Frizzle waves from tropic radio's, cult snippets from crooked television sets

has.....it....been...more....than......3....weeks?
*blogs do not respect time, same goes for me in my crummy lazy manner* How else are you supposed to deal with the dark dreadful winter days -warm and cold-? a supposedly low point indeed.

Tomorrow the worldthrawling Sublime Frequencies label of Alan Bishop & Mark Gergis is coming to town in the form of an audiovisual circus. Amsterdam that is. Place it into the context of a squat , the grand ole' O-C-C-I-I near the end of the Vondelpark. Yay, on the double!
21:30 sharp. Expect a super collaged documentary of the Indonesian Sumatra island, filled with super kitsch commercials, movies and soap snippets and ofcourse taking up a helluva lot of music too, either streetwise or staged. All of it conscious folk in it's own bizarre way, with a wink to the West.

I'm hoping the excellent Neung Phak band will be performing too as they did last week in Rotterdam, though hope seems slim for now. Neung Phak are not Asian, but a bunch of Americans who play retro South East Asian muzak in the footsteps of Isan, Molam and retro influenced psychedelica rock. All of it sung in Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodjian and so on!

The SF label has been releasing numerous albums (up to release 29 at the moment!) where the raw material is taken from exotic radio stations and sudden street performances on their travels, ranging from the Northern Africa's through mystical Arabia onto the psychedelic peripheries of South East Asia. The fieldrecordist's and etnomusicologist's dreams morphed into one idea, interfered by political bulletins and radio jingles on the go. The titles given to their collages all portray a nice knack of (in)sanity to the provided context, it's unsorted creativity.

One big pity though is that most of their albums do not list any artists references so that good tune snippets are too hard to track down in the shape of decent full-on recordings and opening it to a wider -and western- audience. Perhaps it could even lead to total output by an unknown artist being opened as a pandora yumyum goodie box. Giddy boys do thrive on discovering lost and unpolished gems, count me in.

buuuuuuuut, I'm wandering off as ever.

I got the recently released Radio Thailand -Transmissions from the exotic kingdom- album last week and haven't been able to stop listening to it at work -to keep me sane-. 2 discs of deepfried soundcollages that keep your ears filled with joy and amazement, recorded off the air between the era 1989 to 2004. The absurd side of the southern orient will be far away no more after this experience, Thai a go go.

here some clips from this release:

Rubber Of High Quality
(just hear that kid wither, sing and laugh in this fine song... and then the report on rubber that follows...owwwww!)

543 Years Ahead Of YOU
(psychedelic organ pop, muffled jazz and some Molam tunes thrown into a collage of warm wavelengths)

21st Century Perspiration
(madcap pop, quicky rockabilly and post 2000 Thai hiphop! Who cares about sense, it's great fun!)

Torrential Nostalgia
(pure Molam to enjoy, beware at the end... those zombie kids at 5:36 are freaky!)


** over
**** out