Heart of the Forest [Hannibal, 1993]Where Baka Beyond: Spirit of the Forest, the acoustic guitar jam producer Martin Cradick constructed around tunes and percussion tracks parts he took out of the jungle, is so easy to ignore it makes you appreciate the candid hokeyness of Deep Forest, where Cradick constructs an awesome and enchanting glimpse of another world. His musical record of the Baka pygmies borrows the structure Steven Feld devised for New Guinea's Kaluli on 1991's Voices of the Rainforest, which condenses the sounds of a village day down to an hour. But unlike Feld, Cradick doesn't try to evoke a mindset in which birds, insects, frogs, running water, and crackling brush create music to that the human beings who share their earspace "lift-up-over sound." Instead, as in Smithsonian's recently reissued Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rain Forest, natural sounds provide the ground of an ethnomusicological array dominated by indigenous harps--magical incantations, nursery rhymes, work songs, occasional divertissements, and drunken revelries. Before you buy any more guff about aural environments and ambient whoziwhatsis, check out what a real soundscape sounds like. Don't miss the water drums. A-
Percussion Studio V3 05 Crack Cocainel
History of House Music, Vol. 2: New York Garage Style [Cold Front, 1997]Where the Chicago-based volume one honors disco and spawned techno, the Gotham-based volume two honors funk and spawned nothing. Compressing clenched male studio voices into keyb-saturated bass-and-percussion, it's just a dense, urgent, anxious moment of dance music--unutopian even when Colonel Abrams soul-shouts that "Music Is the Answer." "Don't Make Me Wait" set it off. "Set It Off" was the answer. A-
I'm Not Here to Hunt Rabbits [Piranha, 2018]Site of both the monumental Norman Rush novel Mortals and the soft-hearted James McCall Smith No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (Jill Scott played Precious Ramotswe on TV), Botswana is less esoteric than Piranha wants curiosity seekers to believe, its capital no further from Pretoria than Boston is from New York. Nor will the bass-heavy "Botswana guitar" style showcased on this oddly configured compilation sound strange to any fan of South African mbaqanga. But that's good--with mbaqanga having long ago run its post-apartheid course, these tunes work up the same gruff energy and stalwart pulse without percussion instruments or anything Jo'burg would call a recording studio. Propelled by a guitar technique in which the hand reaches over the neck to riff on three strings while the thumb drives a bass sometimes furnished by a battery cable, their rustic confidence is less frantic than mbaqanga's urban drive. The vinyl disc features only 11 tracks, whose purchase permits the download of eight otherwise unavailable others, including one called "Condom." Those 11 are the cream. On side two, hear the scratchy violin of "Ngwana Wa Dichabeng" transition to the playful vocalese of "Tiki Molamu" to the organ-driven female falsetto of "Re Babedi." And wonder where Sibongile Kgaila found the guitar hook of "Gladys." A- 2ff7e9595c
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