50 largely non EU/US discs from the "ethnographic" boxes: excuse to shoot the shit about why/how/we get what we get out of this & interrogate the notion of "exotica" etc

I have heard very very few of these and that is very very sad

I do like musics one doesn't really have a familairity with teh structure of .
& am probably hearing a number of things filtered through musicians with evenwider tastes tahn me, like Coltrane etc.
& thinking of times like teh alte 50s where you'd have to know where to buy these musics and they'd be about as exotic as one could get in a non media saturated world where access is what it is today where one can reach out to spotify and find some rep-resentation of these or some other online presence where you can at least read up on them.

& wonder if anybody's nicked any cool riffs from among them. Anybody taken teh repetitive one from Your Eyes Are Like A Cup Of Tea and used it as a guitar riff or something.
& have Sun City Girls, Suns of Arqa and people turned listeners onto their sources heavily.

also interested in cross cultural fertilisation. If records of this type or earlier manifestations turned up in non Western areas and had any impact.
With records having been recorded for a Western hadience if they did turn up in other place and brought about any changes/developments in teh way things were played leading to other musics taht wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I do know there was a major spread of Latin music across Africa in teh late 50swhich just about ties in with this. Fela Kuti got swept up by it and the Mande artists who turned up in Les Ambassadeurs, Rail Band, Orchestra Baobab etc all have some legacy of taht feel in their recordings.

wee primer for the interested: wagogo disc sounds like arnold dreyblatt on the dry savannah; woma@pito bar - nothing moves quite like this - relentless balafon. ZM Dagar is #1 rudra veena virtuoso. rudra veena is a bigger bassier fretted instrument akin to a sitar with a resonant gourd at either end. note bends are deeper & more resonant. you might have noticed Oren A has put out a couple of Dagars on Black Truffle (vinyl a moot choice for this, mind!). the peulh nomads do a vocal drone that is in our range unlike the guttural tibetan monastery chants. Cheikha Rabia – Liberti is the smokiest desert Rai. the two smithsonian Peru discs there sound less like el condor pasa and bizarrely burmese in places. the murung disc has the best khaen piece i've ever heard on it. The Sound of Club Secousse is a super little comp of contemporary african dance pop and other stuff. tsehaytu beraki's double on terp is flawless eritrean tigrinay krar blues, somehow i keep expecting paul leary to solo on half the songs. all the yaala yaala discs are great but i still haven't managed to track down the abdoulaye traore cd. oh the ari people of ethiopia disc on ocora is a must, though, i cannot do it justice in text. hocketing just intonation roundelay that grooves. the recording is so good it puts you right there.

oh if you track down the "tembang sunda" disc, which is jaw-droppingly beautiful m/f vox & zither, you can dump your eyving kang discs ( so long as you hang onto your terry rileys)

Dang i haven't heard a lot of these particular releases, but am familiar with idk, 1/3 of the musical styles?
Hard to vote against the Secret Museum of Mankind - Pat Conte is a pioneer and a genius and that disc (and the whole series) have helped serve as a rosetta stone to so many people i know.

I bet those Peruvian comps are sick as hell; I have a few Folkways LPs of Peruvian music that are just gorgeous.

I think I have 8 of these? tough to beat Water Wheel tho

you can dump your eyving kang discs

what is this blasphemy ;)

As for what I get out of Ethnographic music??? Man so much. Sonic joy, cultural interest, curiosity. More specifically, you know, geography and the proliferation of musical style is fascinating. I like hearing new things because it's exciting. I like music that makes me feel as though I am traveling in space or time. Specifically as a 78 collector I think it's always interesting how folk or classical styles adapted to the 3 minute side, and how they became or influenced popular music styles.

Really golly though there's just so much beautiful music to hear before I die. Polyphonic singing from Sardinia and Georgia? Bolivian huaynos? Khene music of Laos!! Balkan bagpipes, Greek clarinetists, bouzouki players, flamenco guitar shredders, the vast traditions of music from India, I wanna hear it all baby.

<3

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar - Raga Shuddha Todi (Nimbus)
Zia Mohiuddin Dagar - Raga Yaman (Nimbus)

Been listening to Raga Yaman quite a bit this year. I will vote for this, and will work through as much of the list as I can find.

I think a lot of this stuff does not at all count as exotica because it's trying to do the exact opposite - to educate and contextualize rather than exoticize.

Presumably why it counts as ethnographic and not exploitation innit.

Recognition that there are traditions outside the Western canon which itself isn't fixed. Also not that old when it comes to the electric stuff.
I was wondering what a default guitar style for a group in the late 60s who weren't likely to be cratedigging blues fans or r'n'b fiends would be. Like anything along those lines involves some level of personal research to learn to play at the time surely. Though maybe 10 years of r'n'r begins to denote tradition. But rock had to be formed before it became by rote & cliches take a while to develop before they can be overplayed. Its a process that can be avoided by trying to keep oneself fed by ideas outside of what everybody else is listening to. & finding this stuff so outside of the charts at least hopefully and outside of ones own personal context hopefully means it's interpretation is itself personal.

I'm enjoying the extent of chance input as to what I have found in order to purchase. Also being untidy enough to only have some of what i do have immediately findable.

Started making my way through these.i never really had enough spare cash when I was interested, now it's on YT...started with Tanzania:

Wagogo – Tanzanie: Masumbi - Musique De Divertissement Wagogo = Tanzania: Masumbi - Wagogo Entertainment Music (Ocora)

Various – Traditional Music Of Peru 6: The Ayacucho Region (Smithsonian Folkways)

Some of vocals reminded me of Diamanda Galas, in the way she can make you shift on your seat.

I feel kind of weird listening to a lot of this and I'm not sure what to do with that and the fact that even though it sounds great I'll never understand what it means in its original context (maybe sometimes there's enough cultural common ground to get the gist of it or fool myself into thinking I do)

I probably can't listen to it the same way I listen to pop music (except maybe when it is pop music) but I'm not sure what the least gross and acquisitive approach to these musics should be and should I approach them each differently or does it even makes a difference when they've already been commodified for me in album form and if I'm doing my own exoticism and orientalism by exceptionalising and projecting all my weird colonial neuroses onto it idk

One thing my approach is lacking rn is the context I would get from a booklet that would accompany these records. Because there are a few questions.

OTOH I very much like the playing, the music, the singing. So waving that aside, shouting "orientalism" and walking away is probably the worse thing you can do.

I'm not shouting I'm "interrogating"

"troubling", "problematising" etc but perhaps this music is not the right target

It might be the target, you won't know till you give it a listen.

can we unpack that?

Unpack what?

Molam Lao – Music From Southern Laos (Nimbus)

Molam Lao is a group of khen musicians and Lam singers originally from Laos. They settled in France in 1976, and have given concerts and taken part in many international festivals throughout Europe. In 2000 Molam Lao collaborated with Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart on an album called Molam Dub, mixing traditional Lam with dub music.

The khen is the quintessential Laotian bamboo mouth organ. Lam, a.k.a. Molam is popular style of singing popular in Laos and in Isan, the northern region of Thailand where the style is know as Morlam, Mor Lam or Morlam Sing.

Singers: Sengphet Souryavongsay, Phimmasone Saysamone, Nouphiene, Boualiane Thipsangvanh, Khampha Inthisane

Musicians: Nouthong Phimvilayphone - khen, kachapi, ranat. Tem Mahavong - khen, Khamsy Khounsavath - khen Lidsida Thipsangvanh - kong tapone, Khampha Inthisane - kachapi

Instruments: khen - bamboo mouth organ, kachapi - plucked lute ranat - xylophone, kong tapone - drums sing - finger cymbals, niap niep - notched stick

that molam dub album is really good, as well

I could do with coming across some other books as good as Eric Charry's Mande Music was on the music of the North West of Africa on other regions represented here.

THough do enjoy the alien to prior exeperience element of some of this stuff too. But getting a contextualisation does help.

Lacking a booklet or liner notes of some kind, wikipedia and google are your friends. Don't pretend like the information isn't out there, just because it's not presented to you gift wrapped with your youtube video or flac files or whatever. There's tons of blogs with loads of information out there.

Two of my favorites -
https://music-republic-world-traditional.blogspot.com/
https://excavatedshellac.com/

And of course books and academic journal -
https://www.jstor.org/journal/ethnomusicology

I like to see how the music is written about in the liner notes of the records, which might go someway to addressing Left's point.

Ofc "just Google" can fill a gap. I did that w/Molam Lao.

I guess when I read something like this....

I'll never understand what it means in its original context

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFAAFnRxK74

I thought that was part off the attraction that it was so other to one.
Though that may lead one to a perspective close to orientalism or nostalgia. But is anything reflected on enjoyed in itself.
Hard to ditch the associative complex one has for anythibg familiar and at least one gets to construct ones own for something like this. Which again should be part of the attraction i would think.

Like the associations you have to an object or piece of music are a part of the way you understand it. & instead of simply picking up a given interpretation you would be forging your own. Far more easily than if the object/piece of music were part of your cultural network. Probably also helps if singing is in a language foreign to one too.
So that is reduced by actually having a working knowledge of the full context of the actual recording/purpose of the music. Which one is also likely to be intrigued by. Conflicting desires to some degree.
Like is the drive to remove the idea of criticism or otherness necessarily what one wants.

also interested in cross cultural fertilisation. If records of this type or earlier manifestations turned up in non Western areas and had any impact.
With records having been recorded for a Western hadience if they did turn up in other place and brought about any changes/developments in teh way things were played leading to other musics taht wouldn't have happened otherwise.

― Stevo, Thursday, August 31, 2023 3:54 AM (one week ago)

Predating records but the 1889 worlds fair (Exposition Universelle de 1889):
https://symposium.music.org/index.php/52/item/22-claude-debussys-gamelan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lswHSnJ0Rlw

^^ yep, see David Toop's excellent Ocean Of Sound book for more on that

I think the last line of the last thing I wrote started out as the idea of orientalism whch may be clumsy and was supposed to denote a level of otherness. But I think autocorrect got to it.

Right, need to reread David Toop I think I had that title a couple of decades ago. Unfortunately several of his titles were in the library system but disappeared along the way.

actually it was written as exoticism and autocorrected to criticism. Just came back to me.

bookmarked. need to hear a lot more of these.

When I was asking about cross fertilisation it was wondering about non-western source to non-western recipient which may be overly precious. & feeds totally into a point may be viewed as exoticising.
But would be interested if people in what the west thinks of as exotic were in turn picking up on things they found exotic.
Probably true and why there was hybridization with jazz, blues, country etc but also interested in that non first world if that term is still used picking up on non first world music from elsewhere.

Colonial population acting as conduit for indigenous population to pick up on music's from other cultures than that of colonizers. Assume this did happen with population brought in for beauracracy etc bringing their own musics with them.
Like I know my introduction to some indian foods came about in cafes in Kenya because of crossover there.
Plus earlier Arabic and other populations in Pacific and Indian ocean cross fertiliser indigenous culture/music.
But struck by idea of recorded musics in whatever form being picked up on.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CxOoFHeMS-F/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Malian griot plus American old timey players = Africa TO Appalachia.
I think this is a patron complimenting song that they're using as their first number and using to compliment audience members and friends

Murung – Ritual Mouth-Organs Of The Murung - Bangladesh (Inedit)

Had a really disorientating listen to this.

The Sublime Frequencies records throw a real curve ball into this notion of world music as seen by the West. I had forgotten it

Various - Folk And Pop Sounds Of Sumatra Vol.1 ‎(Sublime Frequencies)
Various - Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk & Pop Music Vol. 1 (Sublime Frequencies)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Lol thought I had voted for Dagar.

Working through this list.

i remember hamza el din's voice taking me by surprise on "the waterwheel". got it cheap ready for some oud action - digging the trancey vibes while marking homework or summat, 10 minutes in * BOOM ! * what a voice. didn't even know he sung!
nonesuch gamelan melted my tiny mind in the uni library about 33 years back.
they're all grand discs, i'd recommend every one of them.
i didn't even get into the indian classical boxes
@Stevo - yes. as a brit who gravitated not particularly towards anything but definitely away from the claustrophobic rock/pop of my childhood, there is even after so many decades of armchair exploration, the wonder of a world of much more variegated music, and perhaps never being able to truly grok the stuff ("never lived afro-pop") is in itself an attraction, as well as the religious / communal/ ceremonial nature of much of the music, community not really being a UK/EU/US thing on the whole. reading the liner notes, daydreaming about what it must be like to take part in the harvest festival, get your cicatrizations, sing your stories of the hunt to your fellow hunters. main attraction always the sound, the timbre, the patterns