News | Interview with Sound Collector Jason Kopec | China

If most backpackers are mainly sightseers, Jason Kopec is a soundhearer. Instead of a camera, his primary method of capturing memories is a microphone and field recorder, and he releases his sonic catches from Burma and China in his Ground Up series of discs. (That said, Kopec does also carry a camera and his pictures are beautiful--you can check out both sounds and images on the website of his label, noise|order.)

Kopec calls himself an audio ethnographer, a fact that might draw the ire of cultural anthropologists and ethnomusicologists--not necessarily because he lacks a particular degree, but because his discs lack ethnographic detail. Release the Cheerfulness China: Ground Up 2 contains lovely music and fascinating sounds, but even less contextualizing information than you'll find on your average Sublime Frequencies disc. This lack of context is not surprising, given the producer's fascination with the ways that the familiar sounds of one culture take on new meanings for a visitor from another: Kopec's works are less ethnographies than the audio travel diaries of a self-confessed "sound junkie." I recently asked him about his travels and favorite timbres.

We could start by me asking you what your background is and how you came to travel around China with a microphone and a field recorder...

Well, I'm at heart a sound junkie. I've never been that interested in taking photographs as a way of artistically capturing a feeling, place or person, so my interest in field recording and phonography was in a way inevitable. I began seriously recording in the field in 2000 when I was in South Africa. I had been bouncing around the globe for a spell, and had heard so many amazing sounds that I became more and more interested in the idea of capturing them for future use. After hearing a Kurdish folk group in Van, Turkey give their first public performance after a seven year government crackdown on the PKK and all Kurdish activity, I knew I HAD to get something to start recording such moments. My next major destination happened to be South Africa, so while there I bought a mini-disc recorder and a cheap Sony stereo microphone. I started turning it on at various times when something of interest was happening around me, be it music or an engaging sound.

I then ventured to Burma and became much more focused on my effort. I no longer approached travel as a predominantly visual adventure, but more a sonic one. While there I had so many incredible experiences recording that I managed to amass enough material to put together an album ("Burma 1 - Ground Up 1" on my label noise|order). Burma was the first time I literally spent days walking around a town looking for music and musicians. Since the interactions and situations that resulted from that effort were so enjoyable, it prompted a whole new style of travel and documentation for me. Now I always search incessantly for music and interesting sounds wherever I go, and my previous experiences have allowed me to get much more bold in my approach.

I've now traveled extensively in over 40 countries and have been recording material everywhere I've been since 2000.

News | Marvin Sterling Speaks On the Japanese Reggae Boom |

Marvin Sterling, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana
University and author of the forthcoming "Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan" will speak at IU on Monday, March 17 from 4:00-5:30 p.m. Location: Student Building 159.

It looks to be a fascinating talk. Check the abstract:

"Race and ethnicity in the Jamaican response to the Japanese reggae boom"

In the early 1990s, roots reggae music flourished in Japan. Later in
the decade, a more recent style of reggae, dancehall, began its own
ascent towards achieving "boom" status in the country. In many ways
dancehall has come to eclipse the success of roots reggae only a few
years before. As a measure of this success, in 2006, Yokohama Reggae
Festival attracted about 30,000 Japanese reggae fans, filling Yokohama
Stadium and making it very likely the largest one-day reggae event in
the world. Much of the success of dancehall in the country can be
attributed to excitement surrounding recent Japanese victories in
international competition otherwise dominated by Jamaican reggae
artists. As such, more and more Jamaicans have become aware of the
intense Japanese interest in dancehall and roots reggae. In this paper
I argue that Japanese engagement with reggae and the Jamaican response
to this engagement might be productively read in ethnic and racial
terms. I argue that Japanese engagement with reggae affords
perspective on the Japanese construction of ethnoracial identity and
difference in the two countries, in ways that might be seen as
ultimately speaking to ethnoracial identity in Japan. I also argue,
focally, that the Jamaican response to this engagement represents a
perspective from which to view the Jamaican imagination of its status
as a postcolonial nation in a rapidly neoliberalizing globe.

By "international competitions," I wonder if Sterling is referring to things such as the International Dance Hall Queen competetion held in Montego Bay, which was won by Japanese dancer Junko in 2002. When a white Canadian woman known as Moo Moo won the competiton in 2007, some Jamaicans responded by "throwing bottles and other objects on stage."

Online responses to Moo Moo's win, written in rasta patois, also reveal identity concerns and an anger that extends to Japanese dancers:

How a white oooman win this sh*t are they trying to take over dance hall queen now it gone to the wolves SHAMBLES FOR LIFE

yes same wit japanese dem cant dance all dem can do is jump and spin on deh head and dats not dancing,di white ooman has no ryhthm at all,i was deh and ah pity dem try comercialize dancehall so dem give it to white ooman,she cant dance at all shes terrible,real bad u see her dance at last years,it was the worst

Of course, these kind of tensions often emerge when a the "cultural expression" of a local group becomes a "cultural product." The pride of seeing one's culture gain the world stage is often made bittersweet by the fear of losing it as one's own. It should be interesting to get the perspective from the Japanese side of the coin (as Sterling presents it).

News | Liminal States: Life as an Indie Musician on Taiwan |

I have a new article online in Folklore Forum, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to “the free exchange of ideas on the cutting edge of folklore, folklife and ethnomusicology.” “Liminal States: Life as an Indie Musician on Taiwan,” centers on the life and music of Huang Wan-ting, a founding member of grrl punkers Ladybug who I profiled a few years back on this site.

In the article, I use the concept of liminality (coined by the great anthropologist Victor Turner) to examine ways Wan-ting exists in between some of the recognizable identities people use to identify one another. On the level of national identity, for example, she considers herself Taiwanese and is frustrated by the fact that the world refuses to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. She feels trapped between the identities of “Chinese” and “Taiwanese,” disempowered. On a level of musical identity, however, Wan-ting maintains a liminal state on purpose, as it empowers her creatively. As an indie musician, she stays on the edge of the music mainstream, making styles of popular music that are not yet popular (and may never be). This status on the edge of popular music identities gives her the freedom and power to play with new ways of sounding and being.

I’m particularly pleased that this article came out in a special issue that honors recently retired Indiana University professor Roger Janelli, a great scholar of Korean folklore and folklife. In fact, it was in a class of Professor Janelli’s that I first started developing these ideas. I haven’t met a better teacher or a nicer guy.

News | Sax in Taiwan |

When people tell me that Asian music has become "westernized," one counter-argument I toss out is the fact that so many instruments played by western musicians are made in the East. Particularly in the case of electronic instruments, in which potential sounds and rhythms are often predetermined by programmed "presets," I would argue that global pop music has been Asianized. For instance, entire genres of music have coalesced around the TR-808 drum machine, created by Japan's Roland Corporation.

The Asian manufacture of "western" instruments predates the synthpop era, however. For example, according to today's piece on NPR's Morning Edition, Taiwan began producing and exporting saxophones shortly after World War II. By the 1980s, the island was building roughly a third of the world's saxes, mostly lower-quality student models. Today, spurred on by Chinese competition for the low-end market, the Taiwanese sax is increasing in quality and global reputation. Says one American player:

"You would never have thought of Taiwanese instruments trying to inch into the pro territory. But they are. And they are making some really nice horns."

News | Quite a Journey |

This isn't the sort of music I usually cover (how many times have I written that on this site?), but I was struck by something in the video below. In it, a huge and rapturous Chilean crowd thrills to the operatic, hard/soft, early 80s rock of Journey, a band that provided aural backdrop for many a sixth-grade love drama when I was at summer camp.

But it wasn't so much nostalgia for my youth that made this clip so affecting. Rather, this video gave me a momentary flash of popular music's astonishing reach through space-time and its emergent role as a sort of global connective tissue made of music, emotion and technology. How else could a Filipino club singer end up fronting this famed and aging North American rock band on a South American stage in 2008?

[Keep reading below the video.]

Marx and Buddha
Though I subscribe to neither of the religions that bear their names, two of my favorite thinkers are Karl Marx and Siddhārtha Gautama (aka the Buddha). Both men emphasized that what we perceive as stable and separate--things such as the history of a nation or the identity of an individual--are in reality enmeshed in, and dependent upon, the constantly changing material conditions from which they arise. Marx saw these changing material conditions the "means of production" and sought to reduce suffering by adapting social conditions to suit them. Buddha, on the other hand, thought suffering could be alleviated only through the total acceptance of the interconnectedness and impermanence of one's life and surroundings. Both would agree that trouble arises when we adopt an ideology that doesn't "go with the flow" or "change with the changing times."

On the political left and right, people in the United States are currently getting confused by just this sort of limiting ideology, reacting with xenophobia and protectionism to the sometimes frightening changes brought by globalization. These folks would do well to throw a little Marx and Buddha into their mix--to not fight change, but instead fight to make that change equitable.

Schon and Pineda
Journey guitarist Neal Schon saw Filipino singer Arnel Pineda fronting his Manila cover band on You Tube and--in an inspired act of musical outsourcing--hired him as the band's new singer this past December. A long-distance, high-profile connection like this draws a lot of attention, but it is only a single example of the kinds of connections that music constantly creates and draws upon.

This video is an object worthy of our contemplation. Consider the materials and relationships that went into its creation: African musical elements of rhythm and timbre, European harmonic sensibility, synthesizers and effects boxes developed in Japan and built in China, American technologies such as the electric guitar the internet, the food the performers ate the night of the show, the roads they traveled to get there... This just begins to tell the story of how a piece of culture such as this video reaches your eyes and ears.

Like it or not, everything local is global as well. A popular music performance both embodies and represents the journey culture makes through the world. Or put another way, it takes a planet to create a corny-ass love song. There are other more damaging ways to spread cultural forms, such as military imperialism and terrorism. We need to study and promote the types of cultural flow that make people happier. I'm not saying that there are no downsides to economic and media globalization, but there is no way to disconnect from the world. We should focus on making our connections as positive as possible.

On an aesthetic level, the positivity of Journey's musical contribution is certainly arguable. But hey, they sure dig it in Chile.

News | Happy Chinese New Year and Happy Birthday Radiodiffusion |

As we ring in the Rodential Lunar New Year, my friend Stuart celebrates a personal milestone--two years of posting obscure global oldies at his site Radiodiffusion Internasionaal. If you haven't been downloading his digitized found sounds, you've missed out on over 100 weeks' worth of 60s pop singles from Central, South, East and Southeast Asia.

This week the site features two tracks by the Stylers, an instrumental band from Singapore who dealt in "non-stop dancing music." Stuart asked me to lay down a little background on this rather obscure genre, as I'm a bit of an aficionado. Here's what I came up with:

Non-stop instrumental dancing records go at least as for back as the 1950s orchestral work of Germany's James Last. Non-stop ballroom has had a lasting influence in East and Southeast Asia. (In the mid-1990s, I purchased a wonderful cassette in the Philippines called "Non-Stop Cha Cha Extravaganza," for example.) However, it is the Asian version of the "A Go-Go" pop medley sound that has captured the imaginations of Western record collectors in recent years. Influenced by instrumental rock groups from the US and UK, the 60s teen scenes of Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore produced numerous dancing albums. These albums often retained the ballroom sensibility of listing the intended dance styles next to the track titles (A Go-Go, Blues, Fox Trot, Cha Cha, etc.), but relied on a rock line-up of bass, drums, guitar and organ. As for the songs performed, Western pop hits, regional pop hits and even traditional folk melodies were all fair game.

By the 1970s, surviving instrumental bands like The Stylers seem to have gotten more ambitious, incorporating into their albums film themes, sound effects, "hi-fi" production values, and musical elements of the emerging disco sound. By this point, non-stop instrumental albums were less a teen dance phenomenon than they were fodder for the high-end stereo equipment of Asian audiophiles.

To hear the music and get more information on the Stylers and Asian A Go-Go (including many informative links), go to this week's post. You only have until Sunday morning...

Otgonbayar Chuluunbaatar and Wolfgang Hofer | Zastiin Nogoodoi |Zakhchin Music | Mongolia

At the tail end of the second millennium, father and son John and Alan Lomax traveled the rural south of the United States collecting the last vestiges of music transmitted solely by way of mouth in that part of the world. Ironically, the means of their effort--the technologies of motorized transport and sound recording--were also the means of "pure" folk music's demise. These harbingers of modernity came later to much of the world, and in the third millennium there are still Lomaxes out there trying to catch the last drops of musical streams running dry.

Western Mongolian singer Otgonbayar Chuluunbaatar is one of these. As the youth of her Zakhchin tribe, which numbers only 25,000, move from the steppes to the cities, blending with the Khalkha majority and listening to popular music, they break with the oral tradition of Zakhchin songs. Chuluunbaatar has made it her mission to collect these songs, which she says have never been transcribed or studied.

On Zastiin Nogoodoi, the third in a series of Zakhchin music she has produced, Chuluunbaatar sings more than 30 "short" and "long" songs--so described not because of their total length, but for the way the long songs stretch out syllables. Unaccompanied or with the simple companionship of Wolfgang Hofer's guitar or Altaic lute, her strong, emotive voice brings to life tales of mountains, drunkards and horses.

Her voice is the voice of a thousand voices before her, filling a space where silence may otherwise have been, providing a glimpse of the soul of a people you may otherwise have never known. Once again, the hand of technology cuts off a cultural stream, then casts its droplets out to unexpected places, far and wide.

For ordering information, contact the artist: zakhchinmusic@yahoo.de

Rebuilding the Rights of Statues | Cut Off! |Tag Team | China

Until recently, the indie scenes of China hadn’t made a dent on the outside world. An increasing number of Chinese bands were developing in terms of musical competence and taste in influences, but in terms of writing music with a spark of originality--music outside indie fans would want to listen to more than once--little had broken through. Then, in 2006, Beijing’s SUBS made an impact on Europe with their driving, noisy sound and kinetic live show. Now, in 2007, another dark band from the capital, Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, has taken a strong stab at western ears, performing at South by Southwest and releasing an EP on L.A. imprint Tag Team Records.

ReTROS look and sound as enigmatic and alienated as their name suggests. They traffic in the danceable rhythms and staccato guitar work of their post-punk-influenced Stateside contemporaries, but they make it their own, welding a metalic figure out of pieces of Joy Division and the B-52s and bringing it to life with a nihilist Beijing electricity. (Open question: Does Beijing 2007 really feel like Berlin 1977?)

The Cut Off! EP pops out of the speakers as tight and punchy as you could want, but the real source of distinction is in the vocals. Guitarist/songwriter Hua Dong has a great voice, at times sounding like Fred Schneider at his early best—especially when bassist Liu Min plays the Cate Pierson/Cindy Wilson role in "TV Show (Hang the Police)."

But Hua is no mere mimic. In the standout "If the Monkey Becomes (to be) the King," he deploys the vocal range and theatricality of a Beijing opera star to transport the mythic Chinese monkey hero into a future (or present) controlled by soldier automatons. The song is funny and more than a little spooky— in six minutes, it says more about China’s tangle of creativity and state control than a thousand Newsweek articles.

Hua is playing freely with the past and present of his country as well as the past and present of indie music. In other words, he is a real artist, reflecting his reality in sounds that will become part of your reality. One gets the sense that ReTROS will continue to develop into something even more starkly original.

Video: "TV Show (Hang the Police)"

Kon Ichikawa | The Burmese Harp | | Japan

buy it
The Burmese Harp is a beautiful and unusual film about Buddhism, music and the aftermath of war. Many others have reviewed this 1956 Japanese release, in which director Kon Ichikawa depicts the struggle of Japanese soldiers in Burma to come to terms with their defeat--my purpose here is to discuss the role of music in the film, as well as a broader point about colonialism.

The story centers on a platoon of soldiers who have kept their sprits up during the long retreat across Burma by singing. They are accompanied by Private Mizushima (Rentaro Mikuni), a self-taught player of the Burmese harp. Unlike the stiff-lipped Allies in The Bridge Over the River Kwai, these soon-to-be POWs don't whistle jolly tunes--they sing songs full of loneliness and nostalgia in beautiful choral harmonies, set to Mizushima's elegant harp arrangements.

There is a strange disconnect between sound and image in the film's many musical scenes. The beautifully framed cinematography was shot on location, realistically depicting dead bodies strewn across Burma's serene landscapes. The music, however, is recorded in the studio, with seemingly no similar effort toward verisimilitude: the soldiers' singing is pitch perfect and the harp parts, obviously played on a western harp, utilize a wide range and chromatic pitches not found on the Burmese harp. Moreover, the sound of the harp often projects through jungle and stone walls and across fields in an utterly unrealistic manner. Rather than seeming corny or old-fashioned, this treatment of sound serves to amplify one of Ichikawa's themes--that music unites, transcends, heals and ties together.

In an early scene, the platoon, feigning obliviousness to an impending Allied attack, starts singing what they think of as a Japanese song. Soon they are joined in singing by the opposing forces, who sing the song's English version: "There's No Place Like Home." It turns out that the war has already ended and a needless and bloody confrontation has been averted by a song whose melody and homeward-yearning sentiment transcend nationality and enmity.

Mizushima is soon separated from his fellows and nearly killed. Stealing a Buddhist monk's robes in order to disguise himself, he treks toward the camp where his platoon is interred. However, the scenes of carnage that greet him at every turn profoundly affect him, and the quest for physical survival becomes a quest for spiritual survival. Eventually, he reunites with the other Japanese only to play them a musical goodbye on the harp. The disguise has become reality--when they return to Japan, he will stay behind in "Buddha's land" as a monk.

More than any piece of writing or film-making I have encountered, The Burmese Harp gives a sense of the soul searching that must have taken place in Japan after WWII. Shot eleven years after the war's end, it reveals both the depths and limits of that search. In this film, music is a stand-in for the goodness in the soldier's heart, and Mizushima represents the Japanese realization of war's futility and brutality. However, it is telling that the warrior-turned-monk makes it his mission not to make reparations toward the Burmese people he helped oppress, but rather to save the bodies of Japanese soldiers from Burmese vultures.

Just as in many Hollywood films set in Asia, in Ichikawa's film Burma is merely the backdrop for the colonialist's quest--be that quest "good" or "evil." The song of Japan floats over the Burmese landscape in a grand chorus; the music of Burma is scarcely heard at all.

News | The Band Apart Hits Midwest |

Japan's The Band Apart play big festivals in their home country and have sold over 700,000 copies of their surprisingly sophisticated alterna-rock. Like the U.S.'s 311, they use the "modern" guitar tones of Hot Topic rock, yet manage to come off sounding way smarter than their peers. There's a bit of math rock, emo vocals that verge on smoothed-out J-pop, jam-band guitar licks and a dash of cocktail jazz in their mix. It's very polished and works for me in practice way better than it sounds in theory!

Next month, a few lucky inhabitants of the American mid-portions can avoid the air tickets, stadiums and port-a-potties and see The Band Apart in a small rock club, as the band tours the States for the first time:

09/21/07 - Nashville, TN @ The 5 Spot
09/23/07 - St. Louis, MO @ Cicero's
09/26/07 - Chicago, IL @ Subterranean
09/27/07 - Bloomington, IN @ Uncle Festers

By the way, check out these guys' merch. Why don't more American bands sell towels?