free folk

Ilyas Ahmed is a multi-instrumentalist born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1974, raised in in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. Since 2005 Ilyas Ahmed has been blurring the folk, drone, raga and rock realms into a sound that is uniquely his own. A string of self-released CDrs in 2005/2006 brought Ahmed immediate attention and he soon released landmark albums on Time-Lag, Digitalis, and Root Strata.

Read more about Ilyas Ahmed on Last.fm.

Tenji Nozoki (????) (born February 16, 1950), best known by the stage name Kazuki Tomokawa (?? ???), is a prolific Japanese musician, active in the Japanese music scene since the early seventies. He is often described as a "screaming philosopher". Multi-talented Kazuki Tomokawa (?????, singer, author, actor, painter, raconteur) remains curiously unappreciated in the West, in spite of creating some of the most consistently inspired, emotionally resonant outsider folk music of recent years.

Ed Askew, a gay man, cut one of the best and most obscure LPs in the original ESP Disk’s vague rock/folk/freak series, issued eponymously and since reissued as Ask the Unicorn, before apparently dropping off the edge of his world. Years later, thanks to detective work by - naturally - Mr Clint Simonson of the De Stijl Records imprint, it turned out that not only was Askew still breathing but he had actually recorded a follow-up to his ESP Disk in 1970 that had lain in the can for decades.

Read more about Ed Askew on Last.fm.

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