Robbie Basho - Twilight Peaks

This is originally released in '85 but I think it has been reissued recently. This one is easily my favorite Basho stuff, although almost all of his albums are equally amazing. Guitar. Raga. Basho. Paradise.

Robbie Basho - Twilight Peaks

Natural Snow Buildings - The Sundowner

France's mighty NSB is Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte. Over the course of several releases, their music has become the stuff of legend. This is their latest stuff. Must check out.

Natural Snow Buildings - The Sundowner

Greg Weeks - The Hive

Best known for his work with Philadelphian psychedelic folksters Espers, Greg Weeks returns with his new album ‘The Hive’. Key to the album's sound was the acquisition of a vintage Mellotron keyboard and there’s even a cover version of Madonna’s ‘Borderline’. Recommended.

Greg Weeks - The Hive

Hush Arbors - Hush Arbors

Virginian forest folk wizard Keith Wood, has come out with a new formula and created the mighty Self-Titled album of Hush Arbors. Combining the pensive songwriting of John Phillips circa Wolfking, the plaintive honesty of Neil Young, and the fishtank-gazing cacophony of Six Organs of Admittance, Wood writes classic-sounding songs that sound readymade for AM radio, circa 1968. Additional guitar by Ben Chasny.

Hush Arbors - Hush Arbors

Robbie Basho - Venus in Cancer

Robbie Basho released Venus in Cancer in 1969 on the Blue Thumb label. After five albums for the Takoma label in the 60's, Basho had cemented his reputation alongside John Fahey and Leo Kottke as one of the most brilliant guitarists of his generation. His wide range of musical influences from around the globe set him apart from other blues-based players, incorporating Arabic, Himalayan and Indian themes, Japanese and Chinese scales, and classical and European folk music. All are on magnificent display on this sprawling, spiritually-charged album.

Robbie Basho - Venus in Cancer

Megapuss - Surfing

Devendra Banhart: “Well, I have a band — it’s me and the drummer from Priestbird, Greg Rogove. What started off as a joke — “Let’s start a band and let’s make up song titles” — to our surprise and shock, we started writing songs, and we’ve written eight songs that I’m really really proud of and excited about. We’re gonna record a real record, and we’re called MEGAPUSS.”

Megapuss - Surfing

Brightblack Morning Light - Motion to Rejoin

Listening to the 3rd album from the New Mexico-based duo of Rachael Hughes and Nathan Shineywater, is like having a small teepee barbecue party in the chilly open air of the Appalachian mountains. A very very perfect album for a trippy summer evening. Light the roachos up, brother.

Brightblack Morning Light - Motion to Rejoin

Ben Reynolds - Two Wings

Glasgow, Scotland guitarist Ben Reynolds has been a prominent player in and contributor to the United Kingdom's fertile underground psych/drone scene for many years. A current member of the long-running and highly influential Ashtray Navigations, Reynolds appears on numerous recordings in the tight-knit UK drone cabal, including those by the venerable Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof, and is also active via his duo project Motor Ghost with Directing Hand's Alex Neilsen. Entirely improvised, Two Wings effortlessly weaves shimmering melodic lines together to form spontaneous compositions of dazzling depth and clarity. Incorporating a variety of pacing techniques with his fingerpicking style, Reynolds explores a linearity that harkens back to the American ragas of Robbie Basho, while exposing Middle Eastern influences much like the acoustic trickery of Sir Richard Bishop. The last tune on Two Wings is a written composition, utterly graceful yet striking in its similarities to the spontaneous compositions, underlying the lyrical quality in Reynold's music making. Two Wings is a remarkably unique, non-traditional take on the steel string tradition from a budding musical talent.

Ben Reynolds - Two Wings

The Holy Modal Rounders - The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders

The Holy Modal Rounders' fourth album finds Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber joining forces with the Moray Eels, the morerock-oriented sideline band Stampfel had formed with drummer and playwright Sam Shepard, to make the weirdest album of their entire entertainingly bizarre career. THE MORAY EELS EAT THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS starts with the utterly loopy "Bird Song" and only gets more strange and fragmented from there. It's not just all freaky and noisy, though: songs like the genuinely lovely "One Will Do For Now" and "Dame Fortune" are actually pretty and melodic, and others, like "Half A Mind", work up a good boogie-rock head of steam. But then there's the unfathomable sonic morass "Mobile Line" and the cheerfully out-of-it "The STP Song", which are about as weird asrock got in the '60s. THE MORAY EELS EAT THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS is a true cracked acid-folk classic.

The Holy Modal Rounders - The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders

Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice - Xiao

Wooden Wand (aka James Jackson Toth) produces a Southern gothic sound, but he's more connected to the New York anti-folk scene than he is the Georgian backwoods. Xiao opens with "Paper Trail Blues," a discordant, amelodic religious rant that's striking but obscure. The album as a whole favors long, droning songs with a ritualistic bent, and though it's a unique listening experience, it's also a tough one to connect to without intense concentration and maybe a few intoxicants. Xiao is a dangerous adventure.

WWVV - Xiao

Jesse Sparhawk - Palmaria Palmata

Jesse Sparhawk is a multi-instrumentalist composer whose instruments include, but are not limited to harp, guitar, bass and mandolin. He has recorded and/or performed with Greg Weeks, Marissa Nadler, Fern Knight, Greg Davis, Out Hud and many others. Palmaria Palmata is a wonderful self released cdr of solo acoustic guitar composition. His playing is technically very challenging employing complicated timing, natural harmonics, unusual chord voicing and intricate finger picking.

Jesse Sparhawk - Palmaria Palmata

White Magic - New Egypt

New extremely limited hand stamped and lovely release in Southern records Latitudes series, comes in a gorgeous embossed sleeve. This comes from White Magic, who are a fantastic bunch who mix up Terry Riley-like repetition with psychedelic arabesque guitar and piano that reminds alot of the Ethiopiques series, witchy vocals that sound alot like Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick and a kind of freeform psychedelic gusto that makes you imagine the naked dancing ladies of the Tales of the Unexpected opening credits.

White Magic - New Egypt

V/A - Imaginational Anthem Vol. 2

Imaginational Anthem Volume 2 expands and builds on this theme with 70+ more minutes of guitar magic - all previously unreleased on CD in the US. 24-year old UK 12-string upstart James Blackshaw opens the record, while the late master Robbie Basho, a clear influence on Blackshaw's style, closes it. Basho's track is the only live recording by this groundbreaking guitarist ever released. Riches abound on Imaginational Anthem Vol 2, with new recordings by former Takoma roster alumni Peter Lang (who made an album with John Fahey and Leo Kottke), Billy Faier (an original Greenwich Village folkie whose late 50's Riverside records inspired a fellow crack banjo player, Steve Martin) and an archival home recording by Fred Gerlach (a favorite of Jimmy Page). The new breed is well-represented by fascinating figures of today - Smith, Carter, Sparhawk, Kraus, Rose and Blackshaw. Legendary singer/songwriter Michael Chapman, whose first albums for the Harvest label in the 60's are now seeing the light again, contributes as well.

V/A - Imaginational Anthem Vol. 2 part 1
V/A - Imaginational Anthem Vol. 2 part 2

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill

Portland's Liz Harris has once again made a stunning album, this third one is called 'Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill'. Here, we find her on fine form, presumably having drank from the same spring that carried neighbour and labelmate Peter Broderick across the pond earlier this month. This album trickles from the speakers like a kind of one-woman Campfire Songs, conjuring an alien spectrum where guitars and drones are just two points on the same trend. A must-hear.

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer..

James Jackson Toth - Waiting in Vain

James Jackson Toth is no longer Wooden Wand, no longer to be in a "freak folk" wagon anymore. Waiting in Vain is the first album that Toth, long a cult figure among underground rock followers, has chosen to release as a solo artist, and it marks a new beginning for him. For several years, he and wife Jexie experimented with a folk-psychedelic rock hybrid, releasing music under many pseudonyms including variations of the name Wooden Wand. For his last Wooden Wand release, James and the Quiet (2007), Toth stated that he was deliberately trying to make an “un-weird” album. This is so much like Toth killed Jeff Tweedy and take over Wilco.

James Jackson Toth - Waiting in Vain

Evan Miller - Beeswax Ephemera

Evan Miller makes finger picking folk music with lots of nods towards the san fransisco freak folk scene and the midwestern noise scene. Iowa City's six-string guru Evan "Swain" Miller pounded out this release just in time for the Night People (Raccoo-oo-oon/Evan Miller) east coast tour of 2007. Handcrafted paper with impressive printing and stitching packaging on the physical level, while the audio supplied features Evan expounding on his intricating fingerpicking stylings while evoking the spirit of Fahey's finger angels into your most vivid coloured dream of raga-intricated satisfaction. Highly, highly recommended.

Evan Miller - Beeswax Ephemera

Currituck Co. - Ghost Man On First

With a transatlantic sound that brings together both UK and American folk influences, Currituck Co.'s Ghost Man On First CD is a unique blend of sonics that occasionally brings to mind an imaginary meeting of Bert Jansch and Robbie Basho, the mixture of covers and originals is a mesmerising stew. There's the traditional banjo/vocal two-step of "I Truly Understand", Jansch's "Silly Woman" and Nina Simone's "Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Hair" (reworked as the folk-raga piece "A Raga Called Nina") as well as Barker originals like "Requiem for John Fahey", the astounding "A Raga Called Pat Cohn", which blends acoustic guitar with tablas and Silvertone air organ to hallucinatory effect, and the fearsome "March of the People Who Do Not Know You", an electric guitar freakout bound (and likely aimed) to upset folk-purist dullards everywhere.

Currituck Co. - Ghost Man On First

Six Organs of Admittance - Compathía

Compathía, the classic album from Six Organs of Admittance, is so surprising. Ben Chasny, whose largely meditative Dark Noontide proved a major launching pad for this New Weird sound, has toned down the drone and made what is essentially a pop record. It retains the Eastern tinge of past recordings, but Chasny’s voice, and furthermore his lyrics, separate this from anything he’s done before this.

Six Organs of Admittance - Compathía

Avey Tare/David Grubbs - Crumbling Land

The sixteenth 12” in our split series, David Grubbs v Avey Tare presents two intriguing and highly creative artists whose work is defined in no small part by their desires to continually change and explore fresh territory. Both artists are now based in Brooklyn, NYC, and on this split, both have contributed tracks composed for separate art installations. The two sides neatly complement one another via markedly different sound-worlds, at the same time taking the split series itself into yet new areas. -FatCat

Avey Tare/David Grubbs - Crumbling Land

Hush Arbors - Landscape of Bone

This is the latest cd from the man Hush Arbors, better known Keith Wood, is a man with his finger in many pies, playing the timber strummer for Six Organs of Admittance, Sunburned Hand of the Man and Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice. Across the course of five extended tracks, Wood weaves a delicate pattern of distorted folk and pseudo-country held together by his rather peculiarly beautiful singing and acoustic guitar is backed up by rumbling distortion and echoes of tambourines somewhere in the ether, and Wood's moonlit poems are carried into our subconscious slowly and surely. Landscape of Bone is the latest and greatest from an increasingly vital artist who is sure to continue defying expectations and carving out a well-deserved place among the psych folk elite as long as he chooses to run.

Hush Arbors - Landscape of Bone