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Annamite musicians from Saigon: Longing For The Past. VARIOUS ARTISTS
Longing For The Past: The 78 rpm Era In South East Asia Dust To Digital DTD-28
Dust To Digital. Is there a label that does desirable re- issues better? This is their sec- ond release this year that deserves to walk it in our ‘Best Packaged Album Of The Year’ poll, if enough people have got their mitts on it – the other being their Greek
Rhapsody set of vintage Greek acoustic instru- mental music. Just like they did with Opika Pende: Africa At 78 rpm a couple of years ago.
So, the basic ‘what it says on the box’
stuff. Four CDs, 90 tracks of music recorded between 1905 and 1966 in Burma, Cambo- dia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. A 272-page book of essays and annotations by leading ethnomu- sicologists with over 250 vintage pho- tographs, record labels and sleeves. Yes. To that we can add that the book is a hardback 16 x 24 cm thing of beauty, immaculately designed and printed on art paper. It even smells nice! And the four CDs, separately housed in a beautiful four-gatefold wallet, are superbly remastered with a rich, clean sound and very little obvious surface noise/crackle in many cases. OJL blues re- issues they ain’t! And the whole thing is housed in a really stout, embossed protective outer slip case. Genuinely no expense spared.
The very first track, Vietnam’s Ut Tra On
singing Ton Tan Gia Dien from 1946, backed by guitar and violin, rivets you. It sounds like a wigged-out eastern fusion of old-time fid- dle and Hawaiian guitar, except that the gui- tar isn’t played with a slide, it has its finger- board dug out between the frets to allow microtonal bending, as might be done on the
dan tranh zither. We learn all that, and the history of the song and some biog of the singer, from the fascinating notes. 89 more tracks of thrill and discovery to go!
Before then, you’ve read – in between endless distraction by old photographs and illustrations of musicians – a brief history of the record industry in the region, beginning with The Gramophone Company’s Frederick Gaisberg’s pioneering 1902 trip, and overviews of the various musical cultures you will encounter.
Dust To Digital create special music/ listener ecosystems in this way. You need a clear day, maybe a Sunday, when you won’t be disturbed. You start reading the book, the words and the music draw you in. Even for people who – like me to a certain extent – are relative strangers to some South East Asian musics, you enter a different reality, feeding the CDs in every once in a while (but not until you’ve been distracted by repeating certain amazing discoveries a few times). Your ears tune in. Even by halfway through CD-A things won’t sound so weirdly alien or (hated word) ‘exotic’ any more, if they did initially. Hours of entranced reading and listening pass by. Meals get missed. The sun goes down. Or maybe you serialise it over four evenings. Either way, you emerge at the other end a different, better educated and thoroughly entertained person. That’ll also be a person who will return to this music endlessly, almost certainly start investigating more recent recordings to find out what’s still around now, maybe even be encouraged onto long haul flights. It is a musical and cultural trea- sure house and a Very Important Thing, and compiler/designer David Murray should be very proud of it. See his blog,
www.hajimaji.com
For all that plus the amazing quality and desirability of everything to do with this set,
Lisa Knapp
the £42.99 that Amazon are currently charg- ing seems very little really. Buy yourself the best Christmas present you’ll get this year.
www.dust-digital.com Ian Anderson LISA KNAPP
Hidden Seam Navigator Records NAVIGATOR084
Anyone who has read Colin Irwin’s Lisa Knapp feature in the last issue (and if you haven’t, hie thee to the back issues section, immediately!) will know by now that we’re not just dealing with some: ‘same shruti-different day’ Britfolk songstress here. In
recent years, I’ve heard her sing unaccompa- nied in a Padstow pub on May eve, and seen her share a London theatre stage with Marc Almond, and wondered what she’d come up with for this long-awaited follow-up to 2007’s Wild & Undaunted. Hidden Seam, it transpires, is a painstakingly crafted record, built upon layers of strings, keyboards, drums and programming. It is, in short, exactly the sort of thing that should be anathematic to an unrepentant old folknik like me, for whom all the very best albums were/are recorded by the process of plonking the performer(s) in front of a microphone, rolling the tape, and capturing the prover- bial lightning in the bottle.
And yet… From the opening lines of
Shipping Song (yep, the shipping forecast) you know that Lisa Knapp is a singer who means it (man). Possessed of a truly com- pelling voice, she croons, keens and roars across these extraordinary compositions with exhilarating audacity.
Photo: Judith Burrows
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