NEW CANARY ALBUM Mohammed El-Akkad was from a lineage of Egyptian master musicians and, like a leaf blown in the wind of history, wound up in the U.S. He was about 60 in the the early ‘70s when he self-released this exceptional LP. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/el-sal...

Organizing and resleeving the keepers. So, like here’s a box of specific Slavic & Balkan immigrant collections. And also the 1st of 2 boxes of the 1912-25 Turkish, Arabic, Armenian & Greek stuff. Got your early 20s indie labels then the Victors then the Columbia E series…

Tav Falco verite doc of a 1986 Black biker gathering in Memphis is the most riveting thing I’ve seen in a long while youtu.be/tn6qPxmINSo?...

Just learned that the only other composition by Plonsky available is on an album of Daniel Schmidt gamelan pieces and so isn’t findable as Plonsky’s work. But it is. And he plays flute on it. youtu.be/ZFMERnQICCg?...

Syrian Jews in Brooklyn apparently playing in praise of newly independent Lebanon ca. 1947. Let me know if you can easily translate the Arabic for me. canary-records.bandcamp.com/track/erzeth...

Happy International Roma Day canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/romane...

Just added this Jan. 31, 1912 performance by Zaki Mourad (b. Alexandria 1880; d. Cairo 1946), protege of Abd Al-Hayy Hilmi (whose face is the album's cover) and father of the star Layla Murad, to this album.

New episode of The Sonic Turn posdcast is an hour of me answering Dragos Rusu’s questions

I just added another 7-minute June 1910 performance by Sayed el Safti to this 2 1/2 hour long album. canary-records.bandcamp.com/track/min-ab...

10 more days

French Odeon disque April 1932

New episode of The Sonic Turn posdcast is an hour of me answering Dragos Rusu’s questions

Engraving by Alfred Delauney (b. 1830; d. 1894) of a Breton piper from sheet music for a tune called “Le Biniou” by Emile Durand (b. 1830; d. 1903)

French Odeon catalog 1932 So where are the Paul Gallon musical saw records??

NEW FREE CANARY RELEASE A broken, worn record about which I can’t say much. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/your-h...

Not much bread coming in lately and then the car battery died this week. So I dropped the price of the 200+ title discography to 85% off $169.69 thinking maybe some folks would want to help out. canary-records.bandcamp.com

What to do when there is nothing to do. Dissidence and the creation of “a working model of the future in the present.” youtu.be/2Cs5TBXLyR4?...

Show yr kids. It’s not corny or pandering. I've been a fan for 35 years — grew up outside of Philly & have a lot of stories / experiences, spent thousands of hours listening & reading about Ra. So, I didn’t learn much, but I liked it. But for the kids, it's a decent way in.

A piece on Eliane Radigue by Nate Wooley came out in The Nation. (Apparently I got a mention as a “‘historian, raconteur, and custodian of strange music.”) www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Now playing: "Op. 30 Hairy Vibe + Double Identity (1986)" by #PeterPlonsky (Avant-garde; Experimental; Noise) I've been listening to this on and off for the past couple of days. Great background noise, but also a surprisingly effective way to disconnect. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/op-30-...

Baltimore next month www.lemondo.org/events/music...

Marcia sent me this photo of what appears to be my first public 78 talk putside of Baltimore. ‘03 at the Schoolhouse in Bushwick Brooklyn NY. 2nd photo Ben sent of almost everything I owned around the same time, the night we stayed up drinking and listening to records

Bandcamp Friday $70 annual subscriptions currently include 140 back catalog titles which is absurd. (Sunday I’m gonna pull it back to just 100 for new subscribers.) Big help would be to tell friends about stuff you like. Thanks! canary-records.bandcamp.com

NEW CANARY ALBUM "Don’t think I do my art seriously The flute in my hand's a faucet gone dry. The wine-slurping fools love the flute's sound It's all whistling for drunk donkeys to me." -- freely adapted from a quatrain reportedly written on a cigarette packet by Neyzen Tevfik

NEW CANARY ALBUM “Two half hour concerti (violin + organ) of acoustic and glissando modulated by variable tape speed three times then layer mixed ethnic asian folk instruments: …

No musician ever mattered more to me than Eliane Radige. She changed my life, changed me, affirmed deep intuitions about nature and how a human being ought to behave. I learned so much from her and from her music. I am so grateful.

NEW CANARY ALBUM One of two scarce privately pressed LPs ca. 1963 of a Romanian instrumental dance band with roots in the 1920s, co-led by long-standing performers in their 50s and 60s with four teenagers from their community of working-class immigrants. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/plays-...

RIP legendary salsa sax player, composer, musician Willie Colon at 75. Saw him @ the long gone Zanzibar on the Waterfront in DC. (I will just try to ignore his recent years MAGA tweets as he was once a Dem)

This is the excellent record to which Dr. Sawyer is referring youtu.be/9sm8eTM7UVA?...

NEW CANARY EP folk singer and activist Youssef Taj (b. 1895; d. 1975) has been one of the most compelling voices of the “Middle East” over the past century. This brief 6-side collection adds to his legacy thanks especially to the biographical research of Akram N. Al-Rayess

NEW CANARY RELEASE A short LP of largely instrumental 1950s performances, issued (pirated) in the U.S. for the folk dancing community, including some stunning performances on the drâmba (jaw harp) and cimpoi (bagpipes), flutes (caval & ocarina), and string bands.

We could, of course, have had a direct democracy in which everyone could vote directly from their phone 20 years ago. We could easily now get rid of both the idiotic electoral college and the Senate. The design and implementation of a democracy would be a good use of silicon valley.

thanks to Ula Nowak for the mentions of two of the recent Canary releases along with mentions of Robert Millis's new Sublime Frequencies collection (which I look forward to hearing!) and a couple recent Death Is Not The End titles. All rowing in the same direction....

It’s bandcamp friday. There’ve been 9 new Canary releases - 6 hrs of music - since the last bandcamp friday 2 months ago. canary-records.bandcamp.com

I run a micro label of mostly mine and my friends' music. It's bandcamp Friday, so check it if you like: space psych or heavy improv played on guitars, snares, veena, cracked pedals, voice, bottles or comps of pre-war south Indian instrumental music from 78s. branchdravidian.bandcamp.com/merch

NEW CANARY EP 20 minutes of music from a label run by a Romanian immigrant in n the 1940s, Josef Cristea (b. Transylvania 1904; d. Santa Monica 1973). 3 tracks by immigrants in NYC; 4 tracks pirated from great performers from Romania in the ‘30s. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/dor-do...

Got fascinated by this disc a couple days ago. She was a Syrian Jew (probably around Aleppo) who moved to Egypt. Her known discography totals 11 or 12 songs. This song was recorded ca. 1927 not in Egypt. Maybe Beirut. Maybe even Aleppo?

Many thanks to Remek Mazur-Hanaj for telling the Prince Onago & Princess Muana story to Poland: www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/1229...

I am unable to digest media referring to flagging presidential poll numbers. It’s been a decade. They’ve hardly varied more than 5 points +/- from 40%. Or references to a term limit. Any reference to “three more years” and I unsubscribe. He’s obviously not leaving; pretending he is is unhelpful.

The album of the Lebanese-American violinist Sam Shaheen (b. 1918; d. 2009) of Utica, New York started as 8 tracks 3 years ago. It has expanded from 24 to 80 minutes, and with the addition of three more tracks, I believe it now represents his complete recorded works.

M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"

The wikipedia page for G B’vino, head of Mpls ICE, says his great-grandparents came from Calabria, Italy and naturalized in 1927. Everyone knows we have 16 great-grandparents and the odds of them coking from the same place and naturalizing the same year are infinitesimal….

July 2019 Never Again Action in DC. I remember the ICE employees having lunch outside looking at us like we were idiots. What could we possibly be so upset about?

Goodbye to the great Uncle Floyd who enriched my childhood to no end with his ridiculous television show.

This is me in Denmark 2 months ago at the @endlessgratitude Festival. You can’t see it in the picture but I’m trying to explain why America is like it is, and if you squint hard you can maybe see me not being a total dick. Just doing my part.

NEW CANARY ALBUM (13th in 7 weeks) An hour-long snapshot of Lebanon in the 1950s. Westward-looking and cosmopolitan in the shadow of Egypt’s cultural hegemony, Lebanon produced wonderful voices, some celebrated, some neglected. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/dreams...

Cuts Exuma at his own game years before the fact. Which is not to say that Exuma doesn’t rule, but to say that these maniacs do too. Subscribing to Canary (@iannagoski.bsky.social) is yr best entertainment value. canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/roots-...

“The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota [are] doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.”

I noticed this photo by Steve Jackson Jr. ca. Oct. ‘50. John Handy, Pony Poindexter, John Coltrane (just turned 24 years old), and Frank Fischer at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco on the Syncopated Times site. What jumped out at me was Harry Smith’s mural behind them. Smith moved to NYC in 1951.