Sublime Frequencies
Seattle label Sublime Frequencies began in 2003, putting out musical recordings and DVD videos of artists from around the world that they had collected during extensive self-funded travels. The label is the avocation of brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, of the band Sun City Girls, along with video documentarian Hisham Mayet. Following their tremendous output of global musical vitality last year, the label was back at it last week with two new offerings from afar.
The CD Bollywood Steel Guitar exhibits 21 tracks of instrumental virtuosity and innovation performed by film studio session players recorded to score films produced in India between 1962 and 1986. There is a lot of heavy-handed drumming and intricate melodic interplay between harmoniums and pedal and lap steel guitars. For anyone charged up and blown away by the footage intercut with the opening title sequence of the 2001 movie Ghost World of the sassy-assed Shankar Jaikishan performing the song “Jan Pechechan Ho,” Bollywood Steel Guitar will bound you over the same instrumental terrain.
Also recently released, on vinyl only, was Shadow Music of Thailand–surfy instrumental guitar and farfisa organ rave-ups. It’s the sort music you expect to be blaring from speakers atop the Tiki bar at a Quentin Tarantino pool party.
The list of titles and the requisite descriptions of all of their releases to date is far too long to indulge in here, however, among my favorites are:
Thai Pop Spectacular (CD 2007)
A marvelously deft and dazzling array of power pop cuts from 19 different Thai artists, compiled by Bay Area archivist and audio innovator Mark Gergis.
Choubi Choubi: Folk and Pop Songs from Iraq (CD 2005)
A mix of modern urban rhythmic tracks and traditional melodies, layered with vocals that pass freely from old world, Middle Eastern moaning to Brooklyn-esque, girl hip hop–with some cuts culled wholesale from Detroit radio broadcasts (a technique common to other Sublime releases)
Guitars of Agadez, by Group Inerane (LP 2007)
A band tagged as part of the “Tuareg Guitar Revolution,” Inerane, from Niger, play electric-guitar desert blues. It is the infusion of their own tradition with distilled elements of the Delta blues that make them so haunting and deep. Inerane, however, eschews all the trappings of the stodgy blues song structure and instead cycle around the beat, causing your pop-radio-indoctrinated and inundated ass to have to continually re-orient yourself to the “1” in the count, which has usually relocated itself to a different spot in the progression. The tunes are topped off with beautiful trills from a backing chorus of female voices.
As with the fabulous Ethiopiques CD series, I sometimes wonder if it is as much the American funk, soul and jazz influence on the elements of music of a distant origin that makes it so appealing. But, as is also the case with Sublime’s releases, it is not merely people from other cultures and traditions playing their traditional music and tossing in American musical clichés for pragmatic measure. These artists are taking American musical forms and inverting them, looking at them through different goggles, refining the meatier components and discarding the fat. Then they spit them back at us saying, “here’s what you could be doing with your own legacy.” Although I’m sure the above statement, however unintentionally, oversimplifies the phenomenon.
I asked the well-traveled Sublime Frequencies co-proprietor Alan Bishop, via email, if his duty to finding new music to record became burdensome to the travel process or impinged upon his enjoyment of being somewhere far from home.
“Of course I don’t always carry the [recording/video] gear around…I always have my detectors on,” Bishop writes, “I find ways to make what I do meditative and relaxing.”
Bishop says Sublime Frequencies tries not to force the issue with their artists. They strive to capture, as unobtrusively as possible, performances of their artists in their most familiar and comfortable circumstances.
Says Bishop, “I think some people believe there is some method to this and that we have a formula. That’s never the case. Each situation is completely different from all the others…we never take groups to a studio or try to pull them from their normal operating procedures. That is not conducive to getting great recordings. Many others seem to think slick sound production is best, so they wheel a group into a studio and ‘produce’ them. I prefer to record them wherever they play, in their own space, where they always perform.”
Personally, I listen to Sublime Frequencies releases with an unfortunate anxiety, fighting off my dread that they will one day run out of new music to find or the energy to go out and get it.
Other recommended Sublime Frequencies titles (all CDs) that are more or less self-introductory:
-Radio Algeria
-Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar
-Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean
-PROIBIDÃO C.V: Forbidden Gang Funk From Rio de Janeiro
And some tasty DVDs:
Musical Brotherhood from the Trans-Saharan Highway
Sumatran Folk Cinema
Nat Pwe: Burma’s Carnival of Spirit Soul
A couple videos: