A round-up of CDs DVDs, MP3s, Faxes and other modern media gathering folk, ethnic and world music, tales, poems, shanties, swears, anthems, apothegms and memorabilia of a cosmos beyond the white bread and saddle shoes of U.S. mass culture, conducted by ethno-demographer Grady Adparnassum.  Materials produced by teeny tiny outfits with the life expectancy of a mayfly, so order them now if you ever hope to see or hear them in this existence.

Duddy Ptarmigan’s Motor Car, by Sean Bean and the Bog Trotters.  Wee Manny 4501-B.  Sean Bean ( pron. Sha-gun, Bee-gor-ah in Ear-ly Gae-lic) leads County Bogus’s most beloved pub band.  CD contains 17 tracks of hitherto-unrecorded yodels, banshees and effeminate blather from deep in the countryside, explaining why Bean is often called The Aulde Sod.  Listen especially to the virtuoso ululation and open-lip trilling on “Ça B’leah da Morgah.”

Songs of the Beluga, by various folk artists. Folique Musique CD-DVD 342.  People who used to be called Eskimoes (or Esquimaux) here submitted to film and wire recording in 1946 by famed anthropologist Margarine Meede, as she collected data for her pioneering work on universal incest above the Arctic Circle.  Tracks are often fragmental and recorded in sub-freezing conditions that played hob with the pre-transistor audio equipment.  Film tracks grainy b & w.  Listen and look at your own risk.

Ho-Hokum, by the People of the Bent Cactus.  Jones CD55078.  Field recordings from the 1920s made by the Jonestown Institution, catching the plangent singing, epic taletelling and impromptu horsing around of some 70 tribal peoples in the Twelve Corners Region.  Over 60 tracks of stuff, including the famous snuffling and muttering choruses.  Digitally massaged to make anything at all audible.

Lift Up the Barge, Ye Lazy Git! by the Banjo Bummes.  Sleaze Kat 44.  A major opus from the 1950s folk movement by the legendary crypto-Beatnik group from San Luis Obispo.  Remastered for clarity, 23 tracks made famous when this three-piece band was listed in Red Channels, denounced by Joe McCarthy and reviled publicly by Amanda Sue Lipscomb, Moderator of the Daughters of Bunker Hill.  In retrospect pretty tame stuff, except for the highly risqué “Oh, Miss Gloria’s Fringed Underpants!”

Ka-D’Klumpf O, by Mundique Mompessor.  Age D’Gilte 455-33.  Singer-poet Mompessor essays some 34 songs and dances from Papua New Guinea, rendered in native dialects, with accompaniment on sagwaar (nose flute), g’munp (one-string banjo) and daziklill (harpo).  The performances were recorded in Australia, after Mme. Mompessor escaped the Laquanna tribe with her notes, instruments and the clothes on her back, ending 40 days’ captivity as next Sunday’s entrée du jour.  Highly recommended, winner of 2003 Disque d’Auricule.

Bolshevistiko!  by the Red Artillery Kazoo Band and Chorus.  Hammersickle 33-21.  A 1957 recording of the famous Cold War troubadours on tour in Roumania, to buck up spirits and guide fanatical right-wing deviationist revisers back to the true path of neoMarxist revolutionary solidarity.  Includes 23 rousing tracks, such as “O, Tractor Plant,” “Beyond the Blue Urals,” “I Found My Sweetie in the G.U.M. Store” and “Dnap-time in Dneiper.”   The precision backing of the 413 kazoos (including sopranino, high tenor, vox humana and contrabass) has to be heard to be believed.

Never Hump an Armadillo, by the Pan-Pipettes.  Gollum Music DVD 56.  Trans-Andean band of pipes, drums, flageolets, krumhorns, sackbuts, swanee whistles, schweinflauten, bumpuses and octave-tuned velocipedes.  Not really authentic folk music, recorded by a group of Nashville session men with time to burn and a big cache of funky instruments from the Museum of Old-Tyme Country Musick.  Once a brief novelty hit ( one track, “My Guanaco Has the Mange,” was No. 98 with a pillock on the Billboard charts in September, 1974), the music is endearing when you can actually see these middle-aged white guys with big sideburns and disco shirts trying to play after hitting up a hogshead of Jack Daniels’ No. 7.

O, the Bleeding Barley-O! by Augustine St. Swinge (pron. shushel-ning), with psalter and pneumothorax accompaniment. Olde Foulkes CD566.  British folk-song at its purest by an ardent collector-poet famed for his unerring old-timiness.  Mostly Phather & Childe Ballads, with some material more recently collected by Anglo-Lithuanian pianist-pederast Rafe Von Gustafsonstil.  Over 50 tracks, most recorded in after-hour pubs along the Pennine Trail.

Hoxha, My Hoxha, by the Massed Choirs of Lower Albania. Snarfle CD 101.  Historic recording (1977) of the lost Albanian choirs that once dominated the music scene in middle Adriatica.  Illustrates the confluence of Islamic and Orthodox hymnology prevalent after the Battle of Vienna (1680).  Accompaniments ranging from concertinetto to miniature military band.  Called by The Odd Music Magazine “a gem of purest ray serene in an ocean of neomusical gunk.”

Ears of the Aztec Thundergod, by Ima Shumac.  Crapital 33021.  Novelty folkishness by a Brooklyn music student who could sing 11 octaves from ultra-contrabass to dogwhistle sopranino.  Sounds like nothing else on earth, with lush, sensuous and vomitose accompaniments arranged by Nelson Raygun and played by a 200-piece studio orchestra. Tracks with names like “Eegeetcha the Volcano Lover” and “Nomaam, I’m Not in Love.”  Not for serious listeners but good party music.  Don’t turn up the treble, whatever you do!

jptArchive Issue 5

Copyright 2008- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

The Journal of Provincial Thought

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jptArchive Issue 5

AS OTHERS SEE US:  Ethnick Korner