NEW RELEASES OUT NOW: This World Is Unreal Like A Snake In A Rope DVD and Eat the Dream: Gnawa Music from Essaouira LP

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This World Is Unreal Like A Snake In A Rope

 DVD SF073

A film by Robert Millis. Folk cinema from the eternal never-ending collage that is INDIA. A journey through the ancient Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, street music, festivals, nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, ancient temples, processions, devotions, decay, fireworks, abstractions and more. India is impossible to know: it is impossibly old and impossibly new, impossibly rich and impossibly poor, quiet and chaotic. Offered here is one perspective, raw, captured live and in the moment, with an emphasis on India's complex and mesmerizing sounds. DVD features bonus photo gallery with over 100 images. 50 minutes/Color; digipack; all-region DVD; NTSC format. Limited one-time edition of 1000 copies.

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Eat the Dream: Gnawa Music from Essaouira 

LP SF071

Recorded and compiled by Tucker Martine in 1994, the bulk of this album features the magnificent results of a chance meeting between Martine and the late, great master of Gnawa music, Maâllem Boubker Ghania (1927–2000), who kindly offered to organize a several-day informal recording session in his home. Martine began rolling tape as musicians came and went throughout the sessions. These spectacular recordings from Essaouira Morocco are interwoven here with other encounters including a wedding procession in the streets of Marrakech, snake charmers of the Jemma El Fna with their rhaitas, calls to prayer with children playing while James Brown echoed off of the labyrinthian walls, Moroccan radio dial surfing and more.

The Gnawa are a mystical brotherhood whose ancestors migrated from West Africa to North Africa approximately 500 years ago. After integrating into the local Berber and Arabic societies, a unique cultural blend resulted which is reflected in their music. Their complex liturgy borrows both from the traditions of mystical Islam and African Shamanism. The Gnawa's trance-inducing music accompanies rituals such as the healing of psychic disorders and scorpion stings, Ramadan celebrations and animal sacrifice. Participants in these all night rituals are invited into an ecstatic state. The primary instruments of this tradition are the krakebs (a pair of metal clappers) and the guimbri (or sintir), a three stringed lute with a camel skin covering and a body carved from a log. The one short string and two long strings are made of goat gut.

Limited Edition LP housed in a heavy-duty tip-on jacket with insert containing additional photos of the musicians and Tucker Martine’s liner notes.

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SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations. SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is focused on an aesthetic of extra-geography and soulful experience inspired by music and culture, world travel, research, and the pioneering recording labels of the past including OCORA, SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS, ETHNIC FOLKWAYS, LYRICHORD, NONESUCH EXPLORER, MUSICAPHONE, BARONREITER, UNESCO, PLAYASOUND, MUSICAL ATLAS, CHANT DU MONDE, B.A.M., TANGENT, and TOPIC. SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PO BOX 17971 SEATTLE WA 98127 USA