Harmika Yab-Yum: Folk Sounds From Nepal CD

Some of the albums released on Sublime Frequencies feature street recordings and soundwalks in exotic, remote places. Others focus on the recorded music and broadcasts from a small area of the world (with a particular taste for the bizarre East/West cultural shocks of the '60s and '70s and the dizzying kaleidoscope of local radios). This CD, assembled by Robert Millis, combines both approaches. Millis has a knack for re-creating and condensing the experience of a total cultural immersion. The people sound real, the music is alive, the locations are vivid. The first two thirds of the album consist of a smoothly flowing collage of radio recordings, street music and field recordings. The influence of Northern India is palpable in some of these tracks, but Bollywood is kept at bay. A melodica replaces the traditional part of the sitar in "Pony Train/Radio Nepal III," a long chant that provides one of the highlights of this set. For the last third of the album, Millis hits the road and takes us to various gatherings, including a long suite/collage juxtaposing recordings from an animal sacrifice (the music accompanying the ritual, not the sounds of the animals themselves), prayer wheels, celebrations on Krishna day and the street sounds of Kathmandu. The album ends as Millis walks away from a night festival, the sound of singing children fading away as the cicadas grow louder. Millis' work is not scholarly -- he doesn't classify the sounds he gathers, he doesn't theorize on what they are and what they mean. He is much closer to a National Geographic photographer, capturing what passes in front of him, selecting the most vivid pictures -- those that tell thousand-word stories. These sounds, and their impressionistic assemblage, tell a thousand stories. ~ François Couture

Liner Note Author: Robert Millis.

Photographer: Robert Millis.