Any musical genre has its first division stars who take the limelight, eclipsing their colleagues who may be no less deserving of acclaim. This is especially true of rockabilly. Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash may be the names everyone has heard of but there are a host of others, such as the artists featured here, who have disappeared into the mists of time, leaving only a handful of tracks as testimony to the enduring vitality of their music.

3CDs of Cuban legends! This digitally remastered set features contributions from artists such as Compay Segundo, Omara Portuondo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Ruben Gonzalez and many more latin favourites.

Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo. However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.

Spending the greater part of the last decade assembling this masterpiece while tracking down most of the musicians in the process, Stuart Ellis of Radiodiffusion Internasionaal has compiled a mind-blowing set of Pakistani instrumentals spanning the period between 1966 and 1976. It’s all here: rock and roll beat, surf, folk traditional mixed with pop, film tunes, electric guitars, sitar and organ solos, brilliant percussion and arrangements crafted by the grooviest bands of the period: The Panthers, The Mods, The Bugs, The Blue Birds, The Abstracts, The Aay Jays, The Fore Thoughts, Nisar Bazmi, and Sohail Rana.

Sublime Frequencies releases their first 78rpm compilations, and true to form these are sounds rarely heard by contemporary Western ears. These 2 albums (SF077/SF078) are compiled by Robert Millis, a long time Sublime Frequencies contributor and a founding member of Climax Golden Twins, He is the author of Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days (Dust-to-Digital 2008), a book of historic early recording documentation, ephemera and music drawn from Millis' 78rpm collection. In 2011, he produced and helped design "I Listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces" (Dust-to-Digital), a similar book drawn from the collection of artist Steve Roden. In addition to composition, sound art practice and design, he has filmed and produced experimental documentaries on Asian music: "Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan" and "This World is Unreal like a Snake in a Rope" (both for Sublime Frequencies DVD release) and is an obsessive collector of 78rpm music records and ephemera.

Eagles' Desperado Pioneered Country Rock and Cemented a Legendary Songwriting Partnership: Includes "Tequila Sunrise," "Saturday Night," and the Title Track. Mobile Fidelity's Numbered-Edition Hybrid SACD of Western-Themed 1973 Album Sounds Present, Detailed, Rich, and Dynamic. Desperado seams to speak to a universally human theme – the notion that at heart we are all drifters, always searching in life for ever-elusive goals such as stability, companionship, belonging, and satisfaction. Marrying cohesive western-themed arrangements to conceptual narrative devices, the Eagles' 1973 album also hits on a tried-and-true American principle: The West, and the freedom, promise, and danger it has represented throughout U.S. history. Ambitious yet accessible, deep but direct, Desperado remains a towering influence on country rock and a crucial piece of the Eagles' development and evolution.

Boy George is going ‘old school’ on new album ‘SE18’. Boy George is about to release a new reggae album and he’s taking an old fashioned approach with his latest offering. SE18 takes its title from the postcode of the area of London that Boy George lived in as a teenager in late 1970s. “This is not going to be steamed, it’s CD and vinyl only, I’m taking it right back.” Boy George said in an interview on British TV show This Morning. “My audience doesn’t seem to care about streaming. They like the product, the lyrics.” he added. The artists has had a prolific career. His band Culture Club has put out six albums, and he’s also got 12 solo albums under his belt. Plus he’s put out countless single releases, collaborations and recorded under different names including Yum Yum and Generations of Love. Last week a new documentary about Culture Club had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It features all four members of the band, including Jon Moss who had a falling out with the other three members and quit the band in 2021. The documentary will come to Netflix later this year.

The Singles is the Pretenders' 1987 compilation album and features all the band's UK single hits to that date, as well as including "I Got You Babe", which Chrissie Hynde had performed with UB40 in 1985. The album reached No. 69 in the US album chart and No. 6 in the UK.

Composer, harpist, improviser, and educator Zeena Parkins has been a mainstay of the Downtown scene since 1984, performing with Fred Frith, John Zorn, Bjork, Ikue Mori, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, and countless others. Her newest project, years in the making, pays tribute to the fearless American visual artist Jay DeFeo. Zeena captures DeFeo’s bold experimentalism and love of beauty with a lush, exotic extended work for harp and percussion. Performing with her on a unique instrument built by legendary composer Lou Harrison is her close collaborator William Winant. One of Zeena’s most important and compelling releases, this is a major composition by a pioneering harpist/composer who still surprises after forty years of groundbreaking work!

NOW – Yearbook Extra 1997 - a must-have 60-track 3CD collection out August 8th, continuing our celebration of an incredible year in pop!

Gypsies, or more correctly, the Romany or Roma people, have always been nomadic, so it is no surprise that their music has been influenced at various times by Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slavic, Spanish and Turkish musical idioms. Gypsy jazz has that rare quality of evoking a time and a place. So if you want to be transported back to the Paris of sixty years ago, then bon appétit.

Esquivel was a self-taught musician who created open futuristic sonic landscapes. He formed his own band, boasting 22 musicians and five singers, and over the next 15 years, Esquivel & His Orchestra went on to become Mexico’s most poplar act. Many of the numbers he made popular in his homeland can be heard here, songs that Esquivel later took to the world: Besame Mucho…La Bamba… Latin-Esque… among others. Enjoy!

From Autumn harvest festivals to traditional Japanese folklore steeped in rich history, this album shows the diversity and power of the Japanese drums. From stories of ship-crews being saved by the organization of synchronized beats, to a picturesque soundscape of waves in the sea, to a peaceful thankfulness for loved ones and nature, this release is full of sound stories. This release also features purification drumming heard in Buddhist temples before, during and after ceremonies and a famous taiko drum beat symbolizing the sounds of samurai riding on horseback.

Nothing shakes some action like a snappy guitar-based pop song delivered with a powerful beat, boundless energy and joyous enthusiasm. “Power pop is what we play,” declared Pete Townshend in a 1967 interview to promote the Who’s ‘Pictures Of Lily’. Although the term power pop did not gain much traction at the time, it re-emerged at the beginning of the 70s after the Beatles had dissolved and music began to fracture into various camps. In the USA, bands that remained true to the Beatles tradition began to be referred to as power pop. The Raspberries set the ball rolling in 1972, and young bands began to spring up who really only wanted to sing about girls and having a good time on Saturday night. As the 70s wore on, the new wave had an ever-growing influence on the movement, and even the Ramones donned skinny ties long enough to back up harmony pop masters the Paley Brothers on a thrilling update of Ritchie Valens’ ‘Come On Let’s Go’.

Milan, 1979, only two years had passed since the explosion of punk but it seemed like ten years had passed, 1977 had inexorably changed the destiny of a generation of musicians. Milan in those years felt a bit like Manchester, a city in black and white, with monuments grayed by smog, busy and still far from becoming the “Milan to drink” of the mid-80s. The music scene was totally disconnected from the rest of the Italian underground, the bands were born and imploded within a few months. The inputs that arrived thanks to the English weekly New Musical Express and some Italian fanzines were essential to know what happened across the channel almost in real time. The concerts at the 2001 Odyssey, a club where almost all the really important post-punk bands performed, were fundamental to understand and feel part of something that resembled a revolution, a movement that in those years produced little in terms of discography but that today, after almost forty years, we reveal the absolute uniqueness of the proposals of the protagonists of that Milanese season. Sharp guitars, primordial drum machines, synthesizers bought at a high price and 4 tracks cassette recorders were the tools used to affirm their belonging to a creative movement that developed simultaneously throughout Europe.