Listening to a Finders Keepers compilation is like stepping in one of those invisible cities described by Italo Calvino, a confabulation of sounds from all over that at first might feel chaotic, the outcome of the whimsical pointing of privileged fingers/finders, but it is rapidly that order emerges, you can recognise similar themes shining through the structures of sounds crafted in places very far away, underlying this  all the realisation that all the songs therein contained are music produced by real people, something which is not so easy to find as one would hope.

If you need any proof, just listen to Parva’s Farsi Funk strutting percussion and ravishing strings ‘Selda does mid-tempo disco’ Mosem E Gol, just get lost in the coruscating spirals of melody rising into a blue sky criss crossed by white doves, the translation of the title is ‘The Time of Blossom’, but of course you didn’t need to know that, you felt it already.

Parva- Mosem E Gol

This is included in the latest Finders Keepers ‘B-Music’ comp. Get it on vinyl, the Ennio Morricone tune in it is total killer too.

And if stunning psychedelic delights are your bag, then you’re on for another treat thanks to Holy Mountain Records, who have just released in 7” Onna’s ‘Cortigiana del Velo/Mone o Tsutsunde’, utterly soul-transfixing psychedelia from the Japan of 1983, it’s all very slow, and full of awe like the best prog, you know, that ‘standing at the edge of a cliff against which eternal waves of space and time crash’ feeling, put together with the most elementary of materials, this is, blue sliding into orange gradient sky as the sun rises on the horizon, a placid wind brushing green fields, the stuff that good epiphanies are made of, slide around a recurring guitar motif over which Keizo Miyanish’s voice soars with otherwordly beauty, think Acid Mothers Temple jamming with Earth, or perhaps Ghost in a moment of utmost zen reflection, and you are sort of there but why get bogged in comparisons when you can just press play and dwell on the utter immensity of the drone.

Onna- Mune o Tsutsunde

It’d be aces if any Japanese readers out there could give us a translation of the title to see whether it fits with the epic vibes this tune creates in your astonished scribe.