"arrival in mas" - recorded by david baker
"Arrival in Mas" - recorded by David Baker (download) (buy)
from Pitamaha: Music From Bali (2000)
released by Amulet
(file expires July 4th)
There's lots of gamelan music to be had besides Amulet's Pitamaha: Music from Bali, and I've had some of it, but David Baker's compilation of field recordings was my first exposure. "A thousand toy pianos twinkling madly," is how I described it before I knew anything about the genre, about how each "instrument" is actually an individually tuned set of sub-instruments. And, to be honest, I still don't know much about it, give or take a few shadow puppet traditions. It is not that the rhythms sound foreign to me. They sound as instantly natural as ever, as does the tone. They sound like another dimension, like the alternating consciousnesses of Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a place I've been all along.