Download: Hisham Mayet – Sublime Frequencies Mix
It’s a crap metaphor, I know, but sometimes it’s fun to imagine western pop-culture as a vain, self-obsessed teenager with a limited attention span. Every few years, it surfaces from its bed long enough to actually notice the rest of the world. Uncertain whether to re-enrol in college or to get a proper job, it packs a rucksack and heads off abroad to find itself. A sort of musical gap-year…
We’re going through one of those phases right now: in a mirror image of the post-punk period, today’s musical landscape is littered with a zillion ‘ethnic’ influences, from Damon Albarn’s adventures in Chinese opera to Franz Ferdinand’s aborted attempt to board the Africa Express via M.I.A’s global goulash of 21st century pop. Whilst most artists are embracing these influences in a genuine spirit of musical exploration you still can’t help but feel the occasional twinge of cynicism. When Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer describe their music as “Upper West Side Soweto” or “Middle Eastern-Psych-Snap-Gospel” it sometimes feels uncomfortably reductive, as if entire cultures – someone else’s lives and dreams – have been compressed down into a convenient marketing tag that sprinkles exotic fairy-dust over the otherwise familiar and hum-drum. Cheap air-travel and the internet offer the illusion of a world that’s now so tiny you can store it on your hard-drive, but our relationship with the rest of the planet seems as one-sided as ever: you can only Google “Soukous” if you already know it exists. Thank God, then, for Sublime Frequencies.
Sublime Frequencies is a Seattle-based label founded in 2003 by Hisham Mayet, Alan Bishop and his brother Richard. It specialises in raw, street-level field-recordings, mostly from North Africa, Asia and the Middle Eastern. Bar-bands, back-alley buskers, short-wave broadcasts, deranged Indonesian folk-pop, Kurdish cassette-booth fodder, Cambodian freak-beat, Tuareg guitar-heroes…you name it: SF like to get up-close and dirty, releasing garishly-packaged runs of mind-bogglingly brilliant music that has fallen through the cracks.
The label’s back-catalogue is breath-taking in its variety: from the brutal, gunshot-splattered bashment of Proibidão C.V – Forbidden Gang Funk from Rio de Janeiro to the bonkers 150bpm sun-frazzled selection of pre-invasion Iraqi pop on the Choubi! Choubi comp. Check SF’s series of African desert-blues records, Guitars From Agadez, or the label’s album of insect electronica – field-recordings of Asian cicadas that resemble malfunctioning laptops – or their North Korean Commie Funk CD, which flips from cheesy DX7-backed power-ballads to Eurovision-style propaganda sing-along’s: it’s a Kim Jong-worshipping jolly-up for all the family!
“SF’s methodology is deliberately contrary and counter-intuitive, allowing their operational aesthetic to remain elusive and untarnished by clueless corporate copycats.”
SF’s methodology is deliberately contrary and counter-intuitive, allowing their operational asthetic to remain elusive and untarnished by clueless corporate copycats. The label is fiercely independent, staffed by an international network of volunteers who work guerilla-style, unimpressed by fashion and far from dry acedemic research, corporate sponsorship or tasteful boutique imprints. Self-financed, low volume runs of high quality material sell through before internet piracy becomes an issue. Their back-catalogue veers from lavish gatefolds with detailed sleeve-notes to random collage-style CDs sourced from local radio-stations, found casettes and live recordings and films of street performers. Their preference, however, is for vinyl. “It’s more of a risk and more expensive to make,” says Alan Bishop, “but these days it seems to be manageable. Our aim is to someday have every release on vinyl. Perhaps we’ll even do them all on cassette too.”
Stream: Omar Souleyman – Dabke 2001
Sublime Frequencies spun out of Sun City Girls, an Arizona free-rock group formed in ’82 by the Bishop Brothers and the late, much-missed Charles Gocher. SCG were a delirious mash-up of free-form jazz, noise, spoken-word and middle-Eastern mysticism, often performed in bizarre ritual costumes. They are hugely repected – no, revered – from the sub-underground upwards. Gang Gang Dance’s Josh Diamond is a big fan of both the label and the band, telling FACT: “Sun City Girls were making neo-world-tribal-ethnic-eastern-psychedelic-outsider weird shit since before Gang Gang wet its first diapers.”
Sublime Frequencies’ Radio Morocco compilation, recorded during a North African trek to Essaouira on the Atlantic coast, was a defining moment. Alan Bishop explains: “Without realising it, I was working on future SF projects as early as 1983 in Morocco when I recorded/edited the Radio Morocco sequence. Radio Palestine was done in 1985, the first three Indonesian releases are from 1989, and some others are from the ‘90s. Sun City Girls was utilising some of the same material too and, by traveling to many international locales throughout the past 25 years, all of these projects seemed to blend together.” Two decades later, Radio Morocco sounds as delightfully non-linear as ever: a hiss-smeared collage that seems to arbitrarily jump-cut between different moments in time and space, allowing the listener a glimpse of the incredible breadth and diversity of Arab pop culture.