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Various Artists: Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco
Rating: ★★★★☆ Moroccan music, or Arabic music in general, can be bewildering to the uninitiated. The cadences of the language are guttural and abrupt, the instrumentation can sound off, the rhythms of...
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Various Artists: Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen
Rating: ★★★½☆ Dust to Digital, the label responsible for the fine Moroccan music compilation Kassidat, strikes again with a nine-track primer on Yemeni pop music from the 1960s and ’70s. Ranging from...
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Various Artists: Lead Kindly Light: Pre-War Music and Photographs from the...
Rating: ★★★★☆ You can’t drool over an MP3. Some music consumers in the 21st century have come to favor vinyl releases partly in response to the seemingly inconsequential nature of digital files, so...
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Various Artists: Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-1959
Rating: ★★★★★ “It ain’t but the one thing I done wrong/ Stayed in Mississippi just a day too long.” Dylan fans may recognize that line from “Mississippi” on his 2001 album Love and Theft. But its...
View ArticleBlind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary
A makeshift studio in a hat factory in Bristol, Tennessee was the site of what is known as the Big Bang of country music. Victor Talking Machine company producer Ralph Peer was one of a number of...
View ArticleVarious Artists: Music of Morocco
“The night went by slowly; yet to Port, watching the road was hypnotic rather than monotonous.” This passage from Paul Bowles’ 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky sums up the sprawling four-disc set Music of...
View ArticleWashington Phillips: Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams
There’s something truly haunting about the sounds of the so-called “old weird America.” Coming down through the years as dust-speckled, spectral voices, these pre-war recordings of artists both known...
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