The Roving Musicologist

Birthing Roma Stars (Pecs, Hungary)

    Someone told me to be in the parking lot of the big market and to look for a guy in shorts…you will go and see guys in caves, some gypsy guys, and here, take these contact mics with you.  Then a writer is there from Wire:  http://www.representativetrust.co.uk/archives/414

and this guy Balazs Pandi I know, who plays the drums:

http://fucktothemusic.blog.hu/

SO there we were, after a long drive, recording these Roma kids freaking out.  They turned the power on just so we could do this, and turned it off almost the minute that it was over, finally over, after a straight hour of noise.  Once I tried to go outside and the kids tried to get me to drive them around in the car.  I wasn’t going to drive that car; “fuck you” one of them said over and over.  He didn’t know what it meant.  When Balazs explained to him what it meant, he started saying it over and over again.  Those were his words, yes, no, fuck you.  He was the MC on the track.

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 #20: Modern Day Angkor Living Loop Children. They surrounded me in the taxi and I let them go. Everything you hear is for sale, including the drums and stringed instruments.