ROGC: Under a Dim Crescent Moon – vol. 1

Posted on January 15th, 2006 by s&S.
Categories: *Royal Oakland Gramophone Co., field recordings, Xinjiang.

ROGC_DimCrescent1

ROGC: “Under a Dim Crescent Moon” – part 1
live-mixed webcast of field recordings: January 15th, 2006

PLAYLIST & INFO PAGE HERE!

this is # 1 of a 2-show series (part 2 is located HERE)

For most of 2003, I lived in the northwestern-most region of China…
officially known as:Xinjiang : Uyghur Autonomous Region
and sometimes referred to by some as China’s “other, lesser known Tibet” for situational parallels.
I’d recieved a generous grant to document the folk music (as opposed to the classical muqam music) of the Turkic muslim cultures traditionally native to the region… focusing mainly on the largest group: the Uyghurs , but also including examples of Kazakh and Kyrgyz songs.

For this show, I live-mixed many of those field recordings, which while mostly consist of music, also include ambiences, pop & traditional music on cassettes & cd’s I picked up…and recordings of shortwave radio.
The field recorded music you hear was, with only a few exceptions, strictly performed by common folk (farmers, carpenters, (incl. mystics and beggars)) demonstrating something that’s very much a cultural part of everyday life. With east China’s ever accellerating blitzkrieg development of it’s west though, these cultural traditions are going up in smoke fast.

The recordings were done with head-worn binaural microphones – in yurts, homes, under grape trellises, in mud brick courtyards, orchards and in the streets of oasis towns in areas surrounding the expansive Taklamakan desert

Several of these recordings – in purer, more carefully curated form – will be released later this year on the fantastic Sublime Frequencies label. (!!!)
**photos of these recordings and more can be found HERE. / ** more info on Uyghur music can be found HERE.

-Fausto Caceres (s of s&S)

PLAYLIST & INFO PAGE HERE!

running time: 2 hours

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3 comments.

OddioOverplay (via Archive.org)

Comment on January 17th, 2006.

Remarkable Field Recordings

MOG (via Archive.org)

Comment on December 13th, 2006.

Totally absorbed

What a fantastic collection of sounds
I am totally absorbed in this.

wayneandwax.com » Whirl-a-whirls

Pingback on May 30th, 2007.

[...] When I learned, upon further clicking, that the music was to be (re)released by none other than Sublime Frequencies, I was not terribly surprised (though the amount of info around the sounds already promised more than the label’s typical flippancy, I’m not sure whether “purer, more carefully curated form” would simply mean removing some of the sonic&textual context). [...]

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