Radio Phnom Penh, Sublime Frequencies, 2005.
I'm a fiend for weird Asian music recordings from the 30s-70s. Thai go-go bands, Malaysian surf guitar, elegant Hong Kong torch singers -- I love it all. And I also love that other people love it as much as me, and that those people are more motivated to track down original master tapes and put them out on CDs for me to buy.

Case in point, Sublime Frequencies, which seems to be plumbing the depths of south Asia and the Middle East in search of the stuff that makes me so happy. It's as if someone set out to create a record label dedicated to releaseing exactly what i want them to release. Hong Kong Japan, Taiwan, and Korea have all been documented by retrospective collections (though I could always do with more), but the Sublime Frequencies releases dig into far more obscure territory. Radio Phnom Penh is exactly what the title suggests. Imagine sitting at some streetside food stall while the sounds of Cambodian radio pour out of some tinny old speaker from an apartment a couple floors up.

There's a lot of great old music on here, some early rock-pop, some more loungy stuff like you'd hear in a dimly lit nightclub circa 1963. Some of the songs are more recent remixes, but many are the pure old gold, with radio announcements in between to complete the atmosphere. Most of it is similar to what you'd expect from any Asian country's music at the time -- Western style mixed with decidedly unique local flavor and folk tendencies to create something wonderful and unique. Of the remixes, many are reworkings of pre-Khmer Rouge songs. During that era, Cambodia had a thriving music scene, as did most countries in Asia. But during the Kampuchia years, artists, musicians, and other intellectuals were slaughtered en masse. All that remained of them were scratchy 45s and 8-tracks that had trickled over the border into Thailand. The remixes are a way for modern Cambodians, emerging from decades of isolation and oppression and still faced with the daunting task of rebuilding themselves, to pay homage to the vanished artists of pre-Pol Pot Cambodia while, at the same time, reflecting modern tastes.

As is the case with many Sublime Frequencies releases -- and especially with their radio waves surveys (they've done similar releases for India, Sumatra, Palestine, Morocco, and Java, among others) -- the sheer variety of what's offered makes for an indescribably and completely immersing listening experience. It's no replacement for going to Cambodia yourself (on the Teleport City short list for 2006, along with nearby Laos), but until you can afford that ticket overseas, Radio Phnom Penh is an excellent way to loose yourself on the streets of Cambodia.

Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar, Sublime Frequencies, 2004.
My joy with Sublime Frequency's series exploring the backwaters of south Asian backwaters continues with Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar. The contents of this CD reflect a long out-of-print LP that collected together some amazing and rare music from assorted Burmese 45s and cassettes collected by Sublime Frequencies' main mover, Alan Bishop. This CD explores the musical legacy of a country that has, as a result of brutal dictatorship, been by and large a big blank mystery spot in the world. Where as Cambodia is emerging from its shadow, Myanmar/Burma is still struggling with censorship, political imprisonment, and the other things that keep a country struggling.

Princess Nicotine gives us a glimpse into the Burmese music scene circa the 60s and 70s, which means it's a more eclectic mix than the usual "Rough Guide" collection of folk standards. The guiding principle behind Bishop's work with Sublime Frequencies is that the music should speak for itself -- that neither he nor his label should impose any sort of anthropological "authority" on a person's reaction; and also, that it is the pop and everyman music that truly reflects a place, and not the so-called "important" tracks selected by other archival labels. Such material, while worthwhile, is hardly reflective of the "man in the street," no more so than, say, a recording of Roman Catholic masses would be reflective of the common musical and cultural tastes of the average Italian. So, while religious music is definitely represented in the Sublime Frequencies collections, it is by and large the religious as pop culture -- the religious music of the everyday rather than museum-sanctioned performers who put on shows specifically for archivists and other musical anthropologists.

Princess Nicotine is largely folk- and tradition-oriented. There are some cocktail hour songs, showcasing the blending of Western style nightclub music with Burmese traditional instruments and delivery so that you can imagine you're sitting in your smart suit and tie watching some Burmese band in a candle-lit open-air lounge or some jungle bar. Other songs have a more Indian flavor to them, which makes since seeing as the countries share a tightly-guarded border. In fact, much of the music seems an amalgamation of influences from the insular country's neighbors. As a result, you will hear elements of Chinese festival music (bang those cymbals!), those shrieking horns that make Muay Tai fighters dance and knee each other in the face, Malay gamelan rhythm, and other styles that are blended into a gigantic and unique swirl that is far too varied and eclectic to accurately reflect via my labored and largely incompetent attempts to write about it.

Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom, Sublime Frequencies, 2005.
Sublime Frequencies really outdid themselves when they assembled this collection of pop songs and, well, political rock operas, from North Korea. If ever you thought to yourself that Freddie Mercury's "Barcelona" project wasn't theatrical or bombastic enough, then "Radio Pyongyang" is going to delight you. Fearless leader and god emperor Kim Jung-il, himself an "accomplished" writer of operas, stage musicals, and movies, and a superior golfer (North Korean news items reported that Kim recently played his first ever round of golf, scoring a hole-in-one on fifteen of the eighteen holes), seems to think that soul-crushing tyranny and iron-fisted oppression will go down much better if it's accompanied by operatic paeans to his own greatness, featuring soaring rock guitars, weird electronic space sounds, and, one assumes based on news agency photos, legions of dancers spinning and twirling with AK-47s.

Falling somewhere between the familiar Asian lite-pop strains of China and Korea and the overblown rock opera of Pink Floyd and "Tommy," with plenty of traditional martial music and a dash of Korean folk thrown into the mix, "Radio Pyongyang" is damn near impossible to comprehend. This must be what it sounds like inside Kim Jung-il's head, where jaunty synth-pop ballads co-exist next to military choirs belting out praise to Kim Jung-il. Say what you will about the wretchedly nightmarish North Korean regime, they sure know how to stage a musical number. It must be a skill they learned from neighboring China, who recognized that cute, AK-47 brandishing women in pigtails and "Army of the People's Republic" hot pants are way better propaganda than some asshole in a striped shirt and straw hat playing "It's a Grand Ol' Flag" on the upright piano.

Assembled largely from intercepted radio and television transmissions, nothing here is subtle. Announcers gush on about how proud they are to have Kim Jung-il as their leader. North Korean chanteuses and pop divas mournfully pour out syrupy ballads about how great and perfect North Korea is. Narrators describe historic North Korean victories accompanied by a 70s groove that sounds like something Godzilla would have beat up a monster to, which then fades into a military chorus accompanied by, I kid you not, a circus-meets-prog rock extravaganza that would make even Rick Wakeman thing they should maybe tone thing down a bit. Of course, no political propaganda musical production would be complete without a children's chorus. The propaganda is so blinding, so over-the-top, so ridiculously outdated (even though it's current) that one can hardly believe that such a thing still exists. And yet, here it is, in all its unabashed glory. Most politicians are dirty liars, but to date, George Bush, for all his dabbling in bald-faced and ridiculously obvious propagandistic manipulation, has yet to reach the sublime levels of his diminutive nemesis in North Korea. At the same time, those "Proud to be an American" and "Let Freedom Ring" pop-country songs that Sean Hannity loved so much come close. Now if they'd been accompanied by a hundred Texas Guardsmen engaging in a snappy dance number...

As kitschy absurd as it all is, one can't help but feel bad for the thinking people whoa re subjected to this endless stream of propagandistic pop insanity. There are plenty of Koreans old enough to remember a time when Kim and his father weren't the inventors of electricity, the first men on the moon, or the greatest golfers the world has ever seen, and hearing the constant exultation of the evil elf Kim Jung-il must be a chore. At the same time, it's hard not to be swept up into the swirling technicolor madness of the music. It's not the sort of thing you might throw on for casual listening, but as an audio document of one of the most isolated countries in the world, it's a real eye-opener. Just don't fall asleep while listening to it, or you might wake up thinking to yourself, "Yes, Kim Jung-il is a great leader and true hero of the world. I shall now go and rent his excellent film, Pulgasari."

Of course, one also has to wonder why, if North Korea is so grand and the North Korean people feel a deep joy upon hearing this music, almost all the commentators and announcers are speaking English. One might even get the sneaking feeling that perhaps this whole thing is aimed more at the GIs on the border, because lord knows the hardened vets on the Korean borders will throw up their arms and surrender as soon as the phaser pedal gets pushed

Night Recordings from Bali,
Sublime Frequencies, 2003.
Although there probably those among you that would consider it offensive, I will freely admit that, in certain areas, I have what you might call an exotic cultures fetish -- exotic basically being anything that doesn't have to do with culture as experienced in the American Midwest or Northeastern seaboard. I would put the American south in there as well, except that I think the South, at least as romanticized by losers like me who refuse to admit that the South is now just one big pile of strip malls and greasy lotto addicts, remains a legitimate exotic culture. My fetish for exotic cultures isn't, however, the type of fetish that characterizes anything white and of European decent as "regular culture" and anything non-white as exotic and strange. No, my sense of exoticism is based purely on personal experience and familiarity, and my fetish stems from an intense desire to always learn about and experience new aspects of the world. I consider it healthy.

One of my great fascinations, especially coming from a particularly superstitious region like Appalachia, is festivals and rituals centered on rural legends, superstitions, and, ghosts. This applies particularly to the ghost rituals of South Asia (my bias as a Southerner always leading me to pay more attention to other Southerners, regardless of continent), which are often colorful, musical, and full of people in garish costumes lighting things on fire. As far as I'm concerned, anything that involves color, music, and people in garish costumes lighting things on fire is well worth familiarizing oneself with, even more so if it also involves drinking oneself silly. Basically, I'm enchanted by any festival or holiday that combines Halloween with the 4th of July.

Sublime Frequencies' Night Recordings from Bali isn't necessarily an audio study of ghost festivals, but they certainly play a key role in these field recordings of rural Balinese rituals and festivals taking place after the sun goes down and the world gets a wee bit more magical and mysterious. The CD combines instrumental and vocal performances with ambient sounds of the Balinese countryside and jungles at night to create an evocative and thoroughly captivating experience that, if you close your eyes, will indeed make you feel like you've wandered into the middle of some small-village festival.

The majority of the recordings were made at night in and around the villages of Peliatan and Ubud. The sounds "on display" include traditional Gamelan performances, rehearsals, and Ketchak, as well as ambient sounds of the surrounding woods. I'm normally so-so on these types of field recordings, as so many people think they can do them yet so many actually know how. It takes more than just standing around with a microphone and recording the surrounding din. Night Sounds knows how to assemble these disparate songs, chants, and noises into a connected and flowing totality that absolutely sucks you in. What makes it so enchanting is the evidence of sheer joy and dedication communicated by people who come together not to make music for recording, or for commercial gain; but rather, to make music simply for the elation from and belief in the music. Such festivals are not often somber affairs, and the celebration mixed with religion and the simple desire to get outside and bang furiously on the drum is intoxicating.

The sound quality on Night Recordings is lower than on previous Sublime Frequencies releases, but that's not much a detriment. Where as other labels attempt to present field recordings as some sort of removed anthropological survey, Sublime Frequencies presents them instead as a very personal, and as such much more accessible travelogue -- like snapshots, they are based entirely on the listener's experiences. As always, the trip is a real pleasure.

Molam: Thai Country Grooves from Isan, Sublime Frequencies, 2005.
Damn you, Sublime Frequencies! Just when I was getting good at not blowing every single penny I earned, just as I had broken my CD and DVD buying habits -- or at least whittled them down to a more manageable level -- along you come with some of the coolest CDs I've seen in years; and yes, having no self-control, I must own them all, and not over the course of a few months, but right now, this week. Maybe sooner.

Anyway, SF's exploration of obscure (at least in the United states, where we have a shocking level of insulation from the rest of the world's pop culture -- owing of course to the superiority of our own pop culture, like Nanny 911 and Chingy) and forgotten South Asian pop and folk music continues with Molam: Thai Country Grooves From Isan. Molam, or "master singer" is considered by many to be sort of the Thai bumpkin style of music, like bluegrass before its recent turn as the hipster music of choice hipsters talk about but don't actually listen to. Likewise, molam is considered Thai hillbilly music, not fit for sophisticated aural palettes, which is odd when you hear how wonderful Molam is and how bland and tepid more acceptable modern pop is. Molam is characterized by a vocalist (obviously, given the name) accompanied by an array of traditional instruments like the reed flute, percussion, and lute and fiddle-like instruments as well as, as the years progressed, electric bass, Hammond organs, and wah-wah or reverb guitars, among other modern twists. The result is spectacular. However, to pigeon-hole molam as being a single particular style or possessed of a single particular sound is wrong. Incorporating Western rock and psychedelia influences into the framework of more traditional northern Thai and Laotian approaches to music results in, as is so often the case, something that is strangely unique but still familiar -- not to mention highly listenable and fun.

And you can't beat the names on some of these gems from the 60s and 70s -- "Husband Drunk, Wife Drunk," "Ganja Better Than Booze," and my personal favorite, "Don't Want, Don't Want Marriage...No Way!" The music also reflects a more melancholy set of moods and events as well, with songs frequently lamenting broken hearts and hard times -- in other words, once again very much like old time music from the US, even if it sound more like whacked out 60s pop with a dash of Iron Butterfly. Completely different yet so much the same, huh?

Guitars of the Golden Triangle, Sublime Frequencies, 2005.
Who knew Burma rocked so well? Guitars of the Golden Triangle is Sublime Frequencies' second trip to the isolationist South Asian country that sometimes calls itself Myanmar, and as you world expect from the title of this collection, the focus this time is much more on sixties-style rock influenced by The Beatles and the English freakbeat scene, much less on traditional folk music. Most of the songs are culled from the country's expansive Shan State, a wild and somewhat anarchic region that was, for many decades in rebellion both open and covert against the central Burmese dictatorship.

I first became more familiar with Shan through the superb book Chasing the Dragon, detailing the adventures of a journalist as he hiked in from across the Thai border in hopes of interviewing the shadowy Khun Sa, nominal overloard of the Shan State and one of the biggest heroin manufacturers in the world -- though in his own eyes, narcotics were a way to finance the rebellion against Myanmar and set up an independent Shan State, which would then phase drug production out of its economic future. Shan is also home to some world-class headhunters, a few cannibals, plenty of trigger happy rebels and government troops, occasional Thai commando squads, and plenty of regular ol' folks just trying to get by. Guitars of the Golden Triangle is the perfect soundtrack for the book, but even if you skip the literature, the CD is still magnificent.

This collection of garage and psychedelic rock, raw folk blues ballads, and country-western style music hails from the early 1970s and are rare even in Burma owing to Shan's fierce independence and sense of identity a something apart from the rest of Burma. Some of the recordings are extremely rudimentary, and the sound quality on a few tracks suffers due to battered source materials (if you think you're going to find pristine master tapes, or any master tapes, of Shan acid rock, you're going to be disappointed), but these are minor quibbles with what is otherwise one of the most impressive collections of Asian psych and garage rock ever put together. The ability of the people at Sublime Frequencies to consistently track down some of the most obscure music in the world and bring it to us astounds and delights me. If I hadn't said "one of the best Sublime Frequencies" release for every release I've reviewed, I'd definitely say it about this one, because Guitars of the Golden Triangle is one of my favorites, not to mention perfect music to accompany you as you travel the rivers and jungles of Thailand and Burma by boat, train, and foot en route to meet the world's most notorious drug kingpin/celebrated emancipator of the people.

Choubi Choubi: Folk and Pop Sounds from Iraq, Sublime Frequencies, 2005.
These days, when I think of Iraq, I don't usually think of funky acid rock. Even before the war -- even before the first Gulf War -- on the rare occasion that I thought of Iraq, I rarely thought to myself, "Man, I bet they got some really trippy, organ- and guitar-driven freak-out music. But that's exactly what you get on "They Taught Me," the opening track of Sublime Frequencies' stellar Choubi Choubi: Folk and Pop Sounds from Iraq, a 16-song tour of the pop music landscape of the former Cradle of Civilization.

Although political pundits on both the left and right go back and forth comparing the U.S. involvement in Iraq to the Vietnam War, there is one major similarity I'd point out: both are countries we hear (or heard) about every day and thus felt "familiar" with, yet both are countries about which the average American knows next to nothing. Sensational news reports don't exactly clue you in on what day-to-day life is like for the average Iraqi any more than body counts gave you insight into what Vietnam was like before the war. One of the surest windows into the lives of people is pop culture, though I'm sure refined intellectuals from any nation would turn their nose up at that suggestion. The Sublime Frequencies series has been first rate in giving us a glimpse of what people from otherwise "mysterious" places might be like.

Choubi Choubi is, like all Sublime Frequencies releases, a rich and tremendously enjoyable melting pot of sounds and musical styles. The aforementioned "They Taught Me" certainly employs elements of acid rock and Bollywood-style funk, but there's an undeniable Iraqi take on the sounds as well -which only makes sense considering the fact that Western acid rock borrowed heavily from both Arabic and Indian music. Other songs are much more identifiably traditional -- I've always appreciated the fact that so many countries have integrated traditional folk sounds into their pop entertainment. It's a major failing in American pop music, if you ask me. Well, one of several major failings.

Most of the music in this collection was produced during the Saddam period, often by Iraqis living in exile, roughly from the 1980s to 2002. "Choubi" refers to one traditional type of Iraqi performance, a rapid rhythmic style that includes fiddles, reeded instruments, percussion, bass, keyboards and oud. Other styles featured are the urban Baghdadi basta, the bezikh, and the hecha. Socialist folk rocker Jafar Hassan's 1970s album, "Let's Sing Together" is represented by three tracks. Without a doubt one of Sublime Frequencies finest releases to date.

Labels: Sublime Frequencies