The Latest
Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling are pleased to announce details of a brand new EP of collaborative recordings with a collective of Indian musicians, the Dharohar Project, in July. The British artists embarked on a unique tour of India back in December 2009, spending a number of days with Rajasthani folk musicians in a makeshift studio at an arts & culture school in Delhi. The fruits of those recordings …
Martha Tilston’s Lucy & The Wolves is her third solo album (although her backing band The Woods feature heavily throughout ) and is her first new album since 2007’s Of Milkmaids and Architects (2008’s Till I Reach the Sea being a compilation EP). The album marks a move away from the more political and social concerns of her earlier work (although these are still prevalent on Lucy & The Wolves …
Inter-Be is the debut album by PETER WOLF CRIER, the Minneapolis-based duo of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen. The album was born on a single summer night when Pisano felt a torrent of creativity after what had felt, to him, like an interminably long dry spell. He shared the songs with Moen, and over the months that followed, at Moen’s home, these rough-hewed tunes became what they are now: a …
Following an Irish immigrant carpenter from coastal Queens to the Catskills and beyond,The Builder is an American existential portrait that explores the gulf between the idea of a thing and the thing itself. Having set off to the New York countryside to construct a reproduction of the earliest of American cape houses, the protagonist (Colm O’Leary) finds himself overcome by an inexplicable fatigue.
Sharon Van Etten will be putting out her second record, a seven-song collection called epic, on October 5th through Ba Da Bing. The track below is the last song off that. If you’ve seen her live recently (like at the Chris Knox Benefit), you may have caught it. In April, the song was covered at the Music Now Fest in Cincinnati by Bon Iver and members of the National.
In 2008, the Aga Khan Music Inititative and the San Fracisco-based Kronos Quartet inaugurated a pioneering musical collaboration that brought the quartet together with leading musicians from Azerbaijan and Afghanistan to create music rooted Central Asian traditions. Over a period of nine months, Kronos met with renowned Azerbajani vocalist Alim Qasimov and his ensemble, and with Afghan rubab virtuoso Homayin Sakhi, to compose, arrange, perform, and record a body of …
Raised in a large, musical farm family in Rappahannock County, Virginia, John Jackson (1924–2002) was the most important black Appalachian musician to come to broad public attention during the mid-1960s. Smithsonian Folkways is proud to present Rappahannock Blues, a new collection of previously unreleased live recordings by John Jackson mostly made at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
UNITE: A Gathering of Strangers is the latest ambitious world fusion project from Hamid Man Tu and Tim Whelan of Transglobal Underground. UNITE stands for URBAN NATIVE INTEGRATED TRADITIONS OF EUROPE. Taking stock of their group of collaborators and co-conspirators across Europe, they were looking to create something that reflected both that network and the growth of the contacts and movements that have taken place over the time that Trans-Global …
The Staves, comprising of sisters Jessica, Camilla and Emily, are a melodious folk trio from Watford who are garnishing some well deserved praise for their infectious and seductive harmonies. Their new EP, “Facing West” is an excellent introduction to the girls’ music and a real promise of treats to come.
Music has been used to spread messages; political, romantic, historical, for hundreds, probably thousands of years. It’s an effective medium and the musical traditions we’re so proud of owe their very existence to this fact. The trouble is, of course, that almost any message is open to interpretation. This CD, and the Folk Against Fascism movement it supports, have come about because of the misappropriation of British folk music and …
Never judge a book by its cover…or a record for that matter. However I love the pleasant surprise that often comes in doing just that. That was how I came to stumble upon Vadoinmessico, a five-piece based in London with members hailing from Mexico, Italy and Austria. They met at music college in the city in 2006 and it’s no wonder the summertime drizzle and grey skies made them yearn …