Sublime Frequencies World Music Compilations

I absolutely love Sublime Frequencies for doing all these compilations. I originally came across the label after downloading Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk & Pop Music Vol. 1. My eventual goal is to get a large majority of the Sublime Frequencies comps uploaded on the blog. However, this is one of those labels where I seriously recommend buying the CDs/LPs too because this is stuff you can feel really good about supporting.

SF describes themselves as the following: "Sublime Frequencies is a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations."

As a note, all descriptions of these comps are taken from the Sublime Frequencies website. 

Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan 

Molam is a multi-faceted folk music native to Laos and the predominantly rural Northeastern region of Thailand known as Isan - home to myriad ethnic groups and provinces, and once a part of present-day Laos. Mo meaning "master" and lam meaning "song", molam literally translates into "master singer", but it remains more of an umbrella term covering over a dozen types of lam styles in which male and female singers can be backed by a free-reed bamboo mouth organ called a khaen, indigenous lute-like instruments (the phin or the soong), a bowed fiddle called a sor and a percussion ensemble featuring finger cymbals and hand drums.

Lam phun and lam sing are the two molam styles featured most prominently in this collection. Also in the musical family is look thoong, a slower, more tragic style, usually lamenting lost love and perpetual poverty. Examples are heard on tracks 10, 15 and 20. Costumed Isan comedy troupes called Talok incorporate hyper-eccentric molam and look thoong renditions with low, vaudevillian comedy and high social satire on stages and TVs throughout the country. Maniacal examples are heard on tracks 2, 8 and 11. The classic recordings featured here are selections from rare vinyl LPs, 45s and cassettes recorded in Isan and beyond between the 1970s and 1980s. This was a pivotal time when music of the region began to be electrified and integrated with Western instruments. When electric bass, effected guitars, electric organs, kit drums and horns played alongside the khaen and the phin. Molam had never sounded this way before -and due to the typically ephemeral nature of the music industry and the introduction of the modern keyboard workstation, molam will never sound like this again. 

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Pakistan: Instrumental Folk & Pop Sounds 1966-1976 

Spending the greater part of the last decade assembling this masterpiece while tracking down most of the musicians in the process, Stuart Ellis of Radiodiffusion Internasionaal has compiled a mind-blowing set of Pakistani instrumentals spanning the period between 1966 and 1976. It’s all here: rock and roll beat, surf, folk traditional mixed with pop, film tunes, electric guitars, sitar and organ solos, brilliant percussion and arrangements crafted by the grooviest bands of the period: The Panthers, The Mods, The Bugs, The Blue Birds, The Abstracts, The Aay Jays, The Fore Thoughts, Nisar Bazmi, and Sohail Rana. 

Situated between Afghanistan, India and Iran, the collision of cultural influences in Pakistan gave birth to music that was, and still is, unlike anything heard anywhere else on the planet. By the late 1960s, previous restrictions on musical expression began to soften and bands that were playing American and British pop covers became popular in Karachi’s burgeoning night club scene and at private dance parties. Long hair came into fashion among young men and hashish became the popular drug of choice on college campuses across Pakistan. Soon, hippies from both North America and Europe began flocking to Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar. Very few of the bands that formed during this time actually got to record. Like their neighbors in India, the Pakistani record industry was more focused on releasing “filmi” music, which had just started to incorporate the electric guitar and electric sitar. 

Pakistan’s musical revolution ended in June 1977 after a coup d’état and the establishment of a pure Islamic state governed by Sharia law. This marked the end of the “Swinging ‘70s” in Pakistan as night clubs and alcohol were banned throughout the country. Television and cinema, as well as popular music, were now subjected to government censorship. After the clamp down, many Pakistani musicians left the country and moved to America, Canada and England. 

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Folk and Pop Sounds Of Sumatra Vol. 1 

The equator runs through only ten countries on earth and I bet that you cannot name them all without consulting a map. Indonesia is one of them and the only nation in Asia with the equatorial stripe impaling it. There are so many different cultures spread-out on these islands, that it would take several lifetimes to experience them all properly. Within this umbrella of diversity is one of the world's richest and most dazzling sound museums. Sumatra is the northwestern entry point to the great archipelago. It is a large island approximately the size of California. There are jungles, mountains, swamps, various forms of myths and folklore, hustlers, Padang Food, Tigers, the Durian, dozens of cultures and languages, and more music than you've ever been allowed to hear. 

The selections on this CD are a combination of droning beat pop, pseudo-gypsy songs, jungle folk trance, and other improbable traditional and hybrid styles heard by only a handful of outsiders. These recordings are from old cassette tapes received as gifts, in trade, or purchased from sources in Sumatra in 1989. Some of the tapes are unmarked with the artists unknown, yet all of them are decaying documents of various sound quality containing some of the most eccentric artifacts ever uncovered from this fascinating island.

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Check out all the other amazing compilations on the Sublime Frequencies website. (I've got my eye on Saigon Rock & Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968-1974.)