Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk & Pop music Vol. 1 [Sublime Frequencies]

An unbelievable collection of dynamic Cambodian music recorded between the 1960s and the 1990s, both in Cambodia and in the United States. A truly Khmer blend of folk and pop stylings - Cha-Cha Psychedelia, Phase-shifting Rock, sultry circle dance standards, pulsing Cambodian new wave, haunted ballads, musical comedy sketches, Easy-Listening numbers and raw instrumental grooves presented in an eclectic variety of production techniques. Male and female vocalists share the spotlight, embellished by roller rink organ solos, raunchy guitar leads and MIDI defying synthesizers. Culled from over 150 ageing cassettes found at the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library in California, these recordings showcase a pre and post holocaust Cambodian musical lineage that can't be ignored. -Sublime Frequencies

Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk & Pop music Vol. 1 [Sublime Frequencies]

Tickley Feather - s/t

Tickley Feather is Annie Sachs. She grew up in rural Virginia but has been living in Philadelphia for 5 years now. She has been using her time learning to write and record her own music as part of her nights spent at home, adapting to being the single mother of a young child. Sachs is a four tracking hobbyist who's musical spirit dwells in the realm of her own natural inclinations. She is a firm believer in doing what feels right, and in her recordings she really uses her solo status to great advantage. It adds up a very personal sound which involves all sorts of sensations from serendipity to silliness, and even the sweet and eerie sound of her little boy's voice as he tells her his ideas. Her recordings have been praised by critics from the start, with comparisons to work by artists such as Syd Barrett, Kate Bush, and Gilli Smith, and all the while being given credit for having a sound that is completely its own. Now she's coming in from the outside to share her songs and it's precious beyond value. -Paw-Tracks

Tickley Feather - s/t

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

Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez (Music of Niger) [Sublime Frequencies 2008]

Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blues, and folk in the local Tuareg styles at times entering into full-on electric guitar psychedelia. This music is performed with two electric guitars, a drum kit and a chorus of vocalists. The recordings were captured live in the city of Agadez in the Republic of Niger. Group Inerane was also featured in the Sublime Frequencies DVD “Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel”. Recorded by Hisham Mayet, this is the second Sublime Frequencies Vinyl Release. 180 gram vinyl, full-color gatefold jacket, and limited one-time pressing of 1000 copies.

Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez (Music of Niger) [Sublime Frequencies 2008]

V/A - Shadow Music of Thailand [Sublime Frequencies 2008]

"Shadow Music" was a broad term given to the Thai guitar pop movement of the 1960s and the groups that came out of it -- all under the profound influence of early Western rock and roll. British instrumental wonders The Shadows (as in Cliff Richards & The Shadows) were the origin of the genre's title -- also coined "Wong Shadow" or early Thai "string" music. Shadow records were often marketed as "Thai Modernized Music" which it was in the truest sense. Traditional Thai melodies were given the Shadow treatment -- incorporating rock, surf, a-go-go, exotica, soul, blues, Latin and otherworldly styles of the times. Inventive compositions and instrumental genius meet the occasional odd vocal arrangement and the results range from plaintive guitar and organ-driven lullabies to full-blown electric garage folk-psychedelia! Featured on this collection are a handful of the leading recorded artists from the time; P.M. Pocket Music, The Son of P.M., P.M.7, Jupiter and Johnny Guitar. Throughout the 1960s, these groups forged a unique and highly self-referential Thai sound. This is a one-time pressing of 1500 LP copies and each of these beauties comes in a full-color, heavy-duty tip-on gatefold jacket featuring gorgeous original Thai Shadow LP artwork, and of course, 180 gram vinyl -- so don't sleep on this one. Sublime Frequencies releases rule!!!!

V/A - Shadow Music of Thailand
(link borrowed from kind mr. jesse from hipinion forum)

Burning Star Core - The Very Heart of the World

A student of La Monte Young and Terry Riley's unorthodox school of scathing minimalism, Midwestern noise sculptor C. Spencer Yeh stands at the epicenter of the region's burgeoning noisecore underground. Like most of his noisenik peers, Yeh cut his teeth on a series of limited-edition CDRs and short-run LPs, collaborating with the likes of Thurston Moore, the Sunburned Hand of Man and Deerhoof in a career that is already well over a decade old. Over the past few years he has gained momentum, if not necessarily mainstream acceptance, and his current high standing among middle America's noisy tykes is certainly well deserved. While each of the album's four compositions is built upon layers of mind-melting drone and descending arpeggios, Yeh is careful never to bore his haywire vessels into the ground, adding layers of molten feedback and carefully chosen (if utterly demented) melody lines to weave their way through the debris. "Nyarliathotep" is similar in tone and execution to the works of Matthew Herbert, with millions and millions of miniscule sound bytes coalescing to create a horrifying approximation of a surgeon performing open-heart surgery while eating a turkey pot pie. Though "Benjamin" and "Catapults" were clearly crafted by human hands, they shudder along on decidedly robotic cadences, tossing off unnervingly Coil-esque chunks of frazzled industrial electronics and ice-caked piano lines. The only slight hint of humanity is the scratchy female voice that opens "Come Back Through Me", the album's monumental closer and piece de résistance, but even that is quickly swallowed up by a nuclear blast of sulfur-submerged guitar, and violated synths.

BXC - The Very Heart of the World

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

Tau Emerald - Travellers Two

This collaborative venture from Fursaxa's Tara Burke and Sharron Kraus came about when the two musicians missed a flight bound for Finland. Instead of rebooking or changing flights the duo decided to spend the week at Sharron's house recording this album. The end product of their endeavours is a three-quarter-hour collection of improvised acoustic psychedelia and avant-folk song crafting. There are comparatively few pieces that would fit into any conventional song template, but the largely a cappella, almost ecclesiastical sounding 'Hensbane' stands alongside the mediaeval-styled title track and the drifting sea shanty 'Mermaid's Call' as examples of what these two can do within the parameters of 'traditional' folk music. Elsewhere, you'll find a varied approach to instrumental music, with some pieces along the lines of 'Evening Wings' propelled by melodious string plucks and sonorous metallic drone tones, others taking the form of pure percussion, as on the magical 'Stoikite' while 'Laureola' establishes a reedy astract drone. With so much emphasis on variety and multi-instrumental exploration, Travellers Two is an album that never fails to maintain your interest, ranking amongst the best work of either artist. Highly recommended.

Tau Emerald - Travellers Two

MV & EE - The Ground Aint Dirty: Ragas of the Culvert

This is a deeply, sublimely, supremely psychedelic album that manages to be at the forefront of the 21st century free-folk avant-garde while simultaneously digging back to the roots of U.S. psych-rock by reclaiming the blues for mind-expanding purposes. The ghosts of Canned Heat and The Grateful Dead are the guiding spirits here, providing an electric, outlaw-blues context for jams that soon drift off into realms of mind-blown, pink-cloud psychedelia—with Valentine’s guitar adding layer on layer of dripping, gut-wrench fuzztone and Fahey-esque Americana—while Elder’s disembodied vocals drift through to us on a whiff of drug-haze eroticism.

MV & EE - The Ground Ain't Dirty: Ragas of the Culvert

Heather Leigh Murray - Devil If You Can Hear Me

Over the past few years, Heather Leigh Murray has distanced herself from the ex-Charalambides tag. She’s expanded her pedal steel approach across solo CD-Rs and group work that drifts from ecstatic, fuzz-heavy howls or sheer drone walls to the clean, non-affected whispers, weather shredding strings like standing six-string players or building instant, miniature drones on the horizontal instrument. Murray’s range on the pedal steel creates a singular, and often non-guitar, sound. The notes sculpted with each pull on “Wrecking Crew” seem transcribed from a trombone or accordion. Where “Porch Fighter” offers more pronounced vocals, here they envelope the instrument in a gauzy layer with only brief moments of focus. Rambles rambles rambles.

Heather Leigh Murray - Devil If You Can Hear Me

Shepherds - s/t

Shepherds are Brooklyn based psych-folk improvisational units that apparently no one needs convincing, but I’ll tell you anyway that this Shepherds is awesome, way better than the real kind. Approximately 35 minutes, this is three tracks of untitled, sufficiently-psyched woodsist electric guitar jams. first track includes some wavering woodwinds and scraping-branch accompaniment in MV & EE fashion, plus an intense little segue of live drumming with electric guitar with clean rhythm guitar plays through a moderate looping pace with tambourine percussion as acidic electric axes in the back flail and crash. Might damage your brain cells.

Shepherds - s/t

The Skaters - Dispersed Royalty Ornamanets

"Staggering low-grade psychedelic murk and splintered free jazz
soul from this new American duo (James Ferraro & Spencer Clark)
who deal in the same kind of densely populated occult space as
Double Leopards, using destroyed vocal loops, cracked stomp-boxes
and endless layers of accumulated fug. a technicolour vortex of
strangulated vocals, teeth-mashing chant and DIY trephining matched
with some the most beautifully hypnotic noise/drone alchemy."
- David Keenan / The Wire & Volcanic Tongue

The Skaters - Dispersed Royalty Ornamanets

Night Recordings From Bali [Sublime Frequencies]

The island of Bali is Indonesia's most popular place. With the modern beach resorts at Kuta and Legian, the lovely, tropic interior of palm-covered hills and rice paddies, and a rich variety of art, dance and music, it is a destination of choice for travelers around the world. But, regardless of their increasing role of servicing an ever-demanding tourist industry, the Balinese are a strong-willed and tight-knit society. The island is a tiny enclave of Hinduism within a massive nation of Islam, yet, their Gamelan music is faster, tighter, and louder than their mighty neighbors to the west, the Javanese. Balinese Gamelan stylings and the Ketchak dance are legendary throughout the world and have been immortalized in sound recordings and on film for decades. But, beneath the creeping exterior of a pseudo-western culture slowly overtaking an amazing tradition of unique human expression, the moods of the island are governed by magic and superstition. The hills, forests, rivers, and crossroads are alive with tales of demons (Leyaks) and a flesh-eating Ogress (Rangda). A lesser-known darker side of Balinese life secretly balances the lighter side "tropical paradise" of tourist brochures. This CD is composed of field recordings from August and September of 1989. The majority of the recordings were made at night in and around the villages of Peliatan and Ubud. Amidst the excerpts from Gamelan performances, rehearsals, and Ketchak, are sounds of the surrounding forests and mysterious crossroads where packs of dogs seem to take on forms of angry demons. Also encountered here are odd folk stylings for flute and drum, outdoor village theatre, and other various sound anomalies from the Balinese interior.

V/A - Night Recordings From Bali

Pocahaunted - Peyote Road

Evolving comes easier to some than others. A lot of the 21st century's chief underground ringbearers are happy mining the same psych-ditch for the same warped ore, tape after tape and day after day. But Eagle Rock, CA's Pocahaunted are too restless (and easily annoyed?) to sit still like that, and so spent all of '07 throwing ever weirder new figures and moods into their amplifier family, and "Peyote Road" shows the motion of their transformation agenda. The A side ritual, "Divine Flesh," stirs hand drums and chimes into a bellydancing blur of voice smoke and rhythm before breaking down into its base elements and slowly reforming. The flip side ("Heroic Doses") documents Pocahaunted's set opening for Thurston Moore on Halloween night in the wasted and highly un-mystical California desert town of Visalia. Bobb Bruno and Britt Brown backed up the ladies' blown-out but melancholy wailing wall with electronic drums and drones, and the recording treads a dim, no-fi path into a bleak and holy void. With tribal-psychedelia collage jacket artwork by Owleyes.

Pocahaunted - Peyote Road

Sun City Girls - You're Never Alone With a Cigarette

Recorded in July of 1988 during the sessions that produced Sun City Girls' most popular recording, these nine tracks represent the other half of songs which were originally prepared as a 2LP demo version of Torch of the Mystics for Placebo Records in 1989. The sequencing of all 20 tracks at the time was entirely different with the predominately instrumental tracks in this collection mixed in and around the mostly vocal tracks of what became Torch. Placebo went out of business shortly after this proposed 2LP idea was presented to them but Majora Records quickly stepped in to begin releasing most of the material. Included here are five tracks from early Majora singles: "100 Pounds of Black Olives" and "The Fine-Tuned Machines of Lemuria" (the complete unreleased 12-minute version) from the single "You're Never Alone with a Cigarette" and all three tracks from Record #1 of the double 7" Three Fake Female Orgasms -- "Plaster Cupids Falling from the Ceiling," "The Beauty of Benghazi," and "Souvenirs from Jangare." The short piece "Harmful Little Armful" is from the triple 7" box set Bruce Lee, Heroin, and the Punk Scene (from a Bay Area label Massacre at Central High) and rounding out the set are three unreleased studio tracks recorded the same day as much of the Torch LP: never before heard versions of "Amazon One," "Sev Acher," and "Wild World of Animals." This is the first of a multi-volume set of reissued singles, compilation, and unreleased tracks to be assembled and sequenced to play as full-length records. Vinyl editions may also appear in time.

SCG - You're Never Alone With a Cigarette