WOEBOT

this is a very strong point, matthew, and i'm fascinated to see how simon r will deal with it in his history - since i think it constitutes one of his and my major ideological differences back in the day and since we have both moved on a long way since then

it is now i think four years since i offered to write a piece for wire called 'why i stopped writing abt world music by mark s', and they accepted the idea excitedly and i went away thinking hooray, must get on with that...

Thought I was the only one with absolutely no time whatsoever for the woeful cLOUDDEAD, in the face of their near-blanket adulation. Everything from their slavishly inept cod-Burroughsianisms, to their limpid sub-Boards of Canada-offcut-backing tracks, to their painfully contrived vocal stylings grates. The liberal-hipster platitudes they trot out are toe-curling (see their interview in this months Wire, or, rather, don't bother). They're a prime example of _exactly_ the kind of sterile cultural insularity which is the product of a surfeit of indie moralising (all those drab and earnest bands on Southern are full of it) combined with a slavish deference to the 'correct' set of Wire-Magazine friendly musical reference points. It all demonstrates a complete ignorance of why it is the music they earnestly reference might have been exciting or challenging in the first place. No sense of engagement and no sense of rupture or refusal.

i raised this kind of point a while back when discussing the mojo post punk article - named the same names etc
your instincts are correct with the bug matt-
at the rfh the other day - steve levene even played on stage with the bug/sherwood - surely an indication of allegiance at least

everyone cites cut, no one much remembers return of the giant slits (tbh i consider sherwood etc a bit of a device for NOT listening to all but a ahem rockist slice of reggae - eg haha the anticon of dub, not that i've ever listened to anything by anticon)

with my actual real punk hat on for a moment i wd argue that you needed lydon (pil) AND mclaren (duck rock, m.butterfly) as your paired eyes/ears, to understand where post-punk shd be going [eg both directions at once, maintaining the volatile instability of the mix] and also how it looked/sounded in 3D

haha i'm just so LUCID w.my punk hat on, no?

to mark
artist's trajectories out of that era were radical. world music is full of post-punkers. why?

vis a vis sherwood. like i said sometimes the music stacked up, sometimes it didn't. but regardless sherwood is/was a conduit into other greater things (he probably wouldnt deny that)

to Jim
cLOUDEAD grate. they're the worst kind of substitute. those comments about hip hop (wipes brow, sheesh) and their arses in that photo, that really was the last straw.

to Marcus
at least kevin martin is attempting to engage with ragga. the rhythm and sound crew don't score points cos they've not got over roots.

-----

i hate getting into a fusioneering position, but in a (cough) deleuzian sense it's depressing when musics lack lines of flight.

did you know that the people who started WOMAD were part of the same scene as the Pop Group? they did this local magazine-cum-record thing called the Bristol Recorder. i think the story goes that they did the first one and it lost a lot of money and Peter Gabriel bailed them out. and of course 23 skidoo played the first WOMAD (or was it the second?) anyway it ended up one side of 'the culling is coming'

i always thought the postpunkers who went world were subconsciously looking for something to replace Roots after jamaica's music scene moved inna dancehall and slackness. looking for something to glom that roots-rebel-rhythm/rhythms-of-resistance thing onto. and in the process the World actually shrank to a quadrangle connecting West Africa, the SA townships, Brazil and oh i dunno, Cuba and/or cajun. ie. that particuarly idea of World Beat was the stuff that was most rock'n'roll-like, rootsy, a surrogate for all the rawness that was slipping out of rock by the early-to-mid 80s. so not actuall that much time for Inuit vocal music or gamelan or etc etc

(ie the kind of field recordings that a lot of the earlier postpunkers like arto lindsay were really into)

as per what mark s said, yeah definitely growing up malcolm mclaren's trajectory was as exciting to follow as john lydon's. great interviews. i bought pretty much all of his ideas up until the opera one. whatever his ethical deficits, an amazing thinker about music and culture.

that last comment was me by the way!

i'm probably the biggest post punker on my street (it's a very short street) and i am currently compiling a tropicalia sampler for release later in the year. can i get a gold star or do i get a dunces hat for being so late on the bandwagon?

to Simon
>WOMAD

no i didn't! i do recall jumbo vanrennan went to JA to sign acts for virgin with lydon though. and subsequently (circa slackness) ended up compiling the indestructible beat SA comps.

>world shrinking to quadrangle

ha! i guess it wasn't "comprehensive" but it did represent a (how shall we say) a certain open-mindedness.

to stirmonster
fucking critics eh! i'm inclined to give you a silver star pending your comp of brazilian funk(ball) rap. (grins) so sue me!

good on yer stirmonster!

is Simon perhaps being a little bit cynical about the motives of some p-punkers with the quadrangle theorising?

Lapp (Sami {sp}) vocal music does actually rock bombs in a nice minimalist style so plenty of John Adams fans maybe?

for post-punk me the search wasn't for ROOTSNESS (which i doubt i believed in), it wz for STRANGENESS, new sources of otherness, non-routinised osmotic alien tongue pressure: but i think simon is right that a (very oppressive) ideology of authenticity kicked to discipline the world-mus market... the attack from eg Folk Roots [good name eh!] on the bhundu boys for "selling out" by signing to a major and supporting madonna was repellent indie bullying (not least cz it broke the band's hearts and spirits) (and i think actually really killed biggie tembo)

[ î this is the speedread version of my 'why i stopped writing abt world mus' piece i guess]

also the SECOND womad compilation has the cocteau twins on it!!

>new sources of otherness, non-routinised osmotic alien tongue pressure

certainly that would explain the simultaneous routes into kraut, prog, improv, free-jazz and dub then concurrent with the explorations into world music. (pondering) at what moment along the path into world music did the investigation become tie-died and worthy?

i. the naming of the thing as "world music"? [establishment of a space to look for these "types" of record in record shops, thus ceding of power to a very specific consumer bloc to determine/limit meaning/input?]: certainly this is often booed and hissed, but i myself prefer to chuck stuff at THIS horrible moment:
ii. the arrival of andy kershaw's radio one slot

also the SECOND womad compilation has the cocteau twins on it!!

And remember when The Fall played WOMAD --- 'we're The Fall and we're from the first world.'

Not much to add (is Stirmonster really putting together a funk CD? Wow!) but a great rant and one I really agree with. The worthiness of world music is what keeps revival types from thinking about it, maybe? "Ew, Peter Gabriel" is a 'good' excuse for not engaging with the stuff.

the Touch label who pretty much came out industrial and did all that pure sound stuff with Hafler Trio, Strafe Fur Rebellion and Chris Watson, they use to do the kind of strange-world stuff Mark S refers to... C90s of gamelan, actual field recordings they or someone they knew had done...

one of my pals at oxford used to spend his entire grant on records in the first week of term, a mad eclectic selection including brass brand and scottish regimental records and much rubbish but also a lot of field recordings... one of our favorites was something we dubbed Venuezulan Vomit.. shamans on DMT screaming and retching as they see visions in the trees, threads of mucus hanging from their nostrils... a real party favorite that one -- i guess our attitude was not exactly reverential-- i only realised a few years ago that's the record David Toop was involved in and talks about in Exotica -- somewhere along the line i lost the tape, a source of great great pain

i don't know if the pal counts as 'postpunk' but he-- Steve Micalef, aka Steve Mick--used to be involved in Sniffin' Glue and got referenced by Danny Baker in an NME in a singles review

steve also had a great Eskimo vocal record that sounded DAF, weird vocal pulse duets from inuit women collapsing in giggles -- again much regret that i never taped it -- none of the other Eskimo stuff i've heard since has been as exciting

should be not bring up the Jazz Insects at this point, Mark? didn't you support 23 Skidoo at Scamps

being as how it wz the dawn of PC - not yet named but everywhere hovering - and also more punkers and postpunkers than ever let on were of course hippies bawn an bred, rescuing that impulse via their "politics" so-called, reverence and worthiness were like a constant stalking demon: my line - probably not very strongly embodied then, though i STATED it in print often enough - was that if this "world" stuff (or jazz or whatever) was as STRONG AS WE WERE SAYING, it wd *benefit* from being treated the way eg spizzazzz treat pop or bangs treated rock, ie as our beloved pal who we razzed to demonstate the depth of our affection

at nme i wz expending so much effort just getting space for "non-rockist" stuff [era of the hiphop wars: soulcialists vs c68ers] that i rarely had the energy to have any fun with it also - at wire (back then) this was much less so, i wz the licensed jester whose job wz to discuss eg jan garbarek and scandinavian shamanism in connection with noggin the nog

^ = mark s

(jazz insects to me = termites, or maybe those solider ants in tom and jerry, who invade the picnic)

just to respond to some of the points marcello's making over on n.maja abt this, the third king sunny ade release in the UK - a terrific and overlooked 1984 record called aura - pointed towards a trevor-horn-shd-be-producing-this scratchmix new pop sampladelia which never got taken up (it did poorly and his three-LP deal wasn't extended, i think): i always felt sunny or youssou or kanda bongo man wd really totally have flourished in a ZTT context (and the context wd have flourished too: they were ALREADY popstars w.considerable charisma, and willingess to take big chances, musically and otherwise - their music was already cracklingly syncretic, and englamoured of western chartsounds... m.jackson top of all african charts all the time in those years => the gap was NOT TOO BIG to jump)

so *i* didn't think of WM as anti-new pop, quite the opposite, but marcello's right, it was thus deployed by many - and no one DID jump the gap really, laswell somewhat partially excepted, and eventually i just piped down and turned my eyes and ears elsewhere

matt, is it as simple as stating that while the first wave of post-punkers drew from disco, funk, world music, free jazz etc it'd make sense that they'd expand out into those directions, while for the most part the new wave of post-punkers draw on the first wave of post-punkers, so there's nowhere to go.

Interesting to see echoes of my points on Grievous Angel echoed here -- about the link from hippy through punk to (good) world-influenced post punk / industrial / improv. As well as the distinction between "interesting" world (fela, gamelan, noseflutes, retching ) and less interesting world (jive etc -- and yes I think my prejiudices / tastes are coming out here).

But my honest recollection is that the scene that liked the Bhundu Boys et al (sparkly guitar-y african stuff) was a somewhat seperate scene from post punk -- or at least from MY post-punk (On-U, industrial, post-funk et al). So it is interesting to see some qualifiers to that position coming out here.

Oh -- and the usual knee-jerk defence of Sherwood from me -- anyone who thinks that he "isn't real reggae" ain't been digging in the crates properly and doesn't know the man's history. Frankly anyone who makes something like Mind at the End of the Tether deserves godhead status forever (it is surely the best possible use you can out a 10K rig to) but even beyond that there's Singers and Players etc.

Great thread though everyone, many thanks, keep it going...

Oh and on SImon's point of:
"always thought the postpunkers who went world were subconsciously looking for something to replace Roots ... ... in the process the World actually shrank to a quadrangle connecting West Africa, the SA townships, Brazil and oh i dunno, Cuba and/or cajun. ie. that particuarly idea of World Beat was the stuff that was most rock'n'roll-like"

This is germane to my point / memory -- I think you're talking about two distinct scenes here. The people into sparkly guitar stuff that filled the space of guitar rock were, as I remember it, coming from a Green on Red / Long Ryders (and their forebears) direction and specifically wanted a new guitar music.

Wheras the people into gamelan field recordings and all that were looking for something totally non-rock but still exciting, ecstatic, transcendental, even shamanic. The commercial high point of this trend was on the one hand Bhurundi Black (or, if you prefer, Bow Wow Wow) and on the other, loads of industrial stuff (early SPK, some Test Dept, Severed Heads, 23 Skidoo and 400 Blows obviously, Coil etc etc). In fact this audience mixed up african stuff, field recordings, funk, reggae in their collections... I know I did...

The two scenes didn't get on.

I echo Paul's defence of Adrian S - African Headcharge in many ways germane to this thread, post-punk 'fake' world music, uncannily cooked up dubwise in the studio, trading on otherness and exotica, rather than the real ale global purism proferred by Gillett and Kershaw. Kershaw's alleged anti-orientalism actually having a horribly flattening effect, pushing a global homeliness, antagonistic to the unhomely and otherwordly. Paul stirring up horrible memories of 1985 OGWT with his invocation of Long Ryders. That was the Kershaw project, wasn't it, a renaturalized r 'n' r to be analogized with rooted World musics.

OtherWorld music goes back (at least as far) as the cover of the 1st Pop Group LP: a fantasized, rerouted, de-rooted Exotica.

I must confess, I've unconsciously tarred 'good' World music with the same brush as the Kershaw stufff. Never been able to interest myself in anything tagged 'World' because of the way it was ideologically and commercially positioned as opposed to everything that made me shiver: artificiality, syntheticity, the unearthly. This just laziness on my part, natch.

Talking Heads and Byrne/ Eno 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' an interesting adjunct to this, too, another proving of Matt's point methinx.

And Matt we don't need a label, well maybe we do, but - as per Marcello's comments on Collusion, we really do need another magazine. Not so much a gap in the market as a yawning chasm innit.

This is good shit.

Nocturnal Emissions played one of the early Womads as well (possibly the first one).

"Bush of Ghosts" is seminal stuff, nice one Mark (ditto the magazine - there needs to be decent UK mag about reggae as well, France has about 3!)

Also agree with Paul about the Bhundu Boys, everyone I knew who liked them was a John Peel worshipper of the most jingly jangly type (nowt wrong with that, tho!).

another enabler, for good or ill - prob.both - was of course the long series of tape freebie compilations that NME put out after the c81 >>> there's a couple of ILM threads on this, one where it was debated what role this series played in the founding of indie: how much did it contribute to the careful yoking of "alien tongue pressure" (eg old r&b, country, african, jazz) into the fanboy defensiveness that's being called "roots" here, and had possibly always kind of guided the reissue indies which pre-existed indie in its post-punk sense (labels like ace or charlie)

does anyone know what jumbo van renan does now?

K-Punk, you star, that's an excellent neologism: "OtherWorld Music". Really captures the difference.

Kershaw and OGWT and jangly african complementing jangly indie -- it's all about finding new excuses for wearing check shirts. An absolution from glamour and sense.

Undoubtedly My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (and to a degree Remain In Light -- the first album I ever got, packed with afro-funkiness!) is a landmark. That was the one the punters actually went out and bought, wasn't it? Must be one of the biggest "taped off a mate" albums ever. Hmmm... tempted to remix Jezebel Spirit now...

Dan Selzer's kinda right but I think it's about intention. The whole post-punk project and its reclaiming of other musics was about finishing off one paradigm (rock) and kicking off a multiplicity of others. Electroclash can be alright (especially when Weatherall is spinning it) but it's all about looking back. Sampling as dead end. Is there some critical theory to cover this?

> careful yoking of "alien tongue pressure" -- wow. Sounds like Burroughs writing porn!

in the camden squat set there was a group - orchestra jazira? my memory is fukt - which evolved eventually into 3 mustaphas 3... anyway lu who replaced bryan james in the damned was in them + also lol coxhill on 2nd lp => the damned invented this entire trend!!

(now i feel like the poor old bhundu boys are being pilloried for not being exotic enough!!)

the "rough guides" probbly started in the early 70s if not the 60s, but i'd also associate their much higher rise and routinisation in the early 80s with this general terrain - ie ppl who liked liking round weird far-off places as a target audience, world music as souvenirs of ACTUAL cultural tourism

i love(d) remain in light but actually never much liked my life in the bush of ghosts - both were ahem "key texts" for the jazz insects, simon will be pleased to learn: the found-sound over funk-loops idea had (i think) been pioneered by material on the two "temporary music" EPs (my chronology may be bad there, I just sorta doubt that byrne and eno didn't crib it off someone else) (anyway laswell played on MLitBoG)

There's a micro-history of found ethnic sound over instrumentals isnt there? Richard Maxfield etc (as anthologised by DToop).

Pre-Laswell there is Can's EFS series, before that Holger Czukay's Canaxis "Boat Song" (izit?) and Holger's later "Persian Love" off Movies (all predating MLITBOG.

Wasn't Jon Hassell the third founding member of the Bush of Ghosts project before being elbowed aside by Byrne?

Hippest thing about MLITBOG is Tim Wright on bass.

actually eno's "obscure records" series in 1975 kinda sorta opens up this territory

if we track back via can/czukay we reach stockhausen's hymnen hurrah (and before that of course there's cage's 50s thing w.12 radios: is it "imaginary landscapes #5")

Andy Kershaw as the opposite of OtherWorld (luvvit mark!) -- yeah. he used to play stuff like the Pogues and cajun, and go go (but NOT hip hop), so it all aligned around this roots/authenticity/wholegrain/raw-not-cooked/CAMRA cluster

apart from the surrounding ideology, my prob w/ a lot of AFrican stuff pushed in the 80s was it sounded a bit light on the ears, like johnny marr at his most irritatingly upful, but i'm prepared to concede this was ignorant and bigoted, and i missed oceans of pleasure and stimulation.

didn't the Antilles label do a bit of white progressive meets 4th world stuff before punk? traffic kind of veered in this direction a bit, right?

what about ryuichi -- not exactly postpunk but 'riot in lagos', the whole NeoGeo concept?

seems to me the OtherWorld continuum is flanked on one side by the Kershaw/Real-ness strand and on the other by Rootless Cosmopolitanism/Neo-ProgFusion (Axiom, wobble -- who came back on Charlie Gillett's label, right? TransGlobal, etc)... with perhaps Luaka Bop partaking of a bit of both (good comps though).

My Life in the Bush seems honestly voyeuristic and somehow less self-deceiving in its exploitation of its sources. Side Two sounds great on acid.

Jazz Insects was good as i recall, Paul Oldfield bought the single!

to Mark
Not wanting to split hairs, and maybe I'm being overly efnik in my interpretation of the topic in hand (everyone else is!), but what the hell!

In this area didnt Eno filch the idea from Holger? Canaxis (shortwave radio of vietnamese boat woman dates from is it 1966?) seems like the "pop" birth of this idea, not the Obscure music series (Bryars "Titanic" et al). And isn't Stockhausen's "Telemusik" the one on the Fourth World tip, not Hymnen.

You know where to find me ;-)

Yeah, I think Hassel was involved in Bush of Ghosts but I think I read he just didn't have time in the end... who nows?

Remain in Light is a cracking album BTW. Nona Hendryx!

i can't this instant remember what's on the obscure series and what's on the next series, the ones with maps as sleeves - so the dates are all muddled in my head (as are the titles of stockhausen pieces probably)

(i am all wore out from trying to build a totally counter-intuitive and annoyingly perverse analysis of mp3s from scratch)

the shortwave radio idea is older than canaxis in the performance sense, but can may well have done it as a "record" first (stockhausen's works are documented ON records but aren't strictly speaking made as records) (also i can't remember the dates of any of his relevant pieces: czukay was his pupil for a time but the link there is anecdotal rather than audible in the groove, so czukay may have invented this also)

obscure is kind of the manifestation in the UK of stuff being done by fluxus, by the portsmouth sinfonia ppl, in new york arts generally, as documented (in a book) by michael nyman - so eno's inspiration *may* not have been holger directly (the idea wz "in the air" hoho) - it's easy to forget the point that mr k-punk made re brit comix, that cultural information was very hard to come by in the early 70s, even if you were eno: canaxis stuff i rather tht didn't surface till much much later

(faust i think also played radios on-stage)

so did AMM

The People Band also used radios in their performances (according to the notes on the Emanem CD reissue, Mike Figgis and George Khan both brought radios into the studio and switched them on at exactly the same time to catch the start of a Radio 3 programme about John Cage and the "mechanics of chance" - though this is not particularly audible on the CD itself.

Bush of Ghosts as I recall got a terrible slagging off in the NME at the time (by Tony Stewart?) where it was more or less dismissed as a rip-off of Movies, which is a bit like saying that Brotzmann's Machine Gun was a rip-off of Coltrane's Ascension, i.e. not really. Also Eno used radios in the Scratch Orchestra days - apparently he is somewhere on the album of Cardew's "Great Learning" but not detectably so.

he had it tuned to a dead station!

i would like to chip in here solely to nudge the number of comments closer to 50. i don't know what you're all talking about. i'll also drop in a piece of trivia. mike figgis' son was, for a fairly brief period of time, a dj on kool fm. this was in the early days, 92 or 93, no later than that. he went under the name dj fabrock. that's true by the way.

i would like to chip in here solely to nudge the number of comments closer to 50.

Ha! Yes, something of a comments arms race between here and the k-punk mp3 thread...

Hymnen is the one with all the national anthems...

Simon's right; on the other side of OtherWorld is deracinated cosmopolitanism - both it and Kershaw actually collude in making the whole world homely - in other words, un-uncanny, with Kershaw it's blokish-quotidian, with the cosmo-types, it's the weary familiarity of airport lounges (cf Global Dance). The whole Fourth World thing seems poised between OtherWorld - Hassell's 'Dream Theory in Malaya' - and rootless cosmopolitanism - lots of Laswell's projects.

Since Simon mentions Sakamoto, worth thinking about the whole neuromantic relationship to this. Japan, for instance, were always conspicuously geographic, from 'Communist China'/ 'Rhodesia' to 'Cantonese Boy' (then of course there's 'Bamboo Houses' with Sakamoto); they move from trashsploitation to tourist-connoisseur fascination ('Taking Islands in Africa') before Sylvian succumbs to authenticity/ jet set mysticism/ rootless cosmo in his solo stuff.

And since Marcello mentions Empires and Dance on Naked M, what about 'I Travel'?

Early eighties pop saturated with OtherWorld, from T. Heads' AfroFunk through to Adam/Ants/Bow Wow Wow burundi etc.

That was me btw.

actually, I'd like to point out that very recently (like, January-now), two of the guys in the Sun City Girls have put out something like eight or nine ethno-field recording-whatnot CDs with titles like Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra, Night Recordings From Bali, Radio Java, I Remember Syria . . . as well as some accompanying/standalone DVDs w/o narrative. these were detailed in The Wire a couple issues ago, in Erik Davis's big SCG piece. (also, one of the guys in Climax Golden Twins, a Seattle improv/experimental group, has just issued a similarly-minded disc called Recordings From Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar by Robert Millis.) so it does seem as if there's a potential surge in interest in this stuff--but as art brut and not as pop. (the SCG discs intersperse field recordings, cassettes, and other things w/o much regard for documentation, they're going for a total-experience kind of thing and think doc. gets in the way, very capital-R Romantic it seems to me. the Millis disc is better about naming sources.) and in a way that is just as frustrating as the insularity Matt rails at, because it gives a sense that this music is "other," and "natural," and "non- and/or anti-pop" instead of stuff that has some parallel to what's going on in the UK/US.

we were well lucky in cornwall when i was small cos my mate james mcnally's dad was the manger and booker at the cornwall colliseum - he was a massive world music fan and a massive reggae fan and consquentley booked womad and the reggae sunsplash festivals - fkn wicked it was - as soon as he left however the whole bloody thing stopped

to Matos
Keith (aka Stirmonster aka Twitch) turned me on to to the Sun City Girls, and Jon Dale just supplied me with some of their stuff (on a more Psych tip, but EXCELLENT). Some of the stuff they've been championing is straight-up Indonesian Pop, which strikes me as more interesting than the trad angle. Could we do a trade Matos? Has anyone else (besides moi) heard Detty Kurnia's stuff?

---------

The thing about the whole field recordings shtick is that it aint the fifties no more. That's to say in the main indigenous people aren't living as they used to. The whole "primitive", "traditional" angle of the field recordings project as thus practised today is nearly offensive. My cousin just got back from Greenland where he took some amazing photos of Eskimos driving around on snow scooters, butchering non-specified animals in kitchens with tin rooves, gathering drunk around toxic looking fires and affixing antlers to electricity pylons. That's the state of "tribal" culture these days.

Of course this makes (and made) one aspect of PP fetish of the other extremely problematic. I have considerable problems with how Industrial culture (23 Skidoo down) manipulated the image of third world culture. It seems even less constructive than engaging with it at all! I'm much more partial to the entirely cool open-mindeness evinced in the bridges that were built with contemporary modern musicians at the time. I guess Sunny Ade is the paradigm here, and (referring to M Sinker's comments about Aura) although i personally find that a lacklustre record (Synchro System would maybe have made a better New Pop record), I think Marcello's vision of a ZTT-aestheticised Ade or Kanda Bongo Man or Papa Wemba (for that matter) to be an extremely sexy idea, one which would have sat easily with the artists own cosmopolitan superstar inclinations.

Anyway, speaking personally, I've been doing some recherches of my own over the past few months, the fruit of which I'll bung up here. Nag nag nag.

(lands private jet, sips martini) I’m not as “down” on the cosmopolitan as k-punk is. Everyone is cosmopolitan innit. One doesn't need to stick bones in one's nose to siphon off a little of non-western music's unheimlich qualities. Eno's stuff (inc. Remain in Light) managed not to degenerate into cliche. Maybe 23 Skidoo are the last admissible to the golden spot?

Of course the Trad/Field pastiche thing does rub up fairly interestingly against Baxter/Denny/Lyman axis. But beyond the fifties stuff being a bit PC-dodgy (so what innit!), the main of world-music-tinged Exotica is also utterly crap. Unlistenable in part owing to it's sheer implausibility. If the voodoo in the jungle trip is going to work you have to be able to believe in it.

Gibber gibber gibber.

What matos said: those sublime frequencies recordings are grand (and sun city girls in general are my discovery of the year too). Its not so much Indonesian pop: on night recordings from Bali its a variety of things, from street musicians to 'ambient' stuff and 'radio java' can be pop, or commercials...recording things off the radio. Will get people interested in older field recordings (nonesuch explorer etc).

I don't have a problem with cosmopolitanism per se, it's that rootless cosmopolitanism as an aesthetic I find less than compelling. cf Nietzsche's comments on 'cosmopolitan fingering', on the way in which we mooch and graze through cultures, without commitment, direction, focus, immersion. The idea that 'we're all cosmopolitans', yes, it's true, but saying it that quickly begs a few questions about the type of cosmopolitanism we manifest. It's cosmopolitanism as a kind of transcendent pose, a flaneuresque, dilletantism, a refusal of locality, that is flattening and tedious. The routes not roots analysis can emphasise locality as a mode of cosmopolitanism, i.e. what makes us what we are is the way we combine global currents (cf Simon on grime).
I have less a problem with the superficial fascination evinced by some of the p-punkers for the 3rd World than you do, Matt. At least this leads to OtherWorld. Both Kershaw and the rootless mob effectively deny otherness, either through blokish bonhomie or jetset collaborations.

What i found sad abt the bhundus story was that they undertook this kind of epic scary journey out of a near-warzone (post-lib zim: their name is some kind of ref to the anti-colonial struggle) to the cultural centre (via hawick haha), eyes agleam with Beatles-love, and were then forever caught up as whirled chips in this precise cultural debate, where nothing THEY chose to do was ever right (bcz it always sat wrong with the conflicted sides), and they got spat out and sat on, for not being roots, for not being dead, for not being blissed-out, for not being loutish grebo teens, for not being [xxx]. The record they made for WEA, Jit Jive, is a fabulously beautiful, sad studiopop epic abt hope and delusion - ie about what was happening to them (what was being DONE to them). As I wz v.anti the roots mob (for CAMRA-ing all over my spindizzy Juju playpen) I tend (in self-defence?) to blame them worse for the actual-real aftermath, bodycount and all (these were friendly guys i met and talked to, they made tea for me in kensal rise): but I def still somewhat bristle at (imagined?) heartlessness and condescension pointed their way from the side I actually (mainly) lined up with. Sacrificed as footsoldiers (three of them dead by the mid-90s, one at his own hand) in a war-on-pop (penman reading of "on" - it's the terrain not the foe) that they never signed up for. They'd have loved to be Bow Wow Wow but no one let them. Yes their choices mostly - they were grown-ups who'd fought in a real live actual war with bullets - but even so.

"otherness" i guess is a dialectical process, like a love affair (or indeed a hate affair): anyway it's not static, and both sides contribute to the arc of its progress - to me the BBs had a very specific, gentle, intriguing otherness to bring (this little crew of anglophile anglophone Africans who'd fought against one of old-skool Brit imperialism's last outposts...)

(oops: "not being dead" = "not being DREAD")

Tribal cultures certainly are on the verge of dissolution. It's one of the tragedies of capitalism, he says with dour face and making an obvious point which is true nevertheless. Paul Devereux reckons we're the last generation to have their oral history available to us. That's a scary thought. Putting antlers on pylons is fucking wicked though and one way for "them" to survive. (That may sound trivial and shallow but I mean tribal cultures can survive / integrate with modern artefacts -- when they're not being fucked over by "extractive industries". Big discussion here I know.)

Re: industrial and field recordings -- oh, mum, you just don't understand!! ;-) Actually I see what you mean -- mindless sampling by fourth rate industrial bands. But Gen for example was serious about trying to collect and archive information about tribal cultures. Lots of research time and even field work in his own Lee Perry-ish way. You shoulda seen his filing cabinets... Would be interested in a more extended critique, would make good blog-fodder...

i was sure this was on its way to 100