I’ll be doing presentations on both Saturday and Sunday.

I just heard that we lost the great James Blood Ulmer. Fascinating, beautiful person. Dazzling, undersung discography. Have I played any song on repeat more than this one in the past decade? Unlikely.

May 1940

Adieu Areski (1940-2026). Ici avec Brigitte Fontaine, ils interprètent "Les Vergers" en 1974.

In 2 weeks I’ll be making my only European appearance of the year at the Aman Aman Festival in Berlin. Sat June 13 I’m on a panel Sun June 14 I’ll give a 1 hour talk-and-listening session of “Ottoman-American” women from 78rpm discs ca 1917-47 sinematranstopia.com/en/program/f...

intv: When you’re feeling psychically & spiritually depleted, how do you restore yourself Cpt. Beefheart: A Mrs Grace Chocolate Fudge Cake. I feel like saying ‘take me to your leader’ when I see one of those things.

NEW CANARY ALBUM Over 2 hours recorded by the great Deben Bhattacharya (b. 1921; d. 2001) of performances in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Judeo-Malayalam, Bulharian, and Uzbek. Plus 2500 words of notes. Photo by Bhattacharya of two young Yemeni performers. The girl on the right is playing a gas can.

Hats off to the museum wizard who put the moose and the flying squirrel across from each other at the Walters.

A few early 20th century postcards I hadn’t seen before: Egypt, Turkey, Syria

untraced Syrian musician ca. 1940s?

early 20th century funerary photo found in Aleppo before the war

produced by the Derounian Brothers photo studio in Aleppo Syria and hand-dated in pencil about the time it was founded, 1918. They seem to me (some speculation here) to be artistic self-portraits by Vartan Derounian (b. Arabkir 1888; d. Beirut 1954) age 30.

Two photos ca. 1920s of an untraced Egyptian dancer. Found in Syria by a friend about 25 years ago.

NEW CANARY ALBUM canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/share-...

Noticing that I had a clean copy (a 1950s immigrant pirate) of one of the discs of this south Lebanese master singer and activist, I added better masters of two of the tracks on this 30-minute release

What Heaven Has Against Me: Central & Southern Turkish Folk Music, ca. 1928 - 55 canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/what-h...

Disco lindíssimo! canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/bororo...

Sound up, everyone! Vitamin Polka by Ed Swierad & his Aristocrats canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/vitami...

It’s bandcamp friday

Carnival Sideshow, etching by Reginald Marsh from New Theatre Nov. 1934

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?...