Limited edition 2LP in a full-color heavy gatefold jacket with images of the musicians and detailed liner-notes by compiler and producer Seb Bassleer. Swathed in hundreds of miles of snaking hinterland, the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan is a giant canvas for the imagination of the wanderers it gives home to. Through the stark reaches of the vast Thar Desert, Rajasthan shares borders as well as bloodlines with the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab to the west and the Indian state of Gujarat to the south. The states rough history and harsh environment is heavily reflected in the Rajasthani people and Marwari tribal culture; centuries of continuous invasions, epic battles, brutal slaughterings and various rulings by Scythians, Mauryans, Satraps, Gurjars, Mughals, Rajputs and the British have left their traces in local folklore in the shape of storytelling, songs and plays. In Rajasthans modern-day avatar, daily life is controlled by power failures, lasting droughts, dried-out or diverted rivers and an ever-advancing desertification. These hardships of the past and present have equipped the Rajasthani people with their notoriously resilient and proud character and are clearly voiced in the music of the region. This compilation has been recorded in various cities, villages and remote regions of Rajasthan as part of a two-month road trip seeking found folklore, of which one month was spent in the holy town of Pushkar, where we experienced different aspects of Rajasthani cultural and Hindu religious life. Flexible improvisation, good chance and often pure luck allowed these recordings to happen when musicians of different ages and castes crossed our path along the way. This collection does not focus on the contextual technicalities of musical lineage, castes or styles, and is neither an exhaustive folkloric research project nor an ethnomusicology study; rather, it presents the musical landscape of contemporary Rajasthan on the street level as it was found in 2007-2008, a cross-section of aural environment outside of the academic approach to Rajasthani music that many Western and Indian scholars have already covered in intricate detail. The most important criteria for recording these musicians in their homes (or on the streets) was the personal beauty of raw power in their music. - Seb Bassleer.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
