Moğollar - Anatolian Sun (Night Dreamer)
Legendary Turkish psych innovators Moğollar grace the Artone Studios in Haarlem for a masterclass in the original Anadolu psych roots, cutting a compendium of their rawest hits and most-wanted psychedelic rock classics – including the J.Dilla-sampled ‘Haliç’te Güneşin Batışı’ – for the latest edition of Night Dreamer’s essential Direct-to-Disc series. Formed at the end of 1967 with five young musicians, Moğollar were the original Anadolu psych originators. They were the first Turkish pop band who tried to blend the microtonal folklore and traditional instruments of rural Anatolia with Western pop and rock; they were the first Turkish psychedelic band to achieve overseas recognition. They were radical, innovative, and hugely popular, and when the great artists of the Turkish rock revolution appeared on the scene, Moğollar were already there – stars including Barış Manço, Selda, Cem Karaca and Ersen all recorded with them or briefly joined the line-up. Moğollar were and are the undisputed pioneers of the style.
Moody alien - Long lost (Thirsty Leaves Music)
The elusive Greek experimental artist moody alien returns with a new album, comprising "a series of musical encounters with other musically inclined individuals" from his hometown, including Angelos Bournas, Fanis Ploumis, Kostas Tsoumanis, Eva Matsiggou, Panayotis Kapetanakis, Maria Frangou and Phut.
Natik Awayez - Manbarani (Sublime Frequencies)
Manbarani is the debut album from Iraq-born, Cairo-based lyricist, composer and oud player Natik Awayez. Coming out on vinil in spring 2021 through Sublime Frequencies, this is a collaborative work, comprising Maurice Louca (who produced and arranged the album), and a handful of local musicians including Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maryam Saleh (Lekhfa), Aya Hemeda and Adham Zidan (The Invisible Hands), Khaled Yassine (Alif / Lekhfa / Anouar Brahem) and Ayman Asfour (Elephantine). As Awayez puts it, “Iraq is the source and Yemen the soul. As for Cairo, it has offered me snippets of time and a small abode. A handful of its most beautiful musicians and a lot of love. And so, Manbarani came to be.”
NEP - Pop Not Pop (Songs For New Europe 1985-1989) (Fox & His Friends)
NEP was a loose multimedia collective formed in 1982 Zagreb, ex-Yugoslavia. The founder Dejan Krsic collaborated with various artists in a quest of re-thinking the stale concepts of art history, position of the author and the barriers between pop and elitist high culture. Heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin and Andy Warhol in theory and Brian Eno and Kraftwerk in music, Krsic created NEP as an umbrella term (NEP meaning Nova Evropa or New Europe) of diverse rule-breaking activities, covering graphic design, music, photography, video, news-media and theoretical work.
Official Jucifer - نظم (Jucifer)
'Nazm' (نظم) sees Jucifer (comprising Gazelle Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood) deploy their familiar studio tactic: writing, arranging, producing, engineering, and playing all instruments themselves to create a sprawling concept album. This time, it's to celebrate their shared love for MENA and central/south/west Asian traditional and pop music cultures with fourteen highly textured, intensely personal and passionately delivered original songs. From Gazelle Amber Valentine: " نظم (nazm) refers to a branch of urdu poetry, from ancient arabic origins. a nazm typically arranges its stanzas around a unifying theme, and is less regimented with regard to form and rhyme than related traditional poetry styles."
Pauline Hogstrand - The Enterer (No Technique)
Falling somewhere between a classically trained viola player and an electroacoustic composer with iconoclastic tendencies, Pauline Hogstrand blurs the lines between traditional compositions and digitally manipulated sounds. Through a minimalistic material of viola, flute, claves and finger cymbals, the content is being altered, stretched and looped into 40 minutes of baroque arrangements, oscillating between authenticity and surrealism. Hailing from the northeast of Sweden, 33-year-old Hogstrand began singing in choirs at a young age, and before her 15th birthday she mastered a string of instruments, including the viola, serving as her main instrument today. Now based in Copenhagen, Denmark for more than a decade, Pauline Hogstrand has built a musical and creative environment that not only holds her instrumental skills, but also challenges experiences and knowledge of life and the arts, which satisfies a personal need for wholeness in music.
Praed Orchestra! - Live In Sharjah (Morphine Records)
During the years in which the duo produced four albums and performed on an endless number of stages around the globe, PRAED started working on an ambitious expansive project: an orchestra that could transpose this study of rural and popular culture into an immense, iconic work. In autumn 2018, supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation, PRAED Orchestra! premiered “Live in Sharjah”, interpreting new material merged with some of the band’s iconic pieces. The line-up of the orchestra consisted of some of the most innovative artists coming from a wide spectrum of musical practices: Paed Conca, Raed Yassin, Alan Bishop, Nadah El Shazly, Christine Kazarian, Hans Koch, Martin Kuchen, Maurice Louca, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Sam Shalabi, Ute Wassermann, Khaled Yassine and Michael Zerang.
