I don’t know much about rap/hip-hop, but one of the primary focusses in my musical search in Burma was to find urban youth-oriented music, how it’s made, distributed, performed, etc… and how something like a Hip-Hop scene might exist in a city like Yangon or Mandalay. The first rapper everyone pointed me to, both inside and outside the country, is J-Me. A member of the “Myanmar Hip-Hop association”, which supports now over a dozen musicians through their distribution of annual compilations, and functioning for all intents and purposes as a collective and record label.

J-ME SONG 2 MP3

Other members of the MHA include Cyclone, K-Ca$h, Kaung Chit Soe, OnTrack, Bigg-Y and others. Many produce their own music, make their own beats and write their own lyrics, and occasionally some of the artists work with big name DJs such as Thxa Soe and DJ Jay for remixes or new releases. In the spirit of copy songs, I thought it would be appropriate to breath a little life into the idea, and pass along the DJ Thxa Soe and MHA Wu-Tang copy

WU INTERNET MIX MP3 (Wu-Tang copy song)

It’s more common for rappers to release single songs than full albums, making compilations the primary marketing device to introduce rappers to the public. This 2005-dated compilation features 2 songs each by 6 rappers.

K-CA$H SONG 1 MP3

I am hoping to throw a compilation together featuring a number of interesting songs from the Yangon underground electronic/hip-hop scene. Please contact me if you are interested in this project.

A few songs that didn’t end up making it onto the album for various reasons, but which I wanted to share.

CHILDREN MALE DUET
SHAKIRA COPY SONG
MALE COUNTRY SONG
BURMA CLASSIC ROCK
COMMERCIAL

These were recorded March-April 2007 in Yangon, Myanmar. Visit the MUSIC section for links to purchase the disc from Sublime Frequencies.

Guatemala is a tough place to find ANY trace of musical history. Latin america is musically unique in many respects, and an upcoming project I’m working on deals with the notion of language, identity and culture in the role of Spanish musics from Cuba and Mexico to Argentina and Chile. In all the months I’ve spent in Guatemala, seeking out musical performances, historical records, and radio broadcasts, I have always struggled to find anyone who knows anything of recorded music during Guatemala’s civil war days. “Music from the 70s and 80s? That doesn’t exist” is the common response. My search continues, and I have amassed a great deal of live and radio material, but my cassette searches have left me with little other than Costa-Rican manufactured cassettes of Mexican and Argentinian icons of Romantic and Bolero music from labels such as “Peerless” and “Embassy”. Here is a cassette I found in Quetzaltenango a couple months ago.

EL CABLE SUBMARINO MP3
TE LA TENGO QUE DAR MP3

you find it sitting on the corner of a table in a small-town vegetable market:

you send it home in a shoe-box.

7 months later, having no idea what to expect, you pop it into a cassette player and hear this:

Papelle MP3

Believe it or not, Myanmar has its own “Myanmar Hip-Hop Association”; it has its own guitar gods, country music icons, trip-hop and trance underground scenes. Don’t let its international image obscure the vibrancy and creativity of its youth. The problem, obviously, is finding out about that stuff in the first place. I will focus on Burmese hip-hop and guitar music at another time, but I wanted to ease into some of those extremes with the one of the biggest bands in Burma — Emperor.

First of all, who listens to all this stuff? What would Burmese kids recommend? Well, hear them for yourself (My friends in Mandalay on what the kids like in Burma)

I found this Emperor cassette (entitled “New Place”) in the same Mae Sot shop I found the hand-drawn Karen cassette below. Emperor formed in the late 80s, led by vocalist Zaw Win Htut, and my sources tell me this album dates back to the early 90s.

“NEW PLACE” MP3
PURPLE HAZE COVER MP3

info and translation from Naw Laung

Sumba is the southernmost island of the Indonesian archipelago. To the north is Komodo island, to the east is East Timor. Sumba is a living megalithic culture in a perpetual golden age, carving stone monuments out of the hillsides and dragging them through the valleys by brute force. Hilltop kampung (villages) rest above some of the more rare uncultivated valleys of indonesia. Christianity has made inroads, though the animist Merapu religion still reigns supreme outside of the towns of Waingapu and Waikabubak. The Sumbanese are a mixture of Papuan, Malay and Indian ancestry, and its sandlewood legacy lives on within its proud tradition of horses, and you will hear Sumbanese cowboys yelping in the hills long before you will see them, but you can be sure they are there. Pasola is a ritualized war, and now the only real tourist attraction on the island if you can call it that. It has been referred to as a veiled human sacrifice by British media. Electricity and outside music have begun to spread to the island, as well as roads and very limited electricity in recent years. In my time there, the two biggest hits, blaring out of cassette-players was “Everything I do I do it for you” and “Uptown Girl”.

I was given this cassette by a young man in Waikabubak who spent his entire afternoon wandering the town with me through villages and car-repair shops to try and find a cassette of Sumbanese music. It is performed on the 2 or 3 stringed Jungga, which acts essentially as a Sumbanese guitar

This is actually a cassette from Waingapu in eastern Sumba. It is the only duet album I am aware of. The two main cassette artists in Sumba are “Haling” and “Haeng”. the main female is Ataratu. This is the only cassette I was able to find featuring Ester. Last year, Haeng made his first casette featuring electric keyboard accompanying his music. Also, Sumba found its very first Dangdut artist! All that stuff is sitting in my archives, and I am trying to figure out what to do with it, but in the meantime, enjoy the only Sumbanese 2-person cassette in existence:

SONG 1 MP3
SONG 2 MP3

This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote on my tape-collecting in Sumba:
Waikabubak is a little town in West Sumba, and similar to the rest of Sumba, it seems to look better on paper and film — and even in my memory — than it ever did when I was really there. I heard phenomenal tales of (more…)

All sorts of new projects on the go:

• Eau CD release/multi-media presentation Aug 22 in Edmonton.
• Began pre-production on a new rock album;
• Organizing and sequencing a "Dogherder Tapes" release, which will feature field recordings, performances, radio excerpts and found-sounds; A disorienting audio journey through American taxis and Guatemalan jungles
• Throwing a multi-media performance and package together with my Guatemalan audio-visual material;
• Cassette Blog will continue to expand and more free music will be had by all;

INDAHNYA TORAJA MP3

I found this cassette in a street market in Rantepao, the largest trading center in the Torajan valley of the inner highlands of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Toraja were first contacted by the Dutch nearly 70 years ago, at which point they were still fierce warriors and occasional headhunters. It is widely stated that the Toraja’s animist religious beliefs include the idea that they came from outer-space to their current location, and their homes are designed to symbolize the “space-ships” that they came to earth on. More recent interpretations often see this merely as a symbolic creation story, and believe that the arching homes may have come about following trade expeditions to Sumatra, where both the Batak and Minangkabau have buffalo-horn shaped rooftops.

This Bamboo music is usually played by children’s groups, whereas the more subtle and arguably difficult trance musics (Pa’badong/Papelle) are performed by adults. The bizarre rectangular bamboo instruments have very limited pitch range, and no moving parts.

photo I took of the Bambu instruments in Buntu Kalando, Sulawesi

Here are 2 mp3s from my Thailand radio collection:

MOR LUM
STRING BALLAD

More cassettes, radio broadcasts and field recordings to come!

1. Eau (solo orchestral pop debut) — July 2008
   Purchase here

2. Radio Myanmar released by Sublime Frequencies — May 2008