This month’s theme is textural contrast, from the interplay between Australian Aboriginal chants and synthesized arpeggios to an exploration of breath through Mongolian throat singing and woodwinds; lo-fi British folk demos juxtaposed with crystal-clear South Korean indie production; digitized Russian Far Eastern ethnographic tapes amidst reinterpreted academic treatises on folklore—what connects this month’s releases is an evocation of place, real or imagined, through the varied textures of folk and traditional instrumentation.
Yirinda
Yirinda
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Yirinda is a collaboration between Butchulla singer Fred Leone and producer Samuel Pankhurst. They combine the ancient with the modern without resorting to pastiche, Leone’s voice changing and recontextualizing Pankhurst’s slick, synthesized soundscapes rather than serving as decoration. On “Yunma (Sleep),” Pankhurst’s frantic polyrhythms dance alongside Leone’s slipstream chanting. Leone’s voice refuses to be relegated to a lost past, reasserting itself amidst a hermetic electronic soundscape.
Mohammad Syfkhan
I Am Kurdish
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Known for seeking out the nyahh in Irish music of all genres, Nyahh Records dips a toe in the Mediterranean with a release from Kurdish artist Mohammad Syfkhan. Although Syfkhan is now based in Ireland, it’s not completely out of left field musically either—ethnomusicologists have speculated on the maritime links between Irish sean-nós melodies and Middle Eastern traditions for quite some time. Syfkhan sings of small joys—a warm coffee, a glint in a lover’s eye—alongside devastating loss (“Wasted Years”), the jangle of his bouzouki leading the way. At its core, it’s a celebration of the Kurdish people and culture, proudly proclaiming presence amidst violent erasure in his homeland.
胡格 Huge
凤孔 Air through Holes
Hailing from Inner Mongolia, China, Hugjiltu is a veteran of the Beijing music scene whose work with rock band Hanggai and folk-rock act Ajinai fused Mongolian sounds with subcultural genres like punk in the city’s underground. His recent solo work experiments with notions of Mongolian identity, tradition, and improvisation through a mix of modern and folk instruments. He improvises on the hujia, a Mongolian double reed wind instrument, alongside kouxia (jaw harp), didgeridoo, and throat singing, using breath to conjure a startling variety of rhythms and textures.
Milkweed
Folklore 1979
Cassette
On Milkweed’s Folklore 1979, tape hiss, false starts, and esoteric tales gathered from a ‘70s folklore journal are repackaged into 11 minutes of lo-fi backbeats that deconstruct the notion of folk. According to Milkweed, anything can become folklore, as they told The Quietus earlier this month. The mysterious duo (known only as G and R) call themselves “slacker trad,” but the irruption of various samples and spoken word segments among tradfolk vocal stylings might be called plunderfolk. These snippets rarely adhere to a unified set of formal conventions—a radio segment on the extinction and subsequent return of horses in America precedes vocalist G’s noisy wail on “The Legend of the Pacing White Mustang,” while “Letter to the Editor: Fairy Gold” layers a lilting flute melody and twinkling chimes over a pensive drone.
Нанайцы, Николай Батунович Киле
Архивы Николая Батуновича Киле. “Нани” (Нанайцы) часть 1
Requiring Google Translate for those who can’t read Russian, this is a collection of unprocessed digitized reels of the folksong of the Nanai people indigenous to Russia’s Far East. Most of these songs are untitled and unattributed, collected by the late Russian ethnomusicologist Kile Nikolay Botunovich, though those whose performers are known are written alongside their recording number: for example, 375, 395, 396 are sung by Kile Nikolai Gavlakovich from the village of Nizhny Khalby. “387 Эй буэ боапу,” as translated in a book by Tatiana Diomidovna Bulgakova, is an ode to the taiga, singing of the landscapes that characterize life in Russia’s eastern villages. The liner notes, originating from archives at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Vladivostok), bring up as many questions as they answer. This trove of folk songs is both a record of a little-known musical tradition and a testament to the incomplete and conditional nature of institutional ethnomusicology.
Damsel Elysium
Whispers From Ancient Vessels
Vinyl LP, Poster/Print, Book/Magazine
Inspired by “fantasy worlds and anime, paganism, and astronomy,” Whispers from Ancient Vessels, the debut EP from Damsel Elysium, is as gothic as they come. Elysium, who is autistic and possesses a unique sensitivity to sound, transforms that sensitivity into worlds of mysticism and wonder. Her explorations are grounded by a rumbling double bass, at times referencing the natural world while at others transcending it. “Shoreline” incorporates delicate aquatic movements with haunting strings; “Dream of the Rood” has the voice of medieval history professor Mike Bintley reciting the Old English poem of its title, reflecting on the Crucifixion of Christ. With these compositions, Damsel Elysium exhorts us to listen “to the wisdom of the earth,” enveloping us in a world of sound.
Billy Childish & William Loveday Intention
Great Loveday Wonder : The Collected Demo Recordings
2 x Vinyl LP
Billy Childish has been a prolific artist in various areas of media since the ‘70s, with an idiosyncratic career that’s earned him an esteemed place in the public imagination even as he espouses amateurism and personal joy. This collection of demo recordings is a cross section of his musical career, containing the kind of seemingly effortless lo-fi artistry that has characterized his life’s work. Childish sings in a straight-talking, confessional style, using a few strummed chords to propel his narratives: “I Don’t Like The Man I Am (Take 1)” is the best example of this, alternating between his self-effacing heartbreak and a plaintive harmonica melody.
C. Diab
Immero
Vinyl LP
C. Diab creates pillowy and dense harmonic layers with modular synths, bowed guitar, and a bit of banjo, arriving at a sound that’s as pastoral as it is patient. Not exactly classical, folk, or electronic, Imerro has a bit of each of these styles in its ambience of “heat and desire,” recorded during the “heat dome” of summer 2021 in British Columbia. “Quatsino Sound,” named after the area where Diab spent his childhood, evokes a sense of peripatetic yearning through meandering synth lines, hinting at the locale.
Freedom to Spend
Piéces
Vinyl LP
Piéces is an album that has become a bit of folklore in its own right in the wake of this reissue by New York’s Freedom to Spend. Created within the milieu of Québec’s radical lesbian arts scene in the 1980s and recorded on a 4-track, Piéces is an eclectic combination of spoken word, marimba, synthesizer, and guitar, with text from the 1975 book The Tao of Physics. It’s the work of dreams and mysticism, from a historical moment and creative community in which anything seemed possible.
김반월키 (Kimbanourke)
빈자리 (Binjari)
archie
here, this is happening (soundtrack)
Two more mysterious newcomers in South Korea’s indie scene, Kimbanourke and archie make crystalline sounds, the latter with a more straightforward combination of guitar and vox and the latter incorporating Wii Menu-esque sound design in its folktronica stylings.
“희끄무레 (Vague)” from Kimbanourke is a lovely bit of bossa nova for sipping coffee at an empty Seoul cafe, while archie’s “lovers’ hands” somehow works a bass drop into a simple guitar line adorned by synths that float in and out of earshot.
