Sublime Frequencies

The label specialized in 45 rpm records, which at the time were the cheapest option available to performers who were lacked access to Cairo’s pricy studios and Egypt’s radio stations, which catered to bourgeois sensibilities. Most of the 40 or 50 titles it released during its seven-year existence were made by Egyptian singers of shaabi and shabibi, popular forms that were rooted in rural, traditional forms of song and poetry. Born in the City of Tanta collects eight sides from the Bourini catalog that were compiled and sequenced by Gary Sullivan, a record collector and WFMU deejay, and Sublime Frequencies boss Hisham Mayet.

Smart sequencing amplifies this marvelous LP’s appeal. It hooks you at the outset with the collection’s most outré vocal performances, settles into more traditional but no less compelling fare, and then ends on a note of undeniable badassery. While lyrics are not provided, the song titles (which are) and the sounds of the singers’ voices work in concert to fire one’s imagination. Take the opening track, Basis Rahouma’s “Yana Alla Nafsa Masouda.” Upholstered with swaggering strings and a driven by exuberant hand drumming, it’s actually one of the set’s lusher productions. But Rahouma’s impetuous, insistent singing, which escalates until he’s ending each line with a shout or an imitation of a carnivorous animal, sounds like the work of a guy you’d like to have in your record collection, but not face to face with you in an alley. The title translates as “Blocked from What I Want,” and the performance leaves no doubt that you do not want to be in his way when the singing’s done. Then advance a couple tracks to Samah’s “Shawish Aldawriat” (“Patrol Sergeant”).  The vocal duet, which contrasts a fleet and ardent female singer with a buffoonish male one, will leave you guessing just what’s going on, but I’d lay long odds that the sergeant’s holding an empty bag when the song’s over.

By contrast, there’s nothing goofy about Abu Bakr Abdel Aziz’s “Al Bint al Libya” (The Girl from Libya),” just a breakneck oud line, hard-smacked drums, and a singer who sounds shattered. There’s no reason to think that Reem Kamal, who gets the last word while belting “Baed Al Yas Yjini (After Hopelessness, He Comes to Me)” over implacable handclaps, seething accordion, and churning reeds, is singing directly to Aziz. But if she were, she sure sounds like she could do some shattering.

As immediate as Bourini’s sounds were, the label didn’t last long. The liner notes don’t say why, but it’s worth noting that it released its last record in the same year that a cassette-only album by Ahmed Adaweya outsold Oum Kalthoum’s LPs. Across North Africa, vinyl made way for tape, and the day of the single was over.

The original Indian Talking Machine might not have changed how we understand our world, but it did provide reliable transportation to a couple of them. First, it enabled a listener to steep in the sounds of musical traditions that had been around for centuries, but had not yet been transformed by capture and reproduction. Second, it introduced its audience to the surviving Indian 78 rpm culture. The album came as a 245-page hardcover book that presented both reproductions of sleeves, labels, gear, advertisements, and ephemera from back in the day, and color photos that Millis had taken of the places where you can still find them and the people who make that possible. It was possible to treat its two CDs tucked into pockets in the cover as accessories, which was a shame given the musical riches they contained.

That won’t happen with Indian Talking Machine Part Two. It contains the same number of sides as the first volume, this time on two LPs. The transfers subdue most of the 78s’ noise without compromising the sounds of the instruments. While it does include a booklet with a dozen pages of images of records, players, and the animal byproducts used to make shellac, the annotation is much more bare-bones, conveying only the names of the artists and the instruments featured on each track.

And what music! By narrowing the focus to instrumentals, Millis has foregrounded two elements of Indian music of the early 20th century. One is the concentrated power and beauty of the music that made it to disc. Reproducing hour-long ragas and other musical forms that had evolved ungoverned by the small amount of music that a 78 could contain was out of the question, so these tracks capture foundational themes and climactic moments; just the good stuff. The other is the spectacular virtuosity of the playing and the easy but focused rapport between the musicians (usually just a couple per performance); in a culture where music was made mainly by people playing every day, they got really good at playing it.

Indian Talking Machine Part Two is not a musicological enterprise, and anyone looking to be told anything about what they’re hearing will be disappointed. This volume presents the music as something you listen to, period.

That would be a mistake — or at least it would trap one in the kind of double-bind that Bishop’s long-running band Sun City Girls in part used to specialize in. To assume (or insist) that rock and the “exotic” fall into intrinsically separate musical categories is a Western chauvinism, of a piece with the music industry’s attempts to collapse all the tunes and sounds issuing from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific islands into a single “genre” called “world music” (or “global folk,” as Spotify suggests). Those cynical formulations are less malarial dream and more nauseating nightmare. Sun City Girls never tired of provoking such chauvinisms, and then flipping them the bird. The band offered the same response to the liberal hand-wringers who pronounced them “cultural appropriators” or agents of neocoloniality.

Sun City Girls expressed their idiosyncratic interest in the musical traditions of the Arab nations (as we seem to be calling them) from the jump — see “Helwa Shak” from their debut LP in 1984 or “Kal el Lazi Kad Ham” from the sublime Grotto of Miracles (1986). And the Bishop brothers’ relationship to the music goes farther back. They have spoken to early experiences at their Lebanese grandfather’s house, listening to him play the oud and jam with his pals, some of them outlaw Michigan Freemasons who rejected the Christianized version of the secret society and maintained their own meetings and esoteric metaphysics.

40 years later, it's true that Malarial Dreams is a less metaphysical, outré experience than Grotto of Miracles or, more recently, some of Bishop’s other releases as Alvarius B; interested parties might consult the excellent Baroque Primativa or the feral Fuck You and the Horse You Rode in on. Some of the new record’s finest songs are its gentlest. “One Month Non-sexual Vacation in Mongolia” features Shelabi and Cherif El-Masri exchanging moody, melodic passages on oud and electric guitar. It’s a fairly pent-up, tense affair, but it’s also lovely. “Later” is down-tempo and meditative, slowly adding layers of shimmer (Adham Zidan and Maurice Louca play dueling organs) and, in its second half, Asher Gamedze’s expressive drumming.

Among Malarial Dreams’ nine songs, “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin — Part 2” might be most immediately engaged with the musical textures and tones Bishop hears in Cairo, where he has lived for some time. Huda Asfour plays a qanun, in anxious, evocative conversation with Bishop’s guitar. “Part 1” of the composition appeared on Sun City Girls’ Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings (1993), one of the band’s records for Majora. That earlier song is an example of the Girls in grim and then resonant improv mode. “Part 2” expands and refines the melody, brightening the corners but not losing the sense of foreboding. It’s Alvarius B in a reflective mood, considering the places he’s been. This reviewer is grateful that he’s still willing to take us along, into the strange spaces he’s currently creating.

The original Indian Talking Machine might not have changed how we understand our world, but it did provide reliable transportation to a couple of them. First, it enabled a listener to steep in the sounds of musical traditions that had been around for centuries, but had not yet been transformed by capture and reproduction. Second, it introduced its audience to the surviving Indian 78 rpm culture. The album came as a 245-page hardcover book that presented both reproductions of sleeves, labels, gear, advertisements, and ephemera from back in the day, and color photos that Millis had taken of the places where you can still find them and the people who make that possible. It was possible to treat its two CDs tucked into pockets in the cover as accessories, which was a shame given the musical riches they contained.

That won’t happen with Indian Talking Machine Part Two. It contains the same number of sides as the first volume, this time on two LPs. The transfers subdue most of the 78s’ noise without compromising the sounds of the instruments. While it does include a booklet with a dozen pages of images of records, players, and the animal byproducts used to make shellac, the annotation is much more bare-bones, conveying only the names of the artists and the instruments featured on each track.

And what music! By narrowing the focus to instrumentals, Millis has foregrounded two elements of Indian music of the early 20th century. One is the concentrated power and beauty of the music that made it to disc. Reproducing hour-long ragas and other musical forms that had evolved ungoverned by the small amount of music that a 78 could contain was out of the question, so these tracks capture foundational themes and climactic moments; just the good stuff. The other is the spectacular virtuosity of the playing and the easy but focused rapport between the musicians (usually just a couple per performance); in a culture where music was made mainly by people playing every day, they got really good at playing it.

Indian Talking Machine Part Two is not a musicological enterprise, and anyone looking to be told anything about what they’re hearing will be disappointed. This volume presents the music as something you listen to, period.