Curse You, Foreign Lands ~ a 14-track tape pulling together rural Greek demotika recordings from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. Soaring improvisations, odd-metered rhythms, and raw vocal performances oscillate between heartbreaking laments and ecstatic celebrations. Link in bio.
Artwork adapted from Edward Lear's Agia Paraskevi, Epirus, Greece (1857)
DINTE sub-label 333 returns with this double A-sided 45, lifting two of the choicest cuts from Devon Russell's LP of Curtis Mayfield cover versions - previously reissued for the first release on the imprint back in 2022, and long since sold out. Originally released in the early 80s on the High Music label, produced by Earl "Chinna" Smith with assistance from the great Mutaburaka. Pre-order via the link in bio.
"We grew up on the sounds of Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. Everyone in Jamaica loved them. His death was a terrible thing, but while there is life, there is hope."
- Devon Russell, 1994
Let Me Perish Without Return: Lament and Longing from the Fading Russian Empire, 1889-1917 is getting a vinyl pressing!
Compiled by the great @garysgotabanger , preorders are now open for shipping in early June, link in bio.
"At the turn of the last century, the Russian Empire stood at a crossroads, caught between the weight of its imperial past and the promise of a radically altered future. Recorded during a period of profound cultural transformation and unrest, the music collected here offers a haunting glimpse into that fragile moment in history. From playful and satirical melodies that were musichall staples to heartbreaking ballads reflecting the despair of those exiled to Siberian penal colonies, these songs provided both refuge and a reflection of the deep suffering experienced by many living under the regime. More than entertainment, they formed essential strands in the Russian cultural fabric of the time—songs sung in drawing rooms and taverns and on street corners and prison grounds.
I found this music in several gift and media stores in Forest Hills, Queens, and the Brighton Beach and Gravesend neighborhoods of Brooklyn. These and a few other communities are home to more than half a million people of Russian background currently living in New York City, many of them refugees. Back in the aughts and teens, when I was collecting music from New York’s innumerable immigrant-run stores, I would always wonder why this music, why here, and why now."
-- Gary Sullivan (Bodega Pop)
The Pain of Separation: Turkish Gazels, 1926-1935. Link in bio.
A collection of spellbinding, melismatic vocal improvisations taken from 78s cut between the mid 1920s to mid '30s - a period defined by the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s partition, the Greco-Turkish War and the compulsory population exchange that followed.
This same period also represented a time of intense efforts, following the establishment of the Republic, to westernise the new nation's music - coupled with a ban on traditional music education in schools, and later a complete ban on broadcasting Ottoman-Turkish classical music on the radio. As such these performances seem shrouded in an even more distant past, and feel quite intimately connected with forms of Greek amanes and rebetiko - having stemmed from the same Ottoman makam system, both with a subject-matter focussed on heartbreak, yearning, and pain.
Hard to sum up just how key NTS has been for the label and indeed personally over the past 11 years of the residency and beyond. The relationship between the show and the record label’s output is completely symbiotic at this point, and in terms of momentum behind the releases it’s utterly essential.
So join me in celebrating 15 years of @nts_radio at NTS 15 this coming weekend. I’ll be playing at Avalon Cafe this Saturday 18th.
🪦
The second edition from The End Books, Spanish Cante Jondo And Its Origin In Sindhi Music by
Aziz Balouch, is now in and shipping from @boomkatonline and other choice spots.
“Balouch imbibed the Islamic mysticism and devotional songs of Sindh in southeastern Pakistan, before travelling to Gibraltar in the early 1930s. There he became fascinated by the cante jondo across the border in southern Spain.
Running backwards, his book — originally published in 1955 — traces the roots of flamenco’s ‘deep song’ deep within the ancient musical culture of his homeland. It messes with geographical, musical, and spiritual boundaries, taking personal feeling and intuition, and free musical imagination, as its guide.
65 pages; with a litho printed cover and French flaps, more like a snazzy booklet than a book.
Absorbing and liberating.”
— @honestjonsrecords
Iivana Mišukka & Arja Kastinen - Iivana Mišukka
Death is Not the End, 2026
Second volume of Arja Kastinen’s re-interpretations and reassemblages of the music of Iivana Mišukka, a Karelian kantele player recorded to wax cylinder over 100 year ago by Finnish ethnomusicologist, Armas Otto Väisänen. I’ll not repeat here the great effort Death Is Not the End have gone to elsewhere to preserve and detail Mišukka’s life work (though I will recommend you seek out those words), and instead focus on Kastinen’s incredible re-rendering of a music otherwise lost within the dusty annals of some distant archive in Helsinki, or indeed lost completely - some of the original wax cylinders have not survived the passage of time, while some have been converted to tape on a few separate occasions (in mono in the 1960s, stereo in the 1980s). The sound of the music itself? It’s a somewhat wondrous, fantastical thing. The kantele is a many stringed traditional instrument with a hollowed out body that creates a zither-like effect, that heard here possesses a near-psychedelic quality that renders time malleable in its transportative qualities, not least I suspect because the music comes from so long ago. The kantele isn’t something you might not experience readily, though versions of this sound have crept into more recent recordings - Michael O’Shea’s metal stringed guitar, Megabasse, Jon Collin’s use of traditional Swedish instrumentation, Dorothy Carter, and perhaps even the homemade zither Blue Lake’s Jason Duggan has utilised on several records. Like much of the work of those artists, the results here are truly hypnotic, graceful and often otherworldly. Funny that olde time music made by a very real and modest-living person some 100 years ago could easily soundtrack a dissociative trip into some undefined future time. Is this what they mean by history now being a flat circle? These loops certainly suggest the sense of an eternal return.
FFO: Michael O’Shea, Jon Collin, Dorothy Carter, Megabasse // @deathisnot
"Blood Blood Song continues East of the Valley Blues’ streak of sublime, future-forward acoustic fantasias. For years, the Toronto-based duo, comprised of brothers Kevin and Patrick Cahill, has excelled at an earthy and pensive brand of instrumental music inspired by notions of folk music as a global, rather than regional, idiom.
While the duo’s elegant and unassuming virtuosity easily distinguishes East of the Valley Blues from its contemporaries of would-be Bashos and fledgling Faheys, it is the group’s telepathic improv that provides the certain x-factor that ultimately sets it apart from its peers. Throughout Blood Blood Song, Kevin Cahill’s percussive, prepared nylon string guitar---occasionally evoking the sound of a begena—remains in constant conversation with his brother Patrick’s nimble steel string abstractions. Though the stereo separation places the brothers on opposite corners of the stereo field—Kevin mostly on the right and Patrick mostly on the left—the two guitars often create the illusion of appearing to meet in the middle, where they blend into a single, dynamic sound.
Blood Blood Song is an album of uncommon intimacy and grace. Of music that doesn’t so much develop as unspool. Music that blooms"
- James Toth / Wooden Wand
Listen/pre-order now on LP & tape formats via the link in bio.
Recording: 23rd of August, 2025
Location: Southampton, ON
Master: Andrew Weathers
Artwork: Ryan Waldron
Design: Matt Irwin
“Researcher Arja Kastinen excavates another batch of 110-year-old wax cylinders to shine a spotlight on the work of Karelian kantele player Iivana Mišukka.
Like its predecessor, ‘Iivana Mišukka’ uses material recorded by folklorist Armas Otto Väisänen during his trips to Karelia in 1916 and 1917, when he began to archive folk music that was beginning to die out even then. Kastinen again replies to the original material by replaying the songs and letting her new recordings overlap the originals, showing us how the kantele sounds when it’s not garbled by grit from the wax cylinder. Mišukka played a kind of kantele that was new at the time, not cut from a single piece of wood but made from multiple parts and strung with 26 strings; when he died in 1919, not long after the archival material had been captured, his instrument was donated to Teppana Jänis, the subject of Kastinen’s first record.
And intriguingly, Mišukka only played 14 of the instrument’s strings, tuning them carefully so he could hover around the top end, the sound he found “more beautiful,” in his own words. So in contrast to Jänis’s material, Mišukka’s is almost ethereal, re-imagining local folk dances that Kastinen subsequently renders in full HD. It’s disorientating stuff that lurches back and forth between the centuries, offering us the reality and the fantasy, a fascinating study of folk tradition that’s almost historical fiction.”
Iivana Mišukka LPs and tapes now in and shipping from the one and only @boomkatonline
Back at the @nts_radio controls on Sunday night w/ a 2hr selection of chutney, tent singing & Indo-Trinidadian folk. Tune in 10pm til midnight GMT on channel one!
Shop open tomorrow w/ a pile of ghazals & Indian classical on cassette, a plethora of piano rolls(?) and a heap of wax cylinders(!) - alongside new DINTE releases and a handpicked range of books, tapes and records. Come through to Unit 15-17 in Holdrons Arcade, 135A Rye Lane, London SE15 5AW.
