radio free gak #19 - "Distance will be our prism"

At the 20 minute mark of this show, I thought that things were going weird.
At the 40 minute mark, I knew things were weird.
By the 60 minute mark, things were well past weird and were approaching bizarre.
By the end, it was certified loony.

I still need to sit down a properly listen to the entire episode, but when I set out to do my Asian Heritage Month show, I didn't expect it to transform into a piece of radio art, or a snapshot of my usual iTunes shuffle playlist. Nevertheless, the rough template of the show was pretty flexible, to the point I ditched the original opener with Ramasutra's classic song, before going straight from the Ensemble Georgika spooky choral number into two bits of radio collage from the Sublime Frequencies record label from what was captured on the frequencies heard in Thailand (which was a last minute addition) and Indonesia.

This would be the approximate twenty minute marker, from which we veered into more experimental-sounding roots music like the gamelan from Indonesia and whatever Khac Chi plays. By the time DJ Onra kicked in with Vietnamese-sampled songs, I was wondering if the plot was completely lost.

The Japanese sequence worked pretty well, though it was another perpendicular within the entire playlist. The Katamari set was something I had planned for a while, though I had hoped to do an entire episode to video game music (which is still doable but I have serious collecting to do to come up with 90 minutes that won't induce a sugar rush headache). The Lupin the 3rd sampler was a little clunky, mostly since I should have flipped the songs around so people unfamiliar with the theme could have heard it first from the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, then hear where the punky remix came from. But at this point, with my substitutions, I already knew I was approaching a time crunch, especially with the next major focus of the show yet to come.

Hopefully, not lost in density of all the different styles of music (remember: Asia = huge) was the look at Cambodian music of the 1960's and 1970's, which was inspired by a Metafilter thread on the pre-Khmer rouge scene. It's hard to convey the sense of what was lost without reading a lot into the stories of all the musicians involved, but hopefully, you don't find the music corny or sappy; knowing that most of those people were killed by a fearful regime just for singing innocent songs about life and love induces a tragic irony to their delightful songs. I had another two or three tracks lined up after Dengue Fever, who revive a good chunk of that history with a Californian jazz-rock approach. However, although I could've split the Cambodian spotlight onto another show, listening to too much of that music at once and without proper guidance would've been overwhelming to the already erratic flow. And somehow, the Dead Kennedys snuck in before that, along with Pizzicato 5 and Shonen Knife to provide a familiar beacon to the average Western listener.

Hopefully, in time, this episode proves to be a creeper, in that it'll resonate greater upon either repeated listening or allowing time to give separation to all my running around in the stuffy studio. (Summer is approaching and the fan in the back is already mandatory, though prone to making my papers fly.)

Playlist follows: