March 28, 2004

Chaozhou Folk Music Troupe & Linghai String and Woodwind Ensemble | Chaozhou String Music |Hugo | China

buy it
The Chaozhou Folk Music Troupe and Linghai String and Woodwind Ensemble play with vigor, spinning forth complex variations on their simple melodies at sometimes dizzying speeds. They've created a recording that oscillates between tranquility and exhilaration.

March 25, 2004

Petty Booka | Concert Review: Bottom Lounge, Chicago |Benten | Japan

They sing like the Andrews Sisters, dress like Dale Evans, create set lists like pop historians and play ukelele like... um, Tiny Tim? I mean, who the hell plays ukelele? Petty Booka do--and they put on quite a show.

March 23, 2004

Kokeshi Doll & Bleach | Japanese Girls Samurai US Tour |Benten | Japan

On March 21 at Chicago's Bottom Lounge, two noise-wielding trios, Kokeshi Doll and Bleach, unsheathed their sounds, cut open space and time and awakened the room to the amazement of the present moment. As the crowd exited after the show, one woman said "they didn't just break stereotypes about Japanese girls--they broke stereotypes I didn't realize I had about what women can do."

March 06, 2004

Various | City of Ghosts Soundtrack |Lakeshore | Cambodia

buy it
Matt Dillon's directorial debut, City of Ghosts evokes the traveler's experience of Southeast Asia like no other fictional film I've seen. Sure the plot's a bit rickety, but Cambodia comes off the screen so vividly, you can practically smell it. This is due in no small part to the soundtrack. Instead of commissioning a cliched "Asian" film score or a trendy backpacker's mix tape (a la Danny Boyle's wack 2000 travel flick the Beach), Dillon and music supervisor Dondi Bastone came up with a haunting combination: French and American 78s that conjure the colonial past and Cambodian pop classics that predate the bloody days of the Khmer Rouge... posthumous music that lingers like ghosts of the people who performed it.