Bruce Langhorne Greil Marcus has often written about…