Chants du Japon/1

CHANTS DU JAPON 1/est

 

SONGS OF JAPAN 1/east

 

Le Chant du Monde, 1988 (?), LDX 74442

 

 The French label Le Chant du Monde released many Folkways albums for the French market but  many have still not been reissued as parts of their catalogue or are not available digitally on Folkways Records website.
There are two albums about those songs from Japan : one for the eastern part of the country and the other for the  western part. 
So the eastern part of Japan  is the island of Hokkaido and the eastern part of the island of Honshu including Sado island. 
The recordings were made in 1961 for Folkways but I'm not sure about the French release.
All the songs are performed with a small group of shamisen, shakuhachi and percussion players. These songs are folk songs  of the Japanese people (fishermen, horse drivers, for but only the lyrics in French are provided with the title and the relevant district. 
The recordings were made in 1961 for Folkways but I'm not sure about the French release.
All the songs are performed with a small group of shamisen, shakuhachi and percussion players. These songs are folk songs  of the Japanese people (fishermen, horse drivers, for rice husking etc...) but only the lyrics in French are provided with the titles and the relevant districts (Hokkaido, Yamagata, Miyagi, Iwate, Arita, Tochigi, Gumma, Ibaragi, Saitama, Hakone, Nagano, Sado). All these songs are of the min'yo genre.
Unfortunatley no singers' names were given.
I borrowed this copy from a library and I kept the text in French only not the pictures.

 

 

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Musiques du Cambodge des forêts

 

MUSIQUES DU CAMBODGE DES FORÊTS

MUSIC FROM THE FORESTS OF CAMBODIA

Anthologie de la musique des peuples, 1976, AMP 72902

 As far as I know none of the albums issued by this label have been reissued on compact disc or are digitally available. Which is bad really given the great quality of these field recordings. I already posted four of these discs plus this one but there are much more of them I don't have.

This is a copy of an album found in a library a good while ago. 

As usual the people who recorded in the field always give a good picture of the area where they  were about the geography, the history or the people they recorded. Bernard Dupaigne as founder of this great label couldn't do less. He met the Pör people west of Cambodia in the Cardamom Mountain region and the Kuy in North Cambodia in 1969 and 1970. Then Cambodia was drawn into de Vietnam war. Dupaigne asks himself in the text he wrote what happened to those people who were heavily bombed between 1970 and 1975. So these  recordings are quite precious for us and for Cambodian people as well so that young generations might retrieve parts of their culture despite the war and  the ''Khmers Rouges''. 
As I copied the English text as well you can discover in details what these recordings are about.
Note that tracks B1 and B2 are grouped together. 

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SISKIN

 

SISKIN/LAMENT OF OWEN ROE O'NEILL 

Shirak, 1979-1981, SSK 3309

 The Paris-based band Siskin was active between 1978 and 1982. It started with a lot of musicians (about eight of them) ending up with five then four musicians : Mario Forlot on harp, Olivier Darras on fiddle and viola, Serge Hamon on flute and whistle, Christian Lebon on percussion. The fifth musician was the piper Denis Kersual who toured with the band but didn't make it to the recording studio.
They managed to produce an album in 1979 in France which was released also by the Italian label Shirak Records  for the Italian market in 1981 with French text plus a presentation sheet in Italian that I included in the scans.
Siskin ( the name for a bird in English) was a group of its own with a highly creative sense of music. The music is Irish with a lot of original compositions by S. Hamon and M. Forlot; all the arrangements are O. Darras' work.
They wanted to bring us back in 1641-1649 in Ireland during what is called the Kilkenny Confederation when some Old English and Gaelic lords (all Catholics) rebelled against the English government of Charles the 1st and after his beheading against Oliver Cromwell. 
The landlords in central Ireland were threatened by a major colonisation plan like what happened in Ulster previously. The title of the album refers to the man who led this rebellion, Hugh O'Neill's nephew raised in the Spanish Netherlands where his family fled after Hugh O'Neill's defeat at Kinsale in 1601. Soon after the rebellion broke out it was decided to ask Owen O'Neill to lead the army which he did in 1642 bringing 300 Irish veterans with him. In the end Cromwell defeated him; he died in 1649 not in battle but poisoned according to the legend by an Irish women while historians think he died from illness.
This historical and musical representation starts on side 1 with tunes that might evoke Ireland at that time  to set the scene before the final battle. The main character is Captain Moloney who will die in battle on side 2. Tracks 2 and 3 are grouped; track 5 (6 on the record) is a traditional Breton tune played during weddings to make the bride cry when leaving her family and home. 
Side 2 is divided into two main sections; the first one is called ''Battle Cry of Munster'' (a traditional Irish march) grouping tracks 9 to 14. the second section is called ''Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill'' with the three last tracks.
Siskin composed five tunes to illustrate the atmosphere of the battle and what Moloney felt before it and in the end when he's dying on the battle field. To be more graphic maybe they resorted to a lot of sound  tampering. The effect is quite convincing I think with daring chords and a wall of sound  which take us  alongside Moloney. This is what I understand. Besides these musicians were influenced by metal and rock music according to O. Darras taking to the stage in long coats and leather dress. 
So  Siskin was like a a meteorite in the Irish landscape in France perhaps not completely understood by the regular French audience. It seems they were quite popular in Italy though.

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