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Tuesday, April 26, 2005
DANGDUT IS THE MUSIC
Radio Sumatra (The Indonesian FM Experience)
Sublime Frequencies : 2005
[buy it]
STAMBUL LAMA
Music of Indonesia, Vol 3:
Music from the Outskirts of Jakarta: Gambang Kromong
Smithsonian Folkways : 1991
[buy it]
How Do I love Thee, Mama Ong?
Let me count the ways... You can probably think of a singer, a song, or a sound that mirrors your brainpan's audio environment. (My eleven-year-old daughter's most frequent litany: "I've got the weirdest song stuck in my head.") But nothing more eerily reflects my own personal rootless cosmopolitan cacophony than the gambang kromong sound from a late-1980s Jakarta that musicologist Philip Yampolsky described as "a Jakarta that is nearly invisible, one that most people have forgotten exists." Among the twenty-volume Music of Indonesia series Yampolsky produced for Smithsonian Folkways, Music From the Outskirts of Jakarta is the most wonderful and alien sounding to my ears - and "Stambul Lama" is its most perfect track. Amid a dusky, distended xylophone, kettle-gong, and drum groove, singers Mama Ong, WiSun, and Wani croon such transportive Bahasa-language stanzas as, "Play the gambang with five keys/ If you pull up the grass, you'll feel the ground/Your heart's anxious about that guy/ You want to know what his name is."
A slide guitar slithers in the crevices between phrases while a seemingly lost trumpet provides tart, mariachi-tinged commentary. It really doesn't get much better than this in my experience, and the rest of the record's nearly as wonderful - including the examples of so-called "old repertory" in its first several tracks, which unwind like gamelan clockwork but without a whiff of classical or folkloric gas.
Wonder what this music might sound like in, you know, context? So did I, until the Sun City Girls starting releasing their Sublime Frequencies series of alchemically remixed radio tapes from across Asia and the Middle East. The latest batch includes airchecks from Sumatra, just across the strait of something-or-other from Jakarta.
"Dangdut Is the Music" ("...of my country") is not only a fine tune representative of the most ubiquitous swinging pop sound of Indonesia, but it segues most serenditously into...oh, just find out for yourself.
by Richard Gehr
posted by James
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