|
|
 |
Global Hit
|
| Click Here to go back. |
NPR's The World, Global Hit >>
| May 17, 2005 |
|
|
| |
|
| Artist: |
Trans-Global Underground |
| Album: |
Impossible Broadcasting |
| |
|
|
| |
The subject of today's Global Hit exemplifies this week's "Think Global" theme on public radio. The very name of the band reveals its intentions. The group is called Trans-Global Underground. As The World's Marco Werman explains, the British quintet is all about "globalization."
Trans-Global Underground's CD Impossible Broadcasting begins the way the band kind of conceived the album: a radio receiver for global sounds.
Hamilton Lee: "You're kind of tuning in to different stations from all around the globe, and this is some of the sounds that you might find. This is our kind of personal transistor radio if you like."
Trans-Global Underground percussionist and musical programmer Hamilton Lee says his band has been doing this kind of thing since they began to make music nearly ten years ago.
But their album Impossible Broadcasting is more consciously a shortwave radio for world music than ever before.
Transglobal Underground have been a heavy presence at London's trance and trip-hop dance parties. But that scene has subsided somewhat. And the band has had the time now to think about and process what they've seen and heard as they've traipsed around the world.
Transglobal Underground's Hamilton Lee calls what the band does "globalization."
Hamilton Lee: "You know you go to North Africa, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Venezuela, wherever we've been travelling over the last few years or so, everybody really has, or is getting very quickly, access to the same tools that we have to make music. It's good in that sense, if one can call that globalization, that you can collaborate with people down the internet."
In world music circles, a sensitivity has developed toward artists who force together incongruous styles and sounds. The nose flutes of Cameroon's pygmies meet South Bronx hip-hop for example. Hamilton Lee says Transglobal Underground can relate.
Hamilton Lee: "We used to joke about it, you know 'is there a type of music that we find we possibly couldn't have anything in common with.' And we found ourselves working with a gypsy brass band, and we were thinking 'Well, I don't think a brass band with the technology sequences and everything,' I mean these guys, they had never played with a sequencer in their life before, and we had a couple of days rehearsal, and it was absolutely amazing."
That means music and sounds from anywhere are fair game. Trans-Global Underground will globalize it and put it on record though, only if it works for them.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman. | 05/17/05 >> go there
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
