Post-Asiatic

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. The comp focuses on artist who dabble in Asian/Eastern influenced avant-garde art and offers a glimpse into the fierce beauty and embracing expressionism these artists are conveying. The compilation includes 156 minutes of music and field recordings from 25 artists with sound that travels from sitars & winding guitars to tribal animalistic percussion and gamelan music to the psychedelic Thai sounds of the Mekong and Tuvan throat singing to harmoniums, gamelan-esque free-spasm metal percussion and dreamy Chinese dulcimers. Not to mention field recordings from Burmese Puppet Shows and India. This post-cursor to the West Coast Post-Asiatic vinyl is a 2CD set packaged in a heavy cardboard "old style vinyl" gatefold cover.

"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

V/A

Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music

(Urck)
We've been meaning to start stocking stuff from the Urck label for a while now. They had sent us a bunch of discs by a band with the strange name of Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional, and to be honest at first we were fearing the worst, yeah we know, don't judge a book by its cover or a band by it's name, but we often judge band's by their names and it usually works out pretty well for us, Bathtub Shitter, Fuck I'm Dead, Pocohaunted, we could go on, but to be totally honest we were sort of expecting some sort of hippy jam band, you know hackey sacks and dayglo jester hats, but thankfully, we couldn't have been more wrong. The sound was devotional for sure, and the focal point was certainly drums, but the sound was more tribal and ethnic, spiritual and dark, more along the lines of Muslimgauze, lots of samples and voices, intricate rhythms, hypnotic and trancey.

So we will eventually review a record proper from Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional, but we figured an even better place to start would be this brand new double disc compilation, featuring lots of bands on the Urck label, as well as a whole bunch of bands we already dig.

The comp is called Post-Asiatic Lost War Dream Music and is subtitled A Compilation Of Eastern Influenced Experimental Music, which pretty much nails it, but within that fairly broad descriptor, the bands veer into all sorts of varied sonic territory.

Right off the bat, there's a handful of bands who would have made owning this comp worthwhile all on their own, Amps For Christ, who offer up a gorgeous sprawling nearly 11 minute long jam, folky and lilting, guitars and sitars woven into drifting dreamlike harmonies, the melodies sunny and wistful, all very free and abstract, but gorgeous and we would have been happy to hear this track stretched out to fill an entire record. Muslimgauze does a stripped down, pure rhythm track, shuffling skittering drums, looped and cyclical, very hypnotic, and very very abstract. Neung Phak deliver a blissy slab of laid back psychpop, whirring organ, simple subtle drumming, twangy guitar, all wrapped around a super catchy Eastern melody. Experimental guitarist Bill Horist delivers some super spare squeak and scrape, chime and clatter, shimmer and swell, eventually that minimal guitar is joined by some sort of fiddle, wailing out a lonesome tune. Z'ev joins up with someone called Ramona Ponzini, for a haunting metallic scrapescape peppered with tribal drumming and with creepy disembodied vocals. There's also several tracks from that amazing Indian Soundscapes record we reviewed a while back, as well as tracks from Soriah, Metal Rouge, Moe! Staiano and F-Space. But the bands we hadn't heard of are just as exciting as those we were already familiar with.

The aforementioned Hop-Frog's Drum Jester Devotional unfurls a drum heavy ceremony, all pounding tribalism, and buzzing steel strings, sounding very East Asian, another track that we would have loved to hear stretched out to fill up the whole disc. Venerable Showers Of Beauty Gamelan, is just that, a DIY gamelan, chiming and resonant, the melodies definitely Asian influenced, but also a bit Western, with many of the tones allowed to drone on and on, giving the track a slightly ominous buzz. C.O.T.A. weave a dark slab of tribal dark ambience, lots of rumble and buzz, a thick bassy pulse and shimmering sitar like strings. We definitely need to hear more from these guys. And we could go on and on and on. This is after all two discs packed with all sorts of amazing music, and a whole clutch of new bands to discover and probably knowing us (and you we'd imagine) decide we need to hear more of. Recommended for fans of any of the above mentioned bands obviously, or anyone looking for into dark, dreamy, buzzy, blissful, tribal sounds. Everytime we play this in the store, someone comes up to ask what it is. Obviously, way recommended.

Packaged in a super thick mini gatefold lp-style sleeve, with liner notes and credits inside.

The West has always held a complex fascination with the art and philosophy of the East and in turn the East has both voluntarily and involuntarily adapted and mutated aspects of Western culture. This cultural interchange has created a rather fruitful ground for musical growth in both directions. Elements of the East can be strongly heard throughout much of the music of the fifties, sixties, and beyond; whether it is John Cage consulting the I Ching, John Fahey, Peter Walker or Robby Basho playing ragas on their guitars, or the Beatles employing the sitar in their pop songs, each blends traditions of the East with that of the West. This is obviously just a cursory glance at the interaction between West and East, but gives an idea of the broad impact that the East has had on the music of both the 20th and 21st centuries.

The fascination continues beyond the composers and musicians, down to the consumer, as recent years have seen a plethora of Eastern music being released and re-released; from traditional Buddhist chants and other religious ceremonies to documents of the East’s incorporation of Western sounds; the Cambodian Rocks and Sublime Frequencies Folk and Pop Sounds series being two of the most prominent. In what could be seen as a response to, or a similar assimilation of sounds of East into West, the URCK label has recently released a compilation entitled “Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music,” documenting a diverse array of experimental musicians who embrace the sounds of the East, while attempting to push and blur the established boundaries of Western sound/music.

The title of this compilation alone, in many ways warrants a bit of discussion as it references ideas of both past and present. The term “Post-Asiatic,” draws immediate attention to its self-referential relationship to all post movements held under the main aegis of postmodernism. The mere mention of another post movement could bring about a large discussion unto itself, but honestly that is not my real intention here, though it may be something that would warrant further discussion elsewhere. The term, or phrase, that in fact, really warrants attention is the elegiac Lost War Dream Music. The term is active and political; while at the same time offers a chance for reverie. The real pull to the term is in fact its ambiguity, which sums up the dynamic of the music on this wonderful compilation. The dynamic itself is not just a dynamic that is found from track to track but is a struggle that is held within many of the compositions themselves.

The list of players on “Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music” are a somewhat different cast than may be expected. The Curators chose to focus on musicians with a more post-industrial or modern compositional bent, that really offer a further blurring of the lines between East and West. The ambiguity is furthered enhanced by the incorporation of field recordings from both India and Myanmar sometimes making it confusing to discern what you’re hearing, unless you pay close attention to the track list. Case in point is Adihiti Tahiti’s “Srimad” where a harmonium and operatic moans weave an intricate cross pattern around the sounds of young girl repeating a meditative mantra.

Other tracks stray greatly and can easily be discerned from the field recordings such as Sikhara’s brutal pounding war drum ritual “Fatwah,” or Auto De Fe’s beautiful Dead Can Dance-esque, dark-wave exoticism. Amps for Christ offer up an idyllic rock n’roll raga filled with blissed out sitar wanderings and warm overdriven guitars. Hop Frog’s Drum Jester Devotional follows that track up with a slightly darker droning saz and drum machine workout. And one must not forget Ramona Ponzini and Z’EV’s beautiful composition of metal and vocals, Metal Rouge’s exotic droning and Nueng Phak’s Cambodian rock style jams.

This compilation is one really worth picking up, as it documents a fertile and interesting realm of sonic exploration steeped in both tradition and innovation. Though the approach of each project featured on the disc often differs greatly, one is able to easily discern an immediate connection between all twenty-five musicians presented here. On top of that the running order of the comp is very tastefully done so that each track featured works its way gently into the next. 9/10 -- Cory Card (19 December, 2007)

A lot of artists on URCK take their musical inspiration from Asia, especially the rhythm and raga like drone stuff. But not just the URCK people, one could say there is a large group of musicians, and 'Post-Asiatic: Lost War Dream Music' tries to compile these musicians, who all (the majority at least), life on the west coast of the USA, save for perhaps Z'EV and the deceased Muslimgauze. This already defines the range of this compilation. Some names are known here through previous releases, such as, besides the two aforementioned luminaries, Bill Horist and Hop Frog's Drum Jester Devotional, but there is also a bunch of names, the vast majority actually, are people I never heard of. As to be expected there a lot of sitars, tablas, gamelan, oud, saz and more exotic instrumentation, but also guitars, metal percussion, field recordings (licensed from 'Indian Soundscapes' by Soleilmoon as well as some from Burma). Chants, dervish, techno, pure percussion: it's all there. A highly varied compilation with 150 minutes of music. I am not sure, but this could very well be a complete picture of a scene. If such a scene exists of course, but this lot makes a nice scene. (FdW)

".....awash with some excellent modern Kraut-influenced, eastern flavoured rock, and who could possibly resist that. (Simon Lewis)"