West Coast Post-Asiatic

AVAILABLE NOW $11 (includes shipping)

"The term Post Asiatic may come across as another ridiculous entry in the dictionary of contemporary sub-genre music but the name is the most appropriate encapsulation for what has easily become the most interesting musical movement in nearly twenty years. Due to space limitations the West Coast Post Asiatic compilation fails to include the majority of artists on the Western Coast of the US who focus on or dabble in Asian/Eastern influenced avant-garde art. However; it offers a glimpse into the fierce beauty and embracing expressionism these artists are conveying. The compilation includes work from Amps for Christ, Soriah, hop-frog’s drum jester devotional, Auto Da Fe, Sikhara & Refrigerator Mothers with sound that travels from electric sitars & winding guitars to tribal animalistic percussion, cyclic dron-e chanting, gamelan-esque free-spasm metal percussion to dreamy Chinese dulcimers and moon guitars. The marble vinyl is limited to 505 copies and varies in color. A more inclusive 2CD compilation featuring Post-Asiatic artists (including Amps for Christ, Z’EV, Larry Thrasher, the Hop-Frog Kollectiv, Muslimgauze, etc.) from around the globe is due out in Fall 2007!"
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
(FROM THE LINER NOTES)

"Post-Asiatic" is a term I invented around 2002, while I was running an experimental music series at a Chinese restaurant and tiki room called The Jasmine Tree in Portland. It was a way of succinctly describing to the press a movement of musicians and other performers who arrived at their commingled bodies of work by interpolating the traditions of various Asian and Middle Eastern peoples through a distinctly Western deconstructionist methodology. By and large, these troupes and individuals resided on the West Coast, and as the years passed and the Work continued this sub-sub-genre grew both in number and in the ambition and mastery of its component artists. Last year, I received the first submission from a band identifying itself as "post-asiatic" whom I did not personally know. It's strange the way words work.

The word connotes the inherent contradiction of the music it describes. Despite the respect and reverence we feel toward the cultures which inspire us, the post-asiatic ouvre has a certain minstrel-show element that's difficult to ignore. From a lifelong gestalt of images transmitted through movies, books, and live performances; a pan-asian aesthetic emerges that is true to no existing tradition. Through costume, movement, and sound we reflect a deeply-flawed history of appropriation on the part of the entitled and ill-informed Occident. We paint ourselves with white make-up instead of blackface.

On the upside, the post-asiatic influence has in most cases been positive on the forms we emulate, and even saved some arts from extinction. Odissi, arguably the world's oldest form of dance, has all but died out in India but survives in the United States among mostly "white" practitioners; Hijikata and Ohno's creation of butoh was in the simplest terms a meeting of German postmodern dance with the most ancient Japanese peasant spiritualism; and the entire history of bellydance begins with suspiciously post-asiatic roots in the Victorian burlesque period.

So please don't take offense at the fumbling of our clumsy fingers at the fragile crystalline perfections of the Orient. From love our desire springs, and like a callous lover we mar the object of desire in our quest to understand it. 5000. - Noah Mickens, Halloween 2006

Track List:

Amps for Christ: Walk Your Camel For a Mile (Listen)

Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional: Bakshish

Sikhara: Koba

Auto Da Fe: Hirohito (Listen)

Soriah: Star Send Off

Auto Da Fe: Into the Forest

Nequaquam Vacuum: Orichi (Listen)

Refrigerator Mothers: Spiritscar