*NOTE - this volume 1 of 2 - the other is located at:
HERE

For most of 2003, I lived in the northwestern-most province of China - officially known as Xinjiang : Uyghur Automomous Region....sometimes referred to by some as China's other, lesser known "Tibet" for situational parallels.
I'd recieved a generous grant to document the folk music (as opposed to the classical muqam music) of the Turkic muslim cultures traditionally native to the region - focusing mainly on the largest population: The Uyghurs, but also including the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz.

For this show, I was live-mixing right to your ears many of these field recordings, which while mostly consist of music, also include ambiences, regional pop & traditional sounds on cassettes & cd's I picked up - plus recordings of shortwave radio.

The field recorded music you hear was, with only a few exceptions, performed by common folk (farmers, carpenters, (incl. mystics and beggars)) demonstrating something that's very much a cultural part of everyday life. With east China's ever accellerating blitzkrieg development of it's claimed west though, these beautiful cultural traditions are going up in smoke fast.

The recordings were done with head-worn binaural microphones - in yurts, homes, under grape trellises, in mud brick courtyards, orchards and in the streets of oasis towns & villages in areas surrounding the expansive Taklamakan desert.
Several of these recordings - in purer yet more carefully curated form - will be released later this year on the fantastic Sublime Frequencies label. (!!!)

-Fausto (s of s&S)

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