The unlikely Hawaiian-influenced Xabagies music of 1930s Greece: surrealist guitar portraits blurring Athens and Honolulu, haunting tropical serenades, wild acoustic orchestras, and heartbreaking steel guitar duets. With a 28-page booklet.

The Celtic harpist leading a dozen friends — guitar, piano, violins, flutes, zarb, zither — in spell-binding departures from Breton folk-song, originally released in 1976 but fresh and strange as a vermillion hydrangea in full bloom.

Noguès was to collaborate with Rabih Abou-Khalil, amongst others, but ‘we are reminded here of the Meredith Monk of Greensleeves, there the early albums of Brigitte Fontaine / Areski, elsewhere Emmanuelle Parrenin, Pascal Comelade… Noguès’ poetry is ever-changing: airy (Hunvre), cosmopolitan (Pinvidik Eo Va C’hemener), enigmatic (Ar Bugel Koar), profound (Ar Gemenerez), enchanting (Hirness An Devezhiou). And then there is Marc’h Gouez itself, between nursery rhyme and chamber music, weaving a fabulous, transfixing web. “Brittany equals poetry,” said André… Breton; and Kristen Noguès proves it to be true.’

Lovely stuff; dream-like, captivating; quite different. Check it out.

‘Heady, raw, druggy songs of love, dread, hardship, and yearning, recorded in Athens between 1932 and 1936, when Markos was already a master of the bouzouki. His forceful, clean playing compliments his hoarse voice and his stunning rhythmic sensibility, the result of his years as a champion zebekiko dancer. Tracks build and spiral outward, his open-note drones and melodic lines drawing calls of ecstasy and encouragement from his fellow musicians. These recordings mark the height of rebetika, the brief period between the music’s emergence on the recording scene in the early 1930s and government censorship of all lyrics starting in 1936. During the Axis occupation there was no rebetika recording, and though Markos had some hits in the years after the war, he never again attained this level. These are the dizzying, entrancing, and heaviest works of one of the great artists of the 20th century.’

Taut horror soundtrack from 1963: dramatically orchestral, with jazzy intervals.

Dazzling, smash-hit, fully-fledged blend of flamenco, reggaeton and post-Timbaland r&b, with a Middle Eastern flavour to the singing. It’s the re-telling of a medieval story about a woman locked in a tower by her husband, and her escape. There’s even an Arthur Russell sample.
Lost in the Christmas rush here, but so nice we’re serving it twice.

The forgotten music of the Austro-Hungarian diaspora in the mid-west of the United States. An Ian Nagoski compilation to inaugurate the label, with a cover by Eric from Mississippi Records.