|
|
|
|
viewing 1 To 15 of 15 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 015LP
|
Maher Shalal Hash Baz's Je Est Un Autre is not a "best of", it is a reflection of Tori Kudo's evolution as a composer, from playing with seasoned musicians, to playing with people just starting out, from playing meticulous scores, to playing call and response melodies written down, to the songs presented here. These are instant improvisations based on keyboard compositions that Tori plays for the group. Yes, that is it. He plays a recording of himself on the keyboard, with singing or humming sometimes and he leaves it to the "big band" to interpret this on the spot. Sometimes, one can make out the melody, other times it is quite obscure, as if a sort of common shyness flows out of the collected instruments assembled. And other times, well, it is a big party. Kudo and the group were invited to tour Europe to celebrate 20 years of the project Le Ton Mité, members of which are absorbed into the ensemble. The recording evolves from the static sound of hermetic conditions to a live concert in the later tracks. The studio here, a trendy concert hall in Brussels. One can hear the applause of the brave ears that weathered the ride of accidental psychedelia and the moiré of various notes fading into and out of each other. This is only a sliver of the material from the 20-hour recording marathon documenting the new composing/playing style of Kudo, as well as snippets from the last concert of the March 2018 tour. Perhaps the album should be called Je Est Un Autre: Volume One in a vague reference to the My Brother The Wind series from Sun Ra. In any case, here are four sides of ten inch vinyl to take the listener on a journey into Maher: Je Est Un Autre...
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 014LP
|
Okraina presents Linus Vandewolken's Het Vlier, Een Hommel Op Aarde. "What you are listening to is the sound of a forgotten instrument. Nowadays it seen rarely outside of museums in Brussels and other places you most likely have never heard of. It is not spectacular; its simplest version is just a long thin box with strings on top. Some of the strings are melody strings, which have frets placed underneath them, the others are drone strings that have no frets. Traditionally it was strummed with a goose feather and notes were made by sliding a hard stick with a handle, from fret to fret on the melody strings leaving the drone strings ringing openly. The constant hum of the drones is where the name of the instrument comes from: bumblebee, which in Flemish, is a hommel. The hommel has now all but disappeared from the collective memory of Flanders. If it is seen outside of a display case, it is usually being played in a static way, denied the right to evolve and find a more contemporary voice. I saw the hommel for the first time years ago at the Volksinstrumentenmuseum in Gooik. Curious to how it would sound, I suggested to my father that we make one. It's not the most elaborate example of a hommel, but, with the relationship I have forged with it over time, it's a beauty to me. I do not play in a traditional way: I pluck, fingerpick, tap, and bow amplified flat-wound electric guitar strings. I change the notes with my fingers, metal sticks, steel tubes, and the hard stick with a wooden handle which has a special name : the vlier. I play in a Eb/Bb tuning to be in harmony with the tin whistles you hear from time to time and occasionally play shakers. The songs in this collection are not traditional either, they are inspired by cycling around Flanders and the landscape that surrounds my home in Niemandaal. Until I was 40, I only played at home. Since my first public concert, I have been invited to play more in many locations. Thanks to Okraïna, you now have this record in your hands. I chose to keep the recordings quite raw in the hope that the natural reverb and warmth of your listening space can evoke the music's spirit.'' --Linus Vandewolken
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 012LP
|
2x10" version. Alasdair Roberts has worked with Drag City Records for some 20 years, releasing more than ten records featuring both interpretations of traditional songs and his own songwriting. He has played with Will Oldham, Jason Molina, and many others, and is now part of The Furrow Collective. In addition to being a fine fiddler in the Scottish traditional style, Neil McDermott is currently researching the musical and political engagement of the 1960s Scottish folk scene with the anti-nuclear movement. Tartine de Clous (Geoffroy Dudouit, Thomas Georget, and Guillaume Maupin) is a singing trio originally from the department of Charente in western France. Following in the footsteps of some of the great French groups of the late 20th century folk revival (such as Mélusine and La Bamboche), they sing largely unaccompanied three-part harmony arrangements of the traditional songs of France... and Scotland! In early 2016, Alasdair Roberts spoke of his admiration for Tartine de Clous' first LP, Sans Folklore (2015), in an article in English folk magazine, fRoots. After a first musical encounter in Glasgow in January 2017, alongside local fiddler Neil McDermott, the five of them reunited in December 2017. They explored a common set of songs, French, Scottish, and Roberts originals, and recorded them live, with an audience, at the Cube Microplex, an amazing arts venue and progressive social wellbeing enterprise in central Bristol. Recorded live by Neil McDermott at Cube Cinema, Bristol on December 8th and 9th 2017; "Rosie Anderson" recorded at the Old Dentist, London. Artwork by Gwénola Carrère (Brussels). Mastered by Sam Smith, SJS Mastering, Glasgow.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
OKRAINA 012CD
|
Alasdair Roberts has worked with Drag City Records for some 20 years, releasing more than ten records featuring both interpretations of traditional songs and his own songwriting. He has played with Will Oldham, Jason Molina, and many others, and is now part of The Furrow Collective. In addition to being a fine fiddler in the Scottish traditional style, Neil McDermott is currently researching the musical and political engagement of the 1960s Scottish folk scene with the anti-nuclear movement. Tartine de Clous (Geoffroy Dudouit, Thomas Georget, and Guillaume Maupin) is a singing trio originally from the department of Charente in western France. Following in the footsteps of some of the great French groups of the late 20th century folk revival (such as Mélusine and La Bamboche), they sing largely unaccompanied three-part harmony arrangements of the traditional songs of France... and Scotland! In early 2016, Alasdair Roberts spoke of his admiration for Tartine de Clous' first LP, Sans Folklore (2015), in an article in English folk magazine, fRoots. After a first musical encounter in Glasgow in January 2017, alongside local fiddler Neil McDermott, the five of them reunited in December 2017. They explored a common set of songs, French, Scottish, and Roberts originals, and recorded them live, with an audience, at the Cube Microplex, an amazing arts venue and progressive social wellbeing enterprise in central Bristol. Recorded live by Neil McDermott at Cube Cinema, Bristol on December 8th and 9th 2017; "Rosie Anderson" recorded at the Old Dentist, London. Artwork by Gwénola Carrère (Brussels). Mastered by Sam Smith, SJS Mastering, Glasgow.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
OKRAINA 013LP
|
Roy Montgomery on the release: "My first deep exposure to Leonard Cohen was the Bird on a Wire documentary by Tony Palmer (1974), which was, against the odds, broadcast on public television in New Zealand around 1974 or 1975. At age 15 or 16 I thought it was too dark. A few years later, in the late '70s, I wanted things darker. The first Cohen LP was very clever but a little too 'up'. The second was too public and political for me. Songs of Love and Hate (1971) seemed more honest, more about personal failure. I liked it, although Cohen tended to disown it, especially 'Dress Rehearsal Rag' and 'Last Year's Man', neither of which he performed live later on. I like 'Last Year's Man' for the same reason I like Nick Drake's 'Poor Boy'. It wallows and parodies at the same time. I came across the Suzuki Omnichord OM-27 because it was mentioned in relation to another Canadian, Joni Mitchell. It looked like a mystery box of potentially very good or very bad sounds, like a Bontempi chord organ customized for space travel in a Stanley Kubrick film. Irresistible... I was fortunate to meet Jessica Moss because of the 12-hour drone event at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht in November 2017. I thought it would be cool to jam with some of the other people scheduled to play their own pieces so I asked the organisers, Bob Helleur and Jacob Hagelaars, to sound out the other droners a few weeks before the festival. Jessica replied, I sent a sample piece, and we talked, more than rehearsed, a day before the performance. We did our piece live and then some months later I sent her a recorded piece to which she added her magical playing."
Personnel: Roy Montgomery - vocal and keyboard; Jessica Moss - violin; Emma Johnston and Arnie van Bussel - backing vocal on "Last Year's Man". Recorded mainly with a first generation Suzuki Omnichord OM-27 onto a Tascam DP-01FX 8-track Portastudio, January to March 2018. Illustration by Gwénola Carrère, Brussels, October 2018. Mixed by Arnie van Bussel at Nighshift Studios, May 2018; Mastered by Harris Newman, Grey Market Mastering, Montréal, May 2018.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
OKRAINA 009CD
|
Léonore Boulanger and Maam-Li Merati met each other in Paris in 2011 at a concert of Azerbaijani master-musician Alim Qasimov and his daughter Ferghana Qasimova. Maam-Li Merati is an Iranian musician that was born in Kermanshah, near the Iraqi border. In addition to having a doctorate in Musicology, he has worked with artists such as Iranian singer Shahram Nazeri and French novelist Luis Bunuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (for a project devoted to 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi). Shortly after their meeting, Maam-Li Merati started to teach the art of Persian classical music to Léonore Boulanger, a young French musician that released three albums on the multi-faceted label Le Saule. During the spring of 2015, they recorded some first lyrical odes, some dastgāhs for two voices, and traditional string instruments that would later become the "Dastgah-e Nava", "Dastgah-e Shur" "Avaz-e Abu Ata", and "Avaz-e Bayat-e Tork" portions of La Maison d'Amour. Later, Matthieu Ferrandez, church organist and researcher in electronic music, joined the "Dastgah-e Mahur", "Avaz-e Bayat-e Esfahan", and "Dastgah-e Homayun" pieces, weaving a cosmic lace with the sighs of harmonium and acoustic organs
"You, you traded me for nothing Me, I still choose that I wouldn't trade a single hair yours for the entire world" --Saadi Shirazi (13th century).
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
OKRAINA 010LP
|
The film Calling The New Gods, by Vincent Moon, is the document of musicians Rully Shabara and Wukir Suriyadi of the group Senyawa playing outside -- and being filmed on location -- tracing a path from the outskirts of Yogyakarta, Java (on the border of a rice field, on the edge of a garbage dump, etc.) until the center of the city (in the middle of a market, in a fair). In a sort of mandala, of centripetal spiral, during an entire day, from dawn-until-dusk, the film -- with soundscapes shared between the music of Senyawa and field recordings -- captures the powerful, unique, and fascinating presence of the Indonesian duo in the middle of the physical landscapes and human mosaic that helped create it. Two-and-a-half years after the first contact between Okraina and the musicians and filmmaker, the time has come to expose the work to a new audience: Seven songs from the film's soundtrack on a 10" vinyl, with an added etymological obviousness -- that this recording is released on Okraïna, which is Russian for "outskirts", the "suburbs". Filmed, recorded, and mixed by Vincent Moon, in situ, in Yogyakarta (Indonesia, Java) in January 2012, with the help of Aniza Santos and the people of Yogyakarta. Mastering and vinyl cut by Fred Alstadt. Cover art by Gwénola Carrère.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 011LP
|
Delphine Dora and Mocke present Le Corps Défendant on Okraïna. Ned Netherwood of Was Ist Das? on the release: "There is something special about when artists like these collaborate. Two independent talents, both completely self-sufficient choosing to come together and see what happens, to let the muses mingle and share the results with the rest of us. What we have here, however, is not some quick jam caught on tape but a long distance collaboration carefully put together over three years. The result is something that gives us a broad overview of the two talents spotlighted here, showcasing many different moods, sounds and styles. Created like an exquisite corpse story they sent each other music to work on with no instructions or suggestions, just some inspiring mix tapes of everyone from Duke Ellington to Harry Partch. They clearly found their way. As well as her own music (which ended up on Pitchfork's best of 2015 list), Delphine runs the excellent Wild Silence record label. As well as being a solo artist, Mocke has played with the likes of Arlt, Holden and Midget! On this record, Mocke plays the guitar and Delphine sings and plays everything else. He's one hell of a guitar player, bringing to mind Loren Connors, John Fahey and anyone who ever took a six string and mastered it their own damn way. Delphine sings sweetly, sometimes from classic texts or as a glossolalia (divinely expressing without words), though to a non-French speaker you would swear was some lost classic pop song reinterpreted in her own style. Both Delphine and Mocke are originally from Paris but both have long since left, Mocke for Brussels and Delphine for the deepest French countryside. That difference can be found in their music. Mocke's music is urbane with a touch of inner-city paranoia. Delphine's music always sounds isolated in a big landscape. They complement each other as opposites. Like all Okraïna releases, the stunning artwork is by Gwénola Carrère and I can't think of anyone better suited to try and encapsulate this stunningly varied and vivid album. The title does not translate to English as it is a poetic corruption of a common phrase. I think something similar happened to common music on this album." Personnel: Delphine Dora: voice, piano, prepared piano, keyboards, celesta, glockenspiel, piano, guitar strings, violin, shruti box, field recordings, objects; Mocke - guitar.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
OKRAINA 008CD
|
When David Greenberger first embarked on what has become a life-long journey, drummer Chris Corsano was not yet five years old! In 1979, after graduating from art school in Boston, Greenberger took the job of activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home, an all-male elder care facility in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and began collecting the stories, poems and music reviews of its aged patients for what became his Duplex Planet project, an undertaking that would eventually encompass nearly 200 issues of a digest-sized magazine, a series of CDs, books, comics, and performance art. Eventually the nursing home closed, but David has remained engaged in what has become the central art form of his life: the "art of conversation." Three decades later, Chris Corsano set in motion the project present here. With guitarist and banjo player Glenn Jones, a longtime friend of both Greenberger and Corsano, the three began recording in Greenberger's living room in upstate New York. In just three days, with no advance preparation, they recorded the 28 tracks that make up An Idea In Everything. Corsano improvised, Jones invented new tunings for his banjo and guitar on the fly, and Greenberger selected and read stories in direct response to the music. Everything was spontaneous and live. Despite the dark and sad feeling of some of the texts (dealing with aging, memory loss, etc.), there is also humor, joy and grit. The resulting is a rollercoaster of emotions, a glittering patchwork of sonic atmospheres and an oral encyclopedia on dozens of subjects. David Greenberger on the release: "When newcomers hear that I have regular conversations and interviews with elderly people, they assume I collect oral history. What that assumption implies is that when one grows old we become solely a repository of our past. From the start, my mission has been to offer a range of characters who are already old, so that we can get to know them as they are in the present, without celebrating or mourning the loss of who they were before." Recorded by Chris Corsano in Greenwich, NY, February 2013; Mixed by Matthew Azevedo and Glenn Jones in Jamaica Plain, MA; Mastered by Matthew Azevedo at Endless Audio, Providence, RI. Illustration by Gwénola Carrère. Co-released with David Greenberger's Pel Pel label.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 003LP
|
2013 release. Recorded in December 2008 in Ghent, Belgium - equal parts science experiment and Geeshie Wiley tribute. Mutual admirers, Harris Newman and Ignatz met in Belgium to play a duo concert for the Étoiles Polaires festival, and have since done a smattering of shows together in Canada. Features re-imaginings of a few of Ignatz's best loved hits, as well as original compositions for electric guitar, lap steel, acoustic guitar, and Gakken synthesizer. Five songs, 39 minutes. All songs by Harris Newman and Ignatz. Originally released as a tour-only CD-R in 2009. Recorded at the Vooruit in Ghent in December 2008; Remastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montréal in September 2013; Artwork by Gwénola Carrère in Brussels.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
OKRAINA 007LP
|
2015 release. In the company of Gilles Poizat (guitar, trumpet, voice), Catherine Hershey sings the poems of her grandfather Galen E. Hershey, pastor-farmer in Pontiac, Michigan. The poems come from a collection of poetry written between 1946 and 1976. Features Frédéric Jean on whistle on "Dilemma & Decision". Mixed by Gilles Olivesi; Mastered by Harris Newman; Illustration by Gwénola Carrère. Florian Caschera on the release: "As his name readily admits, this disc of tranquil hallucination (but beware) bursts forth in all its absurd duration around eight poems that fire the Reverend Galen Hershey, grandfather of Catherine Hershey, who sings here, recorded more or less in secret, in his notebooks. They are simple and beautiful poems, which have the simplicity and beauty of poems which are recorded more or less secretly in notebooks. The secret of the notebooks is more or less the simplest and the most beautiful of the secrets... Gilles Poizat, trembling in the reverb of a patient guitar, tells his furtive notes like a string of bones, and pulls a trumpet the kind of subtly diffracted traits that are heard on Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom (1974), whistles as we hide to cry and sing like a baby whale dreaming (or he shouts, like Jad Fair stuck at the top of the slide, it could make you laugh but it's heartbreaking). Catherine Hershey, eyes wide open on what comes out of her mouth and makes of this smoke, gives to her melodies the curve of the most intriguing calves. They are sad and full songs, somewhat veiled, whose hearts overflow everywhere, but with a quiet dawn sure of its dawn legitimacy. As all the music summons another, one will think of the rhymes of Ivor Cutler, the refrain of Pearl in The Night of the Hunter (1955), to the sweetest ballads of Shirley Collins, to some Elizabethan airs as they were already, in another life, made effervescent by Syd Barrett. We will think of it without it hindering us in anything. And then we will not think at all, too busy to look after our blues, these exquisite blues bring our souls the songs which we know will never be forgotten."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 008LP
|
2016 release. When David Greenberger first embarked on what has become a life-long journey, drummer Chris Corsano was not yet five years old! In 1979, after graduating from art school in Boston, Greenberger took the job of activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home, an all-male elder care facility in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and began collecting the stories, poems and music reviews of its aged patients for what became his Duplex Planet project, an undertaking that would eventually encompass nearly 200 issues of a digest-sized magazine, a series of CDs, books, comics, and performance art. Eventually the nursing home closed, but David has remained engaged in what has become the central art form of his life: the "art of conversation." Three decades later, Chris Corsano set in motion the project present here. With guitarist and banjo player Glenn Jones, a longtime friend of both Greenberger and Corsano, the three began recording in Greenberger's living room in upstate New York. In just three days, with no advance preparation, they recorded the 28 tracks that make up An Idea In Everything. Corsano improvised, Jones invented new tunings for his banjo and guitar on the fly, and Greenberger selected and read stories in direct response to the music. Everything was spontaneous and live. Despite the dark and sad feeling of some of the texts (dealing with aging, memory loss, etc.), there is also humor, joy and grit. The resulting is a rollercoaster of emotions, a glittering patchwork of sonic atmospheres and an oral encyclopedia on dozens of subjects. David Greenberger on the release: "When newcomers hear that I have regular conversations and interviews with elderly people, they assume I collect oral history. What that assumption implies is that when one grows old we become solely a repository of our past. From the start, my mission has been to offer a range of characters who are already old, so that we can get to know them as they are in the present, without celebrating or mourning the loss of who they were before." Recorded by Chris Corsano in Greenwich, NY, February 2013; Mixed by Matthew Azevedo and Glenn Jones in Jamaica Plain, MA; Mastered by Matthew Azevedo at Endless Audio, Providence, RI. Illustration by Gwénola Carrère.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2x10"
|
|
OKRAINA 004LP
|
2014 release. Rose compiles two duos recorded at two radio sessions over two ten inch records. Ed Askew and Joshua Burkett live for Rob 'Hatch' Miller's show on WFMU in October of 2007. Ed Askew - words and music, voice, harmonica; Joshua Burkett - tiple; Recorded Irene Trudel of WFMU. Ed Askew and Steve Gunn live for Greg Healey's show on Dandelion Radio in March of 2010. Ed Askew - words and music, voice, harmonica; Steve Gunn - tiple; Recorded by Ed Askew. Re-mastered by Harris Newman of Grey Market Mastering, Montréal, in 2014. Artwork by Gwénola Carrère.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
OKRAINA 005LP
|
2015 release. Yiddish-Speaking Socialists Of The Lower East Side by Ed Sanders (b. 1939), founder of the mythical Fugs in 1964 and also a writer, publisher, activist, etc., is an epic piece of almost 18 minutes in length, a vocal setting of a dense and reasoned text that runs to eight typed pages, 1400 words, 8500 characters. First issued on cassette in 1991 by the label Hyperaction P.C.C., the piece recalls an almost fifty-year history of Jewish militancy in New York by poetic means - combining historical scholarship, emotion and clarity, the echoes of the past found in the present: of the pogroms and escape from Eastern Europe in the 1880s up to the death of Meyer London, the Socialist member of Congress, in 1926 (not overlooking exile, the crossing of the Atlantic, arrival at Ellis Island, back-breaking work in the sweatshops, the creation of political parties and trade unions, the outbreak of the First World War - the rupture in the narrative caused by this is marked here by the passage from the A-side to the B-side of the record). This is a literary project that is simultaneously ambitious and highly personal and which cannot help but recall America: A History In Verse (nine volumes published between 1998-2008), which has occupied Ed Sanders for almost 15 years and which, over more than 3000 pages, recounts in verse the history - both poetic and political - of the United States. For this recording of Yiddish-Speaking Socialists Of The Lower East Side, Ed Sanders accompanies himself on a "pulse lyre", a small, finger-operated synthesizer which he invented himself in order to accompany the declamation of his texts in the manner of the acoustic lyre used by the ancient poets (Sanders studied Greek at university). Yiddish-Speaking Socialists Of The Lower East Side is a text (and a recording) of dual resonance, animated by the fits and starts of history as well as the rhythm of the writing (and reading) of Ed Sanders. This reissue was re-recorded in mono in 2006; Mastered by Harris Newman (Grey Market Mastering, Montréal 2014); Illustrations by Gwénola Carrère; Comes in a gatefold sleeve.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
10"
|
|
OKRAINA 006LP
|
2015 release. Eloïse Decazes and Delphine Dora play and sing Luciano Berio. Folk Songs (1971) is a cycle of traditional songs (or traditional inspiration) collected in different countries, collected, and arranged (or composed) by the Italian composer Luciano Berio for his wife, the singer Cathy Berberian. Almost fifty years later, Eloïse Decazes and Delphine Dora took the liberty to re-record them in their own way. Features Mocke Depret on guitar "Rossignolet Du Bois", "A La Femminisca", and "Ballo". Mastered by Harris Newman at Gray Market Mastering, Montreal in December of 2014; Illustration by Gwénola Carrère.
|
|
|
|