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)