I found this cassette simply labelled “Pa’badong” in a vegetable market in Rantepao, Sulawesi. The origins of the tape is unknown to me. This vocal style has been documented before, but this is interesting because it is a locally produced cassette of their own traditional style. Enjoy.
My favorite radio stations in the world are in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All day and night, every station seems to play a never-ending assortment of absolutely mind-blowing songs. The AM program “Classic National” broadcasts all sorts of Malay lounge music, seemingly flamenco-influenced ballads, bit-crushed jingles… There are stations that exclusively play music from India; others from China (including a great late-night Chinese modern-electronic music show, which boasts a parralel lineup of Chinese Notwists, Alva Notos and Album Leafs). There is an independent-music station which proudly shares the prolific Malaysian independent music output in hard-rock, hip-hop and shoegazer music. I will make a blog on Malay lounge music soon, but higher up on the FM frequencies late at night I would occasionally catch some static-y surf music, and wanted to share a few songs. There must be a Malay surf genre, and if anyone has any information on the artists, or other similar music, please contact me!
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:
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:
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…)
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:
More cassettes, radio broadcasts and field recordings to come!
I found this cassette of an ethnic Karen rock group in the back room of an old cassette shop in Mae Sot, Thailand, along the Burmese border. The cassette art is hand-drawn. Sorry I am unable to translate the song titles.
