Rawly ethereal, other-worldly singing by members of hill tribes in China, Vietnam, and Laos.

Sublimely refined songs about broken hearts, dazzling landscapes and lost kingdoms, with zither and flute accompaniment.

Shashmaqom trio improvisation from Uzbekistan, artful and serious: heartfelt singing and fine tanbur lute playing, set off by the accompaniment of dutor and rabob lutes, and doyra percussion.

Delicate, quietly profound 1959-60 chamber recordings of old masters, on a dozen instruments, notably the guqin zither, the pipa lute and the xiao flute.

Deeply moving singing from Ferghana in Central Asia — classical, slow, suspenseful and meditative in a world of pain — accompanied by lutes, chang (a psaltery), nay flute, dayera tambourine, and ghijak spike fiddle.

‘Mind-melting West Javanese gong pop, recorded in 2007 at Jugala studios in Bandung, based on a Javanese secular village music and dance tradition known as ketuk-tila, which was transformed into a popular studio music in the early 1960s by the producer Gugum Gumbira, founder of Jugala. With vocals by Idjah Hadidjah, one of the key historic voices of jaipongan, the situation here is disorientatingly heavy, low bpm gong pressure coming straight from the originators. It is a much less dainty affair than classical Javanese gamelan, and less febrile than the fully automatic Balinese variant. Hadidjah’s golden voice sews together shifting polyrhythms that would baffle a watchmaker; the whole is embroidered by rehab and underpinned by Mariana Trench level bass drops. A second disc features a set of thoughtful electronic reworkings’ (Frances Gooding, The Wire).

Charged, gritty, soulful pop yeh yeh from 1968-71, with backing by Malaysian legends like The Rhythm Boys, The Wanderers, The Flamingoes and The Falcons.
With a full-size, eight-page, colour booklet containing detailed biographical notes and Othman’s own rare photos.

‘The basic theme of the record can be summed up with one extremely powerful Bahasa Indonesian word, Tanah, which translates as ‘soil-ground-land-earth’. Shabara’s vocals are an expressive force, conjuring spirits from the soil with a deep, cosmic humility and respect for the land.
‘Suryadi has built a new guitar for these tracks and pushes the Senyawa sound into new territory, utilizing delay, loops, and other effects to constitute groundings of folk, metal, punk and drone, for Shabara to explore with his whispered poetry and jagged, sharp-as-a-kris animistic powers. There is simply no other sound like it.’

Seven songs by Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, rootsily mystical and vividly al fresco, spiralling from peripheral sites beside rubbish dumps and rice fields, into a busy market at the heart of Yogyakarta, from dawn till dusk.

A kind of intimate scrapbook of the startling collaboration between the techno maestro and this long-standing musical collective based in Bishkek, devoted to the roots music of Kyrgyzstan. Loose-leaved but balanced, lucid and intimate, it sets out from stunning a cappella and virtuosic komuz and kylak, mouth harp and traditional percussion: not field, but expert studio recordings, using marvellous vintage microphones, made over several days in Berlin. Further, a few of these are deftly treated by Moritz, using Reichian de-synced double-tracking, and discreet effects. Also two ten-minute dubs: a deadly, signature Berlin steppers, plus its version; and an echoing, mystical drum session, recorded live on stage in Bishkek. And a side-long, dream-like summation: the locomotive, oceanic, clangorous, dread Facets.
Ravishing, rooted, searching music; beautifully presented.

A rare Saravane-style lam, beautifully sung by Nang Soubane Vongath, and with rocking, virtuoso mouth-organ, with sixteen or so reed pipes, a metre-or-more long.

Subtle, calm classical trio music — for shakuhachi flute, koto zither and shamisen lute — influenced by Buddhism.