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Of Monkey Chants and the Love God
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Islands Magazine, Of Monkey Chants and the Love God >>
Back in the 1960s before the marketplace of "world music" existed as such, the independent Nonesuch Label (now part of AOL Time Warner) began its Explorer Series - a slew of legendary titles that packaged musicology as pleasure, presenting traditional music from diverse parts of the world in high-quality audio. Some of those albums have come out on CD, but unitl now there hasn't been a complete reissue of the series. But beginning in 2002 and continuing through 2005, all 92 volumes will be hitting the stores in volleys - a major record-publishing event.
Most of what a record reviewer gets in the mail is landfill in the making, so imagine my delight when I got a package of 12 explorer titles from Indonesia to the South Pacific. Back when I was a musical tadpole, these records introduced me to gamelan, the pulsing, shimmering tuned-metal orchestra of Bali and Java. I engaged in a marathon listen-down with the aim of picking three of the 12 - not the three best, because there is no such thing, but three I highly recommend:
Golden Rain, recorded in Bali in 1966, begins with the glorious clatter of a 25-piece orchestra called Gamelon Gong Kebjar, then progresses to a recording I first head when it was new - and that I haven't forgotten. It's the monkey chant: 200 men repeating the syllable "tjak" back and forth at a moterically high speed, with solo voices singing over it in a dramatic ebb and flow that lasts for more than 20 minutes. Hearing it feels like a privilege.
Originally realeased in 1972, Gamelon Semar Pegulingan: Gamelon of the Love God is and exercise in ecstatic transport. The integrity of the timbres and the vitality of the performance may remind you how cheesy today's synthesizer-driven chill-out music is. I took a class in 1973 from Robert E. Brown, who recorded this music, and I remember him speaking wistfully of Bali as a paradise on earth. This CD sounds like paradise, too.
Striking a completely different from the others is West Java: Tonggeret: Sundanese Popular Music. Recorded between 1979 and 1986, this is a later generation of music reflecting a different idea, but it still uses traditional instrumentation. This record is unlike any you've ever heard, and it's everything you could want in popular music. There are sensuous, expressive female vocals by Idjah Hadidjah: shouting men; haunting melodies; rich timbres; shifting texturesl and dynamic, challenging drumming. It functions as a kind of link between the Explorer Series and the sophisticated world-music releases of the 1990s. I don't use the word often, but this record is sublime, absolutley sublime.
Ned Sublette 04/01/03
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