Göteborg and Oslo (sample), by The Iditarod

Göteborg and Oslo (sample)

by The Iditarod

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
The 20th anniversary version of this Iditarod release - on LP for the first time. Beautiful inside-out matte sleeves, lovingly re-mastered by Caleb from Big Blood. Looks and sounds super! Comes with a free download-code. (Sorry international shipping is so high, but thats the way it is, blurg).

Raven Sings The Blues:
"Another essential out of the Feeding Tube camp, this reissue puts The Iditarod’s fourth album, the Ghost, the Elf, the Cat and the Angel, in its rightful place on vinyl for the first time. If you’re unfamiliar with the band that’s probably an excusable fact. The Providence duo were a bit ahead of the curve as far as the aughts folk revival and subsequent embrace of Psych-Folk/ New Weird America in the press, but this record should sit on a shelf next to any copies of Fern Knight, Espers, Six Organs, and Skygreen Leopards you have haunting your collection. With Jeffrey Alexander (Dire Wolves, Black Forest/Black Sea) and Carin Wagner at the core, this album found the pair refining their psychedelic folk into an icy ache that recalled darker visions of UK traditional fare like Pentangle and Fairport Convention. Though the band would dive to much further depths than either of those, as exemplified by the tidal breath tension of “Cycle Circle.”

Freer Sounds:
"The Ghost, The Elf, The Cat and The Angel is an album of stunning modern folk from The Iditarod, a long dormant group led by Jeffrey Alexander and Carin Wagner. Originally released on CD in 2002, The Ghost, The Elf, The Cat and The Angel now receives a vinyl pressing courtesy of everyone’s favourite cross-genre trailblazers, Feeding Tube. For context, this album predates the likes of Espers, and the broader successes of the US weird/acid folk movement of Banhart etc. The Ghost, The Elf, The Cat and The Angel is clearly influenced by the simple beauty of traditional British folk, but at the same time, Alexander and Wagner wish to experiment. The instrumentation is impressive and hints at where Jeffrey Alexander would take his psychedelic explorations with Dire Wolves at a later date. The vocals are striking. Carin Wagner is every bit the maiden narrator requisite of such Folk tales. The embattled Let No Man Steal Your Thyme and jaw dropping Afternoons Like This Are Hard To Come By are my favourite songs on the album. All hail Feeding Tube for plucking this album out of CD only obscurity. Personally, I must thank Dynamite Hemorrhage for introducing me to this LP via their excellent radio show. "

Includes unlimited streaming of Göteborg and Oslo (sample) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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Here a few taster tracks from the archival release of The Iditarod live in Sweden and Norway in October 2000.

The full 55 minute collection is available EXCLUSIVELY FOR SUBSCRIBERS here:
jeffreyalexander.bandcamp.com/album/g-teborg-and-oslo

Since its launch in early 2020, the archival subscription series at jeffreyalexander.bandcamp.com has featured exclusive releases from Black Forest/Black Sea, The Iditarod, Dire Wolves, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Jeffrey Alexander + The Heavy Lidders and more. New exclusive content is added every single month. For more information, visit: jeffreyalexander.bandcamp.com/subscribe

“The Iditarod were very much a pioneering psychedelic folk group although for some this took the benefit of hindsight to realise as alongside the likes Stone Breath their music pre-dated the arrival of Freak Folk and mainstream breakthrough acts such as Banhart and Newsom.” (Folk Radio UK)

“Iditarod spew a magnificent gauze of lost-commune-folk-smoke-damage.” (Byron Coley in The Wire)

“Now often viewed with the benefit of hindsight as a precursor of the so-called ‘Freak Folk’ movement, they developed quite an idiosyncratic version of folk music that combined sparse song structures, spectral vocals and experimental arrangements and atmospheric sound textures…bringing to mind Shirley Collins’ work with the Albion Band or the spookier side of Cat Power and the music sounding like a slightly catatonic Pentangle one minute and The Dead C jamming on some found acoustic instruments the next." (Norman Records UK)

“From Rhode Island, the Iditarod play a minimal kind of bleak psychedelic folk that owes as much to the somnambulism of Bristol's Movietone as it does to early 70s private press semi-legends like Stone Angel or Caedmon.” (David Keenan in The Wire)

“The vintage British folk-rock-psych sound, taken into the twenty-first century by a Rhode Island group with oodles of instruments.” (Listed as #2 in Richie Unterberger's Top 10 of 2002 in Rolling Stone Magazine)

“An incredible attention to the tinyest sound and their instrumental touch "lightness" (truly unusual in these music era)…if you love avant-folk absolutely do not to miss this shy and full of light jewel.” (Blow Up, Italy)

“Simultaneously medieval and modern, the Iditarod's elusive eclecticism breeds nothing but smiles, vibes and harmony among listeners.” (Fred Mills in Magnet Magazine)

..

credits

released August 10, 2020

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about

Jeffrey Alexander Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Founding member of The Iditarod in 1996, Black Forest/Black Sea in 2003 and Dire Wolves in 2008. Joined JOMF in 2013. Started The Heavy Lidders in 2019. Former label owner of Magic Eye Singles and Secret Eye Records. Also toured with and featured on recordings by Kemialliset Ystävät, Avarus, Es, Fursaxa, Christina Carter, Gravenhurst, Jeffrey Alexander-Andrea Belfi-Stefano Pilia Trio. ... more

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