Much of the music I post here does bear unmistakable marks of its time... and this does, for my ears fuse with the actual "musical" material proper. So, it's not so much a conceptualized days-of-yore far-off-place sort of exoticism it is about the evocation through sound. I would personally classify my enjoyment of older sounds as being more related to nostalgia and sentimentalism than to the notion of retro, which to me implies a certain level of ironic posturing. I can certainly identify facets of some of this music which are a bit campy or amusing... but beneath that surface I often feel a deep emotional attachment to some of the sounds... I think it's definitely important to differentiate this form of appreciation. To me this is something which underlies the curation of, for instance, the Sublime Frequencies discs. While some would label the inclusion of strange or outmoded sounds among their compilations as tongue-in-cheek, I would actually be more inclined to treat it as a celebration of psychedelic whimsy and exoticism in the non-ethnic sense of the term. A celebration of the phenomenon of music as exotic...
Moving along to some sweet crumbs of auditory pleasure...
I don't really know what got me investigating old Nepalese tunes exactly, but recently I discovered a bunch of really fascinating and beautiful examples.
Sadly, as with other artists from this era and from the "non-West", there isn't much in the way of translated/ translatable information readily available online.
And I checked, but the older edition of the Rough Guide to World Music didn't have anything about Nepalese popular musics. This is very much congruent with the discourse of World Music as I see it.
The intro to the little section about Nepal:
The music of Nepal, either ceremonial and played on trumpets, cymbals giant drums and ear-splitting shawms or made at home for an evening's entertainment, is as yet very little known outside the country.
They're defintely spot-on with the "little-known" part, but what about all the music outside of these very folksy signposts? While the book does have some great insights, it is by all means very rough. Hell, the first version didn't even have a section about Myanmar!
One of my favourite singers that I've discovered is named Aruna Lama. She has a sweet, transparent voice and appears to be one of the biggest names of Nepali music. I enjoy it how her voice in a very textural, physical sense highlights the relationship Nepal's music has with both Indian music and with other more Eastern Asian cultures... Especially Tibetan. The inflection and timbre of her voice is the exact midpoint between those two sounds--and you could say the same about the stylistic elements at play in the music.
So, here are some tracks, mostly by Ms. Lama, and two others. I couldn't manage to find more at all by Pawan Gole, whereas Udit Narayan is well-known outside of Nepal because of his contributions in India. I've also included two videos from the Nepalese Film Samjhana. The videos present two versions of the same song, "Ke Soche Maile". I'm pretty sure the female version of the song is actually sung by Lata Mangeshkar. The male version is sung by Kiran Pradhan. It's quite beautiful...
Aruna Lama - Chautarima Basera.mp3
Aruna Lama - Eh Kancha.mp3
Aruna Lama - Hera Na Hera Kancha.mp3
Aruna Lama - Pohor Sal.mp3
Pawan Gole - Aasharai Mahinama.mp3
Udit Narayan - Kahile Kahi Manka Kura.mp3
