Music Blogs

Few packages are as eagerly anticipated at Arthur Magazine HQ as those with return addresses that read "Sublime Frequencies PO Box 17971 Seattle, WA 98127 USA." Which is ironic, given that Sublime Frequencies releases--CDs, vinyl records and DVDs--do not issue from any single address, state, region, nation or even continent. They are documents of strange, wonderful and often transcendent musical activities from around the planet: field recordings of folk musicians on the streets of Lhasa, audio collages of North Korean TV and radio broadcasts, agit-pop songs from '70s Iraq, compilations of riotous live performances by Syria's current number one wedding party singer.

It's possible that SF releases are as exciting as they are because there's so much at stake. After all, the SF crews are in a race against time, on a guerilla anthropology mission to collect and widely disseminate music from those cultures next on the chopping block: places where modern industrial culture is ascendant, with the homogeneity and soul-sucking cheap dullness that follows, or, even sadder, places about to be mutilated beyond recognition by videogame-trained teenaged American soldiers on the perennial Western mission to gain control of all of the planet's precious natural resources through military might.

Still, serious as they are in their underlying humanist decency, CDs like Choubi Choubi! Folk & Pop Sounds From Iraq and Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean are not simply do-gooder albums you should own to prove to your friends that you're not Dick Cheney. No, the most immediate fact is that they are fun to listen to. Sure, you don't know the language, a deep understanding of the context in which the recording was made is going to be elusive, and of course the voices and instrumentation are--by definition--foreign to your ears. But it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. Or space out to it... or dream to it, or laugh in joy with it--all responses are appropriate when Omar Souleyman is rocking the Syrian wedding jams with Rizan Sa'id on white-hot keys. Boundaries quiver; horizons deepen; one's goodwill towards humanity goes through the roof. That's pretty good for a piece of plastic made by a tiny record label in Seattle.