Folk Sale 288 Items

Noah Sterba is one of Omaha’s underground music heroes, literally performing most of his songs and poetry into dented Radio Shack microphones in the subterranean basements of tornado alley for the last decade. Beside releasing several solo cassettes on Unread Records, he was a founding member of short-lived critical darlings Yuppies, lo-fi local legends The Prairies (which also featured David Nance), and The Subtropics (whose posthumous double cassette is seeing vinyl reissue in 2017), and has been an important member of Simon Joyner’s Ghosts since 2011. He is also involved in a multimedia art/publishing collaboration called Slowed Soul with fellow local Omaha artist and musician Jeff Sedrel.

In a time when so much music is fueled by self-congratulatory irony, The 13-Bar Blues is refreshing for its unapologetic sincerity. The album distills folk, blues, punk rock and country influences and merges them with poetry, allowing Sterba to graciously tear up his hat in the face of those who have come before him as he claws through America’s gnarly 21st century landscape with his tongue, pen, busted guitar, and wide open eyes.

Mystic choral beauty drifting far into the outer cosmos, this other worldly ensemble creates a contemporary avant-garde vocal fusion combined with strange instrumental accompaniment. The Hani are linguistically derived from the YI branch of the Tibeto-Burmese and number a million and a half in the southern part of Yunnan province in China above Laos (Phongsaly) and Vietnam (Dien Bien) where smaller Hani communities also live. As with many other ethnic groups of the area, an original traditional singing pattern is used with each singer adapting the words to the context. Many of these songs express intimate strong emotions that bring tears to the performers while they are singing. The choir that gathers all singers at the same time is considered to be a very unique style of vocal polyphony or heterophony. The cascading mournful feel of this music is beautifully transcendent. You’ve never heard anything like it. Instruments used by the ensemble include the Babi (single tree leaf ) and Mepa (rolled up tree leaf in a shape of a horn or mirliton), a Chiwo (3-stringed bowed instrument), a Labi (6-holed bamboo flute), a Lahe (3-stringed small lute) and a Meba (vertical reed instrument). Recorded by Laurent Jeanneau in 2011, this Limited Edition vinyl LP includes a two sided insert with photos, liner notes, and names of all the vocalists and accompanying musicians.

Borrowed Tongue is the debut solo album by Korean singer-songwriter Minhwi Lee. It’s a mysterious, strangely compelling thing, an album of rare poetry, and remarkably self-assured. Originally released in November 2016, the album made waves, winning best folk album of 2016 at the 14th Korean Music Awards. Its eight songs, written and predominantly arranged by Lee, don’t reveal their secrets easily, or at first blush; rather, they take their time slowly to unfurl in her listeners’ worlds. There are hints of other music here, from time to time: the intimacy of Stina Nordenstam, perhaps; the gauzy haze of Hope Sandoval, on the blissed-out pop of “Broken Mirror”; there are touches of acid-folk, and ECM jazz, and a slyly filmic approach to songwriting and arrangement that makes every song fit perfectly into the album’s arc.

Lee arrived at her solo music through a complex, circuitous route. After studying musicology in Seoul, she learned her trade, film scoring, in New York and Paris. She also studied classical music, blowing off steam in a wild punk duo, Mukimukimanmansu, who released one album, 2012, on Korean indie label Beatball. Subsequently, Lee has been refining her music, focusing both on her solo songs, and on writing for television series and films; she’s written scores for films by such directors as Sangmoon Lee, Jeongwon Kam, and Wanmin Lee. She also plays in the jazz outfit Cubed, and recently joined doom metal group Gawthrop on bass.

Since its release in 2016, Borrowed Tongue has slowly bewitched listeners with its idiosyncratic arrangements and evocative songwriting. It’s an album that hints at plenty, but refuses to make grand statements, something Lee seems intent to pursue: in correspondence, she’s very clear that she wants these songs to enact a kind of transmutation, to be adopted into the listeners’ lives and exist within their own imaginings. She does, however, offer a few hints to what propels these mercurial songs, explaining, “this album is about a person who again opens their mouth, which was once shut. The album deals with what it means to speak: things that are known but not said, things that should be said but are not, things that cannot be said but nonetheless are.”

This may well explain the curious mood of Borrowed Tongue, the multiple ‘voices’ that inhabit the album; Lee’s singing voice is pliable and mutable, approaching each song as its own diorama and ensuring the song is sung with just the right tone. The arrangements Lee conjures for her songs are all in service to narrative and melody; they appear to her alongside the composition, which is surely why everything here fits together so beautifully. From there, Lee approaches her songs carefully, in deference to their ‘need to be sung’ a certain way. There isn’t a moment wasted: everything on Borrowed Tongue is as it needs to be, whether a melancholy folk song taking to the air, or a psychedelic reverie dreamed into being. It’s a beautiful, poised and confident debut.

In the late Congolese musician Lumingu Zorro, protégé of Kinshasa’s legendary 60s band leader Dr Nico, recorded Mosese, his only pre-2000 solo album, for the Tabansi label- and this is it.CHAMPETA STORM WARNING! The first-ever reissue of one of West Africa’s best-kept rumba-soukous secrets- as well as being one of the most in-demand titles on Colombia’s booming Champeta sound system scene, where a rare record is protected as fiercely as on the Northern Soul or Jamaican sound system scenes, the label scratched off, the record hidden from view when not on the turntable.Possibly one of the strongest and most consistent Congo dancefloor albums ever recorded perfectly balanced between voices, horns, guitars and percussion.Which is why original copies of this all-time rumba rarity almost never reach the open market, being traded between Colombia’s champeta picoteros (sound system selectors) instead.In Kinshasa they say ‘Miziki ezelaki eleng ndeko’- ‘Sweet music, brother!’. Roger that

limited edition 180 gram vinyl

Everest Magma rediscovers the folk roots of his dreamy alter ego Woodcutter. Once again he appears as a minstrel crossing moonstruck woods inhabited by gnomes, butterflies and crawling creatures. Nature is sublimated into a personal alien vision in which a lysergic approach triumphs in the arrangement of sound material and immersive musique concrète. Pure acid-folk fingerpicking communicates directly with the forest’s humus, steeped in wild and ethereal moods. Between schizoid or more lyrical moments, a persistent taste for subtle subterranean noises, electric flashes, radio and ufological interferences, deviant scents and psychological drifts permeates the flow. The abstracting structure of voices and singing expresses the cyclical beingness of living, a decontextualizing dimension of space and time. It's the pantheistic feeling of a parallel naturalistic universe, which also takes cues from the psychedelic eccentricity of Claudio Rocchi’s ‘Suoni di Frontiera’, the Incredible String Band or Holy Modal Rounders. Co-produced with Maple Death Records

Here I AM is the first thing. A powerful incantation sung in full choral style at Dartington College of Arts in 1982 and captured on tape, now in 1s and 0s for all eternity. It’s a bold phrase, this assertion of existence, this permanent claiming of space in time; these three words we were made to sing in church, that we used to recite one after another at the beginning of class. Doing so might seem mundane, or easy, but it’s not. What’s easy is not. Not declaring one’s presence, not showing up at all. Claire Bushe, Cathy Frost, Lisa Halse, Cathy Josefowitz, and Mara de Wit showed up, took a side. They called themselves Lining Time. They were here. ANY Woman CAN SAY I’M A Witch, they said. Strike is the album Lining Time made. It plays out like a freedom spell, like liberatory healing magic. Reveling in the power of the voice, Lining Time sing. Not at us, but for us. As if by putting voice to the traumas inflicted by the patriarchy and capital, they could be made right. As if the whole world might join in and sing along, might join in and take action - might join in and strike.There’s nothing exclusive about the music Lining Time made. Like many of the best and weirdest records of the post-punk era, Strike wears its amateurism as a badge of honour, flies it like a flag to rally around. It is inclusive to the extreme. Which isn’t to say anyone could’ve made Strike. That’s the thing. The music preserved here is too weirdly spare and idiosyncratic - and wildly overconfident in the way that only the young and young at heart can be. Sometimes it’s almost protest folk, acappella or accompanied by a single acoustic guitar, as on ‘It’s Possible’. Sometimes schoolroom auxiliary percussion clunks out a cyclical, ritual rhythm, as on the title track. At no point does it feel less than singular. Still, this is music about and for universal sisterhood. It invites solidarity. Take up an instrument for the cause and sing your own song. Time Passes Time Passes Time Passes Time Recorded music often functions like a time capsule. It’s not rare that an album is “lost”. Rather, it’s rare that a work is heard widely at the time it was made. Often, it’s barely heard at all. It just exists somewhere, a cave painting or an ancient piece of graffiti, waiting to be stumbled upon for whatever reason. The reason, in Strike’s case, is a wonderful posthumous exhibition of Cathy Josefowitz’s artwork, The Thinking Body, a cooperative effort between Kunsthaus Langenthal, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, Macro Roma, Les Amis de Cathy Josefowitz, and Elise Lammer. It’s possible that some might be tempted to think of Lining Time as a sideshow curiosity to the main event, but that’d be foolish. Strike, nearly forty years old, is as alive and relevant as it was when it was recorded in the wake of the Reclaim the Night march. If anything, it’s shocking how potent and necessary its message remains today.

Cover with cut corner.Vinyl closer to VG+