#excavated shellac

Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World's Music by Dust-to-Digital

Plenty has changed about Excavated Shellac since its inception. The pace of publication has slowed, other collectors have contributed sides, and the notes that Ward has penned for each inclusion have gotten longer and more in-depth. But they have always been guided by certain principles. Ward avoids romanticization in favor of a tone of respectful curiosity. His admirably lucid texts provide information about the music and its performers in its historical and national context, and they usually tell you a bit about the vast music business that grew up in the late 19th century and survived economic convulsions and world wars. 

Over time, Excavated Shellac has crossed back over from the internet to the realm of commerce. Ward compiled several compilations for the Dust to Digital label, themed by location or instrumentation, and released on LP or CD. He worked on Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History Of The World’s Music for several years, with the intention of releasing a multi-CD set of songs that duplicated the blog’s purview, but hadn’t appeared on the website or been reissued anywhere else. But since there's a pandemic going on, they chose not to produce the set as a physical object, and it was released digitally with minimal fanfare in December 2020. 

If you ever appreciated the physical substantiality and user-interface experience of CD boxed sets, it’s impossible not to mourn the exclusively digital format, since this would have made a great one. Like a vestigial limb, the set’s original format is evident in its organization into four equal parts, each corresponding to a CD’s worth of music, and the text’s layout as a 186-page pdf booklet. The transfers adhere to current practice of removing most of the noise and using musically informed mastering skills to ensure that the instruments sound like instruments actually sound, instead of the wan, ghost-like representations that shared space with blizzards of surface noise on 20th century compilations. The reproductions of labels, disc sleeves, and historical photos all beg to be seen on a page, not just a screen. Ward’s writing is as transparent and involving as ever, and the track selection flows easily between cultures, styles and decades. You won’t necessarily like each of the album’s 100 tunes equally, but each selection represents an opportunity to duck down a wormhole of sound and history. 

But if you are already on board the Excavated Shellac train, you have already found it in your heart to tolerate insubstantiality in order to let its digital transmissions set you vibrating. And there’s something to be said for taking these tunes one at a time, much as you might when visiting the blog. In any case, the collection’s array of classical, popular, and folk sounds from South America, Asia, and Africa, as well as European folk styles, constitutes a persuasive argument that there’s more to be found in the international record business’ actions than what got into Harry Smith’s record collection. 

Ward has also assembled three albums. First came Strings, a selection of music from around the globe. The most celebrated is Opika Pende, a four-CD survey of music from the African continent. And now comes Reeds, which like Strings is organized around an instrumental theme. Some are instrumentals and some feature non-English vocals, but every track prominently features a reed instrument. Some are familiar — clarinet, bagpipes, concertina (remember, instruments of the accordion family also use air forced over reeds to generate their sounds). Others, like the pungi, an Indian instrument favored by snake charmers, are foreign to American and European listeners. 

One quality that reed instruments share is the potential for volume, which is pretty useful to musicians playing in social contexts. If you’re playing in a market, at a wedding, or any place where people gather to drink and dance and holler, you need to project or you’ll be drowned out. So while some might be drawn to this record for the exotic sounds, the purpose behind most of the music on it is pretty universal — to party down. “Tarantella Populare” kicks the record off with a tune that was recorded by three Italian men in NYC two years before the onset of the Great Depression. Their combination of one droning bagpipe and two oboe-like ciaramellas is tonally rich and rhythmically irresistible, with interlocking figures like some sort of Renaissance-era street dance. Next up is a literally stomping song from the Auvergne region of France whose boots-on-boards beats and hectoring vocal will demolish any stereotypes you might have about the corniness of Gallic squeezebox music. 

And so it goes, touching on music from Albania, Tanzania, China, Turkey, India, and Spain, amongst others. The bagpipe tunes show startling commonality no matter the country of origin; the music on “Lahara Saamp Ke Masta Karneka,” which was recorded in India in 1925, sounds remarkably close to the drones and intertwining melodies that accompany singer Obdulia Alvarez on “Cantar Bien Neña,” which was performed five years later in Spain. Similarly, one could imagine “Into Ezimnandi,” a squeezebox and vocal piece from South Africa, dropping into the same dance set as the song from Auvergne. 

Things get more geographically and culturally specific when you lose the bellows; the high-pitched quiver of the suona on an untitled piece of dance music recorded in China in 1908 sounds like it could come from nowhere else, while the low moans of an Albanian proto-clarinet on “Ekâri Eselimmit” project a particularly Balkan sense of tragedy. By highlighting both the similarities and singularities of music made by musicians who learned their stuff before the dawn of recording, Reeds conveys a sense of what it sounded like to celebrate and (occasionally) mourn around the world a century ago.