The Roving Musicologist

Zone Drain (Mumbai)

For the first two days in India, it seemed a better idea to stay on the mat on the floor, letting the maid kick me around so she could sweep, and nodding whenever the cook spoke to me.  The apartment was small and there were no screens on the windows.  My only view was of a vacant lot, about two acres in size, with an unpaved footpath in front of it.  All day long, there were two constant streams of people going each way.  The haze cut off everything in the distance, and I wasn’t ready to deal with a rickshaw driver yet.

   After a nap, I woke up and saw a child on the path struggling to pull an animal that looked like a cross between a goat and a horse, with large white circular blotches on brown fur.  I had no idea what it was.  Soon my host would be home and ask what I had accomplished that day.

I recorded the sound of this water in the bathroom drain of their apartment.

Travel Post #28: Running the God Drill (Latakia, Syria)

Travel Post #27: High Pitched Sunrise Temple Chant (Mangalore, India)

The only thing open was this temple and a newspaper stand.

There were only a few pools of light in the streets when I was dropped off by the night bus.  The few desperate rickshaw drivers waiting by the bus refused to give me any directions so I walked around looking for a place to get coffee, but nothing was open.  Then I heard this chant coming from somewhere, and followed it to a place called temple square.

I spent some time sitting with an old man selling leaves that had some religious purpose while the motorbikes and trucks began breaking the silence.  He was trying to sing along to the chant.

More people began to gather around the temple as the sun came up.  I moved next to the bodhi tree and watched a woman circling around the tree repeatedly.

The chant ended and the sun was up.  People were awake.  The shopkeeper across the street insisted I take his picture.

At the time, I didn’t know why.

Mangalore is unaccustomed to tourists.  The guidebooks barely mention it and no one stays any longer than they have to, usually.

As I walked around the next day, a man stopped on his motorbike and said he had seen me praying at their temple.  I was only standing there while the sound recorder was on, but this was prayer in the eyes of this man.  He was curious to ask all of the usual questions, and then he left.

Then I went to the mall.

Travel Post #25: Where are the knobs on those cricket Frogs? (Nan, Thailand)

These frogs are like an organic version of an earlier post, Gorf Freaks Out.  I have recorded many insects and frogs at night on the trip, but this one is probably the best and the only one good enough to post.

This was recorded out of the window of the oxcart room I stayed in for two weeks in the north of Thailand.

Travel Post #24: Mekong Boatmen Chaos Chorus (Luang Prabang, Laos)

An example of the boats that the singers live on.

There was nothing to do in Luang Prabang most nights, unless you went to the markets.  But the markets were dead most of the time and so Jacques and I ended up down by the river, for lack of money and ideas. 

At the river, boatmen sat in a circle and moaned in a musical way.  Some would  yell and leave, then sometimes come back and join together.  Various instruments took their turns; first a guitar, then an accordion, and finally a keyboard softly pumping out a generic beat.  But all of them were punctuated by the put-put of riverboat engines, as long craft in the dark made their way to points I would never see - except across the river, where the silhouette of a large boat settled in and let a car off onto the far shore of houses and temples, and maybe other things that were now just lights floating across the water mixed with the heavy haze in the air.

Jacques said the smoke was because the farmers were burning forest, which they always did, but for some reason it was worse today.  The smoke burned my eyes and scratched my throat, but it was too nice to leave here yet.  Lights, fluorescent, were nailed to the trees up on the bank, but they left the grand staircase down to the beach unlit, making the lights from the banana shaped boats seem much stronger. 

Hanging in the boats were pots and pans, the organization of lives shining in the light, radios with digital screens, and maybe a lantern here and there.  So many boats were moored here and yet the river was supposed to be too low for them to go anywhere.

Jacques talked about Egypt…the Mekong reminded him of places by the Red Sea.  It was like this, he said, people living like this. 

Travel Post #22: Funeral Music and Hello Ambushes (Kampot, Cambodia)

No Laughing Zone

Joseph Conrad was right, heat warps your mind.  You can’t walk anywhere, any destination becomes a trudge.  Even the novice monks at the temples seem out of sorts.  Although the worst thing you could do is get married in this state of mind, weddings are a constant.  Funerals, coming along on their own, feature repetitive rolling tones blasted out of a PA system that looks like something from an elementary school.

This recording is the result of a day of walking around in the sun in Kampot.  One part of the recording is funeral music that was being played out of a PA system down a dirt road.  The other part is the music produced in an unattended school of music, abandoned in anticipation of the Khmer New Year and full of nothing but percussion and wooden swords.

Travel Post #16: Thailand Sun Making a Man Slowly Give Up

There’s always a fair in Thailand…little bamboo and thatch huts that sit
in a little lawn and sell things.  Everywhere I go I bump into some kind
of market or festival.  For some reason, the Thai way is to have a guy
going around with a portable microphone and talk about whatever comes into
his head.  On this day, I sat in the shade of an abandoned stall, sweating the whole time, and watched this guy.

The music for the festival was the drone like sounds
you hear, which was completely blown out by the guy’s voice.  No one was
really listening to him, as there was hardly anyone at the fair in the
first place.  The way he said “eah” with the sun coming down on him, carrying his battery pack around, seemed so much a product of the heat coming down. The drone of the Buddhist music in the background gave the fair the feeling that everything was happening automatically, indifferent to how much effort was exerted.

The Nan ethnic fair did not host the Princess of Thailand