Hi dear friends,

A cascade of new music awaits…

First, TWO surprise new records: ARC AND AIR (Harlan Silverman and Gregory Allison), and a brand new one, Dancing Shadows, from the maestros MARSHALL ALLEN & TYLER MITCHELL of the Sun Ra Arkestra!!!

We have a handful of copies of the tenth and final CAIRO SOUL COMP, BEAUTY IS EMBARRASSING, back on the site while they last. Back in print for the first time in way too long is the legendary second LP by Portland punks THE RATS (Toody and Fred before Dead Moon).

You’ll find NEW TAPES and a discount code below when you buy 5 or more, plus some favorite LPs old and new on mega sale on the site.

Next week sees the official release of albums by ROMAN NORFLEET & BE PRESENT ART GROUP from Portland, and by MARIA THERESA PIRRIGHEDDU & VIERI MURA from Sardinia.

Below, you can read an interview with Vieri about his years long relationship with Maria Theresa and his careful approach to recording the traditional music of Sardinia. I highly recommend reading this interview if you need some inspiration and perspective today.

Hear the stunning 13-minute final track from Rundinas here, and a new single from Roman and co here.

Meanwhile, Mississippi founder Eric Isaacson continues his month-long journey across Europe. A PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF MUSIC IN TIMES OF AUTHORITARIANISM is in Belfast tonight, Dublin tomorrow (full dates below).

In New York, our dear friend and mentor LONNIE HOLLEY plays at the Brooklyn Folk Festival tonight, and screens “I Snuck Off The Slave Ship” tomorrow.

It’s been a big week in times of authoritarianism, a glimmer of hope, an outpouring of sound. As Abdul and the gang say,

always, love over gold,

mississippi records

OPR-02 Harlan Silverman and Gregory Allison
Arc And Air LP
Listen / Order

Peaceful cello and carnatic-inspired violin pieces from two master musicians. Spare and dialed in, featuring the rich, warm sound of Harlan Silverman's Intentional Recordings Studio (Cosmic Tones Research Trio). Fingers on strings, the creak of a bow, breath, and incredible resonant tones. First pressing features silver reflective jacket. 

OSI-01 Tyler Mitchell and Marshall Allen
Dancing Shadows LP
Listen / Order

A beautiful record by two luminaries from The Sun Ra Arkestra! It features some new compositions written by Marshall Allen and some classic standards of the Sun Ra Arkestra repertoire. A badass sextet laying it down...
This is a very small pressing with the majority going to our CSR record club. About 50 copies remain for the site!

MR-039 The Rats
Intermittent Signals LP
Listen / Order

Finally back in print, Fred and Toody Cole’s Portland punk masterpiece, the second LP by THE RATS!!! Remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic.

KR-10
Various Artists
BEAUTY IS EMBARRASSING 2xLP
Listen / Order

We’ve added a few more copies back to the site of this, the tenth and final offering from the Cairo Records soul series. As always, it comes with beautifully remastered tracks and a massive booklet!

MRI-220 Maria Teresa Pirrigheddu & Vieri Mura
Rundinas LP
Nov 13, 2026
Listen / Order
Short film: Rundines chi ‘olades

Maria Teresa Pirrigheddu is an iconic voice of cantu a chiterra, a singing tradition of northern Sardinia. Now, over eighty years old, she still sings with the same voice, now marked by age and enriched with new shades, as if under the light of another season. After meeting her during one of his journeys to study traditional Sardinian music, Vieri never stopped visiting Maria Teresa. Letting the music emerge naturally from the everyday silence of her countryside home, while helping her knead sweet ravioli galluresi, or pick the highest figs from her garden tree, a familial bond grew between them

BPAG-01
Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group
The Remembering LP
Listen / Order

2nd LP from this powerful Portland collective.
"The Remembering is sonic libation for those who came before us. Drawing from Black American history, revolutionary thought, and the enduring spirit of resistance, the music weaves in echoes of the figures, movements, and ideas that have shaped generations. It honors the past while carrying its spirit into the present."

Major tape drop!
Many titles thought to be lost to time, but back in stock:

MRC-126 - Summer Comes At Night
MRC-002 - House Of Broken Hearts Pt 2
MRC-075 - Camino Reale
MRC-119 - Summer, Six Space Shuttles & 144,000 Elephants
MRC-125 - Mind On
MRC-071 - The Sound Of Fear Vol. 3
MRC-050 - Ain’t Life Strange
MRC-120 - The Summer They Blew Up The Moon

Vieri Mura is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and designer from Sardinia, currently based in Florence. He is a student of the various musical traditions of Sardinia, from the stunning launeddas of the south to the polyphonic folk singing of the north. He’s even sung with the legendary vocal group Coro Gavino Gabriel, its youngest member by several decades.

“After one of my first concerts with the Coro Gavino Gabriel, we were having dinner all together, with other Sardinian and Corsican choirs,” Vieri told me. “At the head of the table was Maria Teresa [Pirrigheddu]. They introduced her to me as a historic voice of Sardinia, and throughout dinner I asked her about herself and her chants. She told stories and sang. She couldn't wait to share, and when we said goodbye she invited me to come visit her. From that day on I did, every time I came back to Gallura.”

So begins the story of Rundinas, released next Friday on Mississippi, an incredible collaboration between 84-year-old Maria Teresa and Vieri. The first side of the record features Vieri accompanying Maria Teresa’s voice on guitar, recorded in her garden in Gallura. Maria Teresa sings fragments of poetry in Sardinian and Gallurese, songs about the Rundinas (swallows) that leave and never return. 

The second side of the LP is devoted entirely to “A sas rundinas (In cresia),” a breathtaking composition of organ and vocals, recorded at the church a few steps from Maria Teresa’s home. If you have the chance, take a few minutes out of your day and listen to this song loudly.

Read more about their work together below, and watch the video for Rundines chi ‘olades here…

Tell me about "A sas rundinas (In cresia)." This is such a departure from the rest of the album. Where did the idea come, where did you record it, how did it come together? 

I discovered this little stone church thanks to the Coro Gavino Gabriel, who took me there the first time they had me sing with them to teach me the tasgia [the vocal polyphony typical of Gallura]. When they then let me try the organ, I couldn't believe it. It had the deep, visceral sound of the mystery of the rite, and yet that feeling of familiarity you can get from a simple wooden instrument played in the intimacy of an old house. 

Over the years, every time I came back to Gallura I would sit at that organ for long improvisations, and the theme sung by Maria Teresa kept surfacing, with those words of farewell about the swallows that never return [the long poem "A sas rundinas (In sa domo de campagna)" by Paulicu Mossa, Maria Teresa's favorite poet].

So I asked her to sing the entire poem, all in one breath, with all the tiredness that the performance gradually carried with it, and I recorded a first version on the organ. While I wrote all the rest of the music in a few summer afternoons, I worked on that organ composition for several years. Last winter, I felt I was ready to let it go, and I recorded the final version.

You spent many years visiting Maria Teresa and playing music together before this album was made. When did you realize that you were working on an album, and not just spending time together?

It took a long time. Her unique story and her singing had deeply inspired me from the beginning, and from the first recordings, which I listened to a lot back home and which resurfaced in my improvisations and compositions. Those wonderful melodies sung a cappella, without their original accompaniment, stirred my imagination and my passion for harmony a great deal, and it came naturally to me to play them and develop them into new compositions. 

However, I was very afraid, not only of carrying out a superficial operation, driven by the making of musical material that was aesthetically pretty but without a poetic vision that truly gave it meaning, but above all of enacting that typical ethnocentric and colonialist practice of extracting wealth and exporting it elsewhere. My roots are in Sardinia, but I live "on the Continent", and the very fact that Sardinians call Italy (of which they formally are part) by the name of the great European continent, set against the island as something vast and foreign, gives an idea of the feeling of a land whose history is marked by invasions, plunder and colonial subjugation. 

Moreover, this is traditional material, handed down from singer to singer, often with great jealousy; material that belongs to a local and oral dimension, and which it wasn't right for me to appropriate. 

The key was realizing that we were telling a story: that of Maria Teresa and her encounter with Vieri. An elderly person, who lives alone and has so much to tell and pass on, and a curious young man, who adopt each other as a grandmother and a grandson [Maria Teresa was born in 1942, like my grandmother Efisietta, from the other side of the island]. 

And the music that comes out of it is a meeting between two points of view: that of a traditional cantadora, expert in her practice but completely unaware of what happens beyond the sea, and that of a composer who grew up instead with Italian and Mitteleuropean music, each discovering the other's world for the first time. 

When I realized we were telling a story, I began to see my spontaneous compositions and those home recordings as part of that tale, and as nodes on a branch with its own poetic perspective. When for the first time I played a draft of the work to Maria Teresa, and saw her moved and engaged by the new guise of her singing... I understood that we had made something together.

How does Maria Teresa see the record now that it's becoming a reality?

She is happy with the work, it's her first vinyl and she keeps saying she never would have imagined the record would reach New York. She is thrilled, even though she looks with nostalgia at the voice she had when she was young. For us, the nuances of her age and life experience in the way she sings today are magical and irreplaceable, while for her they sometimes turn into the memory of something that is no longer there.

How do people in Sardinia relate to cantu a chiterra? Is it music that is widely known and listened to?

As Maria Teresa tells beautifully in the long interview in the record's booklet, until not long ago it was extremely popular: people brought chairs from home and filled the squares. Today that is no longer the case in most towns, especially Tempiu, which in the meantime has changed radically. Today the cantu a chiterra practice is certainly less widespread, relegated to specific events, and it receives attention that cannot compare with that of the last century. And every single time I attend a gara [traditional singing competition], the audience is very passionate but on average rather elderly. Still, it is a tradition that endures, with excellent performers.

It was amazing to watch you play alongside Maria Teresa in her garden, watching you responding to her singing improvisations. How would you describe Maria Teresa's approach to singing, and your approach to playing with her?

What a magic moment... Maria Teresa and I are so grateful to have spent that time together, such good memories. Like she sings in "Benvinuta bona gjenti": "e bulà in spalti l'ali, com'e cédda sempri in gjócu"... Flying with open wings, like a bird always at play. Her singing feels like a swallow among the trees: quick and agile, free, unpredictable. Not by chance, those words were written by a poet from her own town, Franco Fresi, specifically for her voice. 

Accompanying her is an exercise in listening and understanding: a very delicate balance between following her in her explorations, supporting her in the most delicate passages, and at the same time giving clear harmonic and rhythmic reference points, taking the lead in a small part. Moreover, my accompaniment departs completely from the guitar tradition she is used to, and used to very well, having been accompanied throughout her career by great guitarists, above all Antonio Marongiu, a sonadore with a special sensitivity and musical sense. So it is a challenge for both of us. But the moments of greatest cohesion and solidity are no less beautiful than those in which a small uncertainty turns into a question, to which we find a new answer together.

What have you learned from working with Maria Teresa? How has it changed your music?

I learned a lot about singing, about poetry, but also about my own way of thinking and creating. I learned not to stop in front of the fear of doing something wrong, but to keep digging and exploring its creative possibilities, and the possible narratives and their poetic levels, until things finally make sense. Starting from extremely delicate traditional material, realizing that it was truly possible to create something very personal for both her and me, and for each of us in a different way, was illuminating.

I also learned her secret ingredient for seadas [traditional Sardinian sweets: fried ravioli filled with cheese and served hot, drizzled with honey].

We share an interest in spending time with and working with our elders. What draws you to older artists?

Spending time with elders and listening to their stories is one of the things that moves me most in the world. Time, memory, the transience of things that nonetheless somehow always survive, if necessary withering and then blooming again... Isn't that life itself? Culture is this: carrying a journey forward from very far away, taking care of what is given to you, and in turn giving. An older artist is not only a source of knowledge and experience, but expresses in the present moment their own personal metabolization of a world that no longer exists, opening for a moment a window onto a past that will not return. Especially in a historical moment like this one, in which everything flows at an overwhelming speed, and everything gets lost... Being with elders, and listening to their world, is an invaluable chance to be truly present.

Veiri Mura continues his research in Sardinia. You can follow his work here. 

Rundinas is released next Friday on vinyl LP. The record is pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, and the notes include a long conversation between Vieri and Maria Teresa, as well as translations of the poems that Maria Teresa sings.

BONUS: Hear Vieri’s organ drone mix for Worldwide FM

Interview and 16mm frames by Cyrus Moussavi

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF MUSIC (DURING TIMES OF AUTHORITARIANISM)

VIDEO TRAILER HERE!
October 29th - December 16th
All over Europe!

It's the story of music resisting authoritarianism as told through anecdotes about heroes and villains including The Cramps, Jimmie Rodgers (The Yodeling Brakeman), Kipsigis Musicians, Sting, Scientologists, Ethiopian pop stars, Portland punks, Russian bootleggers, Spotify, Octopus, The Beatles, The Germs, African cowboys, Techno Fascists and much more. (Trust us. It all makes sense)

We'll bring it back to Portland on the other end, so look out for tickets at The Hollywood Theatre website in a couple months.

If you know folks in Europe who might be interested, please SPREAD THE WORD!