Dagara: Gyil Music of Ghana’s Upper West Region Sublime Frequencies
First things first. The gyil is a traditional West African xylophone with dried gourd resonators hung below most or all of its hardwood keys. (A similar instrument is called a “balafon” in Francophone Africa.) It’s usually tuned pentatonically, and its full, luminous tone is haloed with a cicada-like buzz, created by vibrating membranes made from spiders’ egg cases and pasted over small holes cut in each resonator. If you saw Badenya La Freres Coulibaly at the African Festival of the Arts in 2001 or SK Kakraba at the World Music Festival in 2016, you already know what one looks like.
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‘Sound Storing Machines’ Boldly Assembles Some of the Earliest Japanese Recordings
A veritable rainstorm of temporal noise pours down between sounds of early 20th century Japan and the audience on Sublime Frequencies’ Sound Storing Machine.
Sound Storing Machines: The First 78rpm Records from Japan, 1903-1912
Various Artists
16 April 2021
A veritable rainstorm of temporal noise pours down between sounds of early 20th century Japan and the audience’s listening ears on the new Sublime Frequencies release
Sound Storing Machines is remarkable in that its recordings are so old, the music all but fades into the background, almost overwhelmed on most tracks by the physical degradation of the media in question.
Sublime Frequencies’
Mien Yao may be a work of preservation and posterity, education, or meditation. Its careful production allows for all of these things.
Mien (Yao): Canon Singing in China, Vietnam, Laos
Various Artists
16 April 2021
The field recordings that comprise a solid chunk of Sublime Frequencies‘ releases tend to be some of the label’s most intriguing works. Where their archival compilations tend to be full of rare, digestible pop tracks shot through with nostalgic vinyl crackles and cassette warps, the field recordings are crystal clear and totally transportive, including new release
Mien (Yao): Canon Singing in China, Vietnam, Laos. Elevated to a sound quality level most ethnomusicologists only dream of,
Kyrgyzstan ballads, Okinawa folk, Ugandan hymns … the album rewriting global music history Garth Cartwright
Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.
These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the on
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