1983’s Waves of Peace is an album of gentle reflection. The sound of ocean waves permeates every track. Sitar, tambura, synthesizer, and bamboo flute are among the instruments that Aziz & Friends use to conjure their blissful oceanic meditation.

Aziz reminisces: “Waves of Peace was born in the beautiful oceanside town of Santa Cruz, California. Living there in 1982 was the first timeI had ever lived so close to the ocean. I would walk down to the beach on a daily basis. Nature has always been a major source of inspiration in my quest to create beautiful original music. Equally important to me has been recognizing the healing potential of harmonious sound. This potential was made clear to me through my illuminating work with the Sufi order, as well as various modern dance companies. Finally, my music has always been shaped by my lifelong commitment to peace and non-violence. With all of these things in mind, drawing inspiration from the nearby ocean and the growing popularity of New Age music, I produced Waves of Peace.

Waves of Peace was my first album to combine instrumental music with the sounds of nature. Graced by the presence of some truly exceptional local musicians, most of the music was performed and recorded live in the studio. Waves of Peace was created to facilitate relaxation, meditation, healing, and awakening for the body, mind, heart and soul. Let the rhythmic waves of the ocean nourish and inspire you to find your peace within”. - Aziz Paige, 2022

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Carl Erdmann’s Bizzarrophytes was recorded in Roswell, New Mexico, during the final years of the 70’s. A desert-fried haze of buzzing sitar raga, shimmering guitar soli, and lonesome instrumental psych. Erdmann had been galvanized several years prior by witnessing an intimate performance by Ravi Shankar at Austin’s University of Texas. Erdmann spent the next several years with a sitar in the back of his pickup truck - teaching himself the instrument between stints working on an oil field as a geologist.

After settling in Roswell, Erdmann procured a Tascam 4-track reel to reel tape machine and began to experiment with recording. He played most of the instruments himself, and followed a fresh muse each day. One day his recordings would mine the same instrumental guitar territory as Leo Kottke and John Renbourn, like on Bizzarrophytes’ opening track, Majesty. The next day Erdmann might multi-track some bass and drums and end up landing in the same hazy psych-folk territory as Relatively Clean Rivers, as evidenced on album standouts Turritella Flats, and Portugal. And then, perhaps his Ravi Shankar influence would shine through, and he’d deliver a stirring sitar raga like Dhun. Erdmann explored all of these sounds without ever considering releasing them into the world. He was simply experimenting with his equipment and his instruments, and flexing his muscles with whatever kind of inspiration happened to strike. It wasn’t until 1980 that a friend convinced Carl to assemble some of these recordings into an album and self-release it.

Bizarrophytes was released in a miniscule private press run, financed and distributed by Erdmann himself. Most copies didn’t make it out of the southwest. And it has remained woefully hard to find until now. The disparate sounds of Erdmann’s experimentation hang together as a beautifully cohesive tapestry of home-brewed psychedelic folk. A menagerie of eclectic instrumental experimentation, baked in the desert sun, and captured to tape. Morning Trip Records is proud to present Bizzarrophytes.

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Tracklisting:
1. Bicycle Town 3:39
2. Rose Of Thy Garden (For Justus And Jamal) 4:48
3. Dawning Point 3:59
4. Going Nowhere Fast 3:05
5. The Journey Home 5:37
6. Reflection Of The Dayspring 3:34
7. Spanish Dancer 4:59
8. Heartfull 1:53
9. In The Silence 3:25
10. From The East To The West 4:20

Released in 1983 on a miniscule run of 300-self-financed LP’s, Dennis Taylor’s ‘Dayspring’ remains a lost masterwork of transcendental instrumental guitar. An important missing link between the 60’s folkloric experimentalism of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the new age atmospherics mined by William Ackerman and Michael Hedges in the early 80’s. Though Taylor’s guitar playing remains crisply unadorned on these 10 tracks, his technique and his compositions stretch beyond the folk roots of the genre. He crafts a soundworld that is both immersive and familiar. His pastoralism has a spaciousness - a pianistic drift - that feels truly timeless.

Taylor cut his musical teeth through the 60’s and 70’s playing with garage rock bands, and later finding his footing in the world of jazz/folk fusion. Sometime in the early 70’s, Taylor found his most profound inspiration to date when he witnessed a live performance from Takoma Records luminary, Leo Kottke. Enraptured by Kottke’s ability to fill the room so completely, with the sound of just one instrument, Taylor was determined to follow a similar path. Thus, he began composing music for solo guitar. He spent nearly a decade writing and honing his pieces, finally entering a studio in 1982 to commit them to tape. Taylor likened the recording experience to “a living room concert.” He recorded each song in a single take, in the order they appear on the album. Paying out of pocket for the recording sessions, studio time was at a premium, so Taylor had arrived prepared. And the results speak for themselves.

Dennis Taylor’s guitar playing is clean, precise, and masterfully proficient. And yet, ‘Dayspring’ is not merely a document of technical ability. His compositions are deeply
expressive. Taylor’s deft fingerpicking is married to achingly beautiful melodicism. His arpeggios chime and roll with painterly expression. Across the breadth of ‘Dayspring’, Dennis Taylor strikes a perfect balance between wistful nostalgia and bold expansion. Though Taylor initially hoped to release his album with new age progenitors Windham Hill, he ultimately decided to release the album on his own. He self-financed a pressing of 300 LP’s, which were largely distributed locally in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. And now, Morning Trip is supremely proud to bring this album back to light. An important missing piece in the expansive tapestry of instrumental guitar music, finally restored.

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Tracklisting:
1. Arkansas Suite (Benny): 2:16
2. Arkansas Suite (Soloman’s Son): 5:12
3. Skye: 7:44
4. Darlene’s Bossa: 3:10
5. Sophisticated Lady: 3:23
6. Poor Theon: 18:23

Jame’s Newton’s 1977 self-released solo-debut, ‘Flute Music’ is an unheralded gem of the 70’s jazz underground. An album that showcases a diverse range of styles and fervent cross-pollination, while retaining a clear sense of direction and cohesion. An artist funnelling their wild expression into multiple facets of “The New Music”, crafting an auspicious and artistic debut. Newton would later go on to record with revered jazz labels like India Navigation and ECM, and collaborate with fellow creative luminaries like Sam Rivers, Anthony Davis, Andrew Cyrille, David Murray, and John Carter. But ‘Flute Music’ captures Newton’s fiery creativity and experimental nature in its earliest blossom.

The album’s opener, Arkansas Suite, finds Newton’s flute unaccompanied, but densely layered. Folding and cascading upon itself, he creates a ricocheting web of dense woodwind harmonics. The effect is deeply immersive and meditative. From first blush, it seems this could be an album of blissful new age. But after this track, Newton’s influences explode outwards. On the same LP side, Darlene’s Bossa welcomes a full band into the fold. The track expounds upon a latin-jazz groove as if the group were seasoned experts of the form. The next track once again finds Newton’s flute on its own as he upends Duke Ellington’s jazz standard, Sophisticated Lady. And finally, on the sidelong b-side track, Poor Theron, the band is suffused with free-jazz electricity - quietly roiling in the midst of musique concrete clatter, and exploding into a din of spiritual fervor. Flute Music pushes in many directions at once, and yet it revolves firmly around a singular smoldering core. That core is Newton’s unmistakable talent and musicianship. His flute anchors the whole affair, whether it’s in cascading sheets of unaccompanied wind, or flitting between the breathmarks of his backing band.

With ‘Flute Music’, James Newton casts himself as a potent force on the creative-jazz scene, and the rest of his career has certainly given credence to that promise.Reissued for the first time since its scarce private-press issue in 1977, Morning Trip are exceedingly proud to present the debut solo work by a renowned and prestigious jazz luminary.

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Morning Trip & Yoga Records are proud to finally reveal one of the ultimate lost masterworks of new age music: Alice Damon’s Windsong. Gently propelled by Damon's haunting breath-of-life vocal winds reminiscent of Joan La Barbara underscored by field recordings and Damon's fretless bass sound calling to mind mid-70 Joni Mitchell, Windsong is traveling music, for the roads or for the skies. Instantly moving, it conjures vistas both romantically familiar and cosmically mysterious — waterfalls and wind, the voice of the earth, as heard through heavenly prisms.

Damon attended college in Massachusetts, where she formed and fronted the all-female garage band called The Moppets in the late 60s. The band began to garner national attention, but Damon moved instead to the wilds of northern Vermont to homestead and raise a family. In 1981 or thereabouts she was able to gain use of an early Sony digital home recorder, and created her masterwork, Windsong.

But Damon waited until 1990 to release a packaged version of this album, now titled "Windsong II", and sent samples to regional distributors like Vermont’s fabled Silo-Alcazar, where a copy of the album was first discovered, but little evidence exists of a proper commercial release. Alice Damon passed on in 2011 and remained essentially unknown until the landmark I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America 1950-1990 first revealed her genius to a wider audience two years later. Now, just in time for the recording's 40th anniversary, Alice Damon's Windsong may at last be heard as one of the most singular, moving and profound examples of new age music's psychedelic essence. Morning Trip & Yoga
Records proudly present Windsong.

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There are constellations within the grooves of Cymbalom Solos. Innumerable points of light, rendered audible in glowing, radiant sound. There are entire worlds too - undiscovered, yet familiar - both terrestrial and celestial. There are moments of quiet comfort and exultant discovery. And all of it conjured by one man with a handful of ancient and invented instruments, recorded mostly-live, with precious few overdubs.

Michael Masley has been a fixture of Berkley, California, since he arrived from Michigan in 1982. Even today, he remains a common sight, working as a street performer - catching the attention of passers-by as he summons otherworldly overtones from a coterie of arcane instruments. This is how he met fellow east-coast transplant and musical voyager, Barry Cleveland, in 1983. Cleveland was enraptured by the sound of Masley’s wildly innovative bowhammer cymbalom. The cymbalom is an ancient instrument, similar to a zither or hammered-dulcimer - originating in Eastern Europe in 1874, but with primitive early examples dating back as early as 3500 BC. Yet Masley’s approach to the instrument was wholly original. Masley replaced the two traditional cymbalom hammers, with bowhammers - an invention wherein he fitted each of his fingers with it’s own combination hammer/bow device, which allowed him to both strike the strings, and bow them like a violin. Outfitted with his bowhammers, Masley was able to wrest startlingly new sounds from a centuries-old instrument.

In 1985, after performing together for a couple years, Cleveland produced Masley’s first solo endeavour, Cymbalom Solos. With the help of Cleveland’s timely production, Masley’s technique reached its zenith. His complex and beautiful compositions combined elements of Eastern-European classical, new minimalism, and celtic/folk music, yet the end result falls squarely within the world of new age kosmiche. Music of the spheres, conjured by earthbound strings. Masley estimates that he sold tens-of-thousands of cassette copies of Cymbalom Solos over his years of performing. And now, Morning Trip is distinctly proud to offer it on vinyl for the first time ever - an album of startling, imaginative beauty, by a brilliant American folk artist.

TRACKLIST:

1.Soleil
2.Sleepdance On Leaves Of Water
3.Music To Look For Something Lost By
4.Bermuda Trapezoid:
5.Survival In A House Of Darkening
6.Advice From The Angel Of Thresholds
7.The Sea As A Moon-Launched Mirror
8.Childbirth In Cave Art
9.Soft Evidence

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