ANNOUNCEMENTS

Some proper new posts coming up within the next few days, honest.

In the meantime:

1. Deathblog Supplemental

Stereo Sanctity is very sad to hear of the death of Max Roach. Whilst I'm still too much of a jazz neophyte to attempt to do justice to his 60 year career spanning god knows how many musical epochs, I can at least testify that everything I've heard with him playing on it kicks ass, and that everything I've read suggests he was a really great guy too. I direct you toward the more authoritative obits on Destination:Out and Locust St. for further details (and music).

2. Cambodian Confusion

In the cause of making me look like slightly less of an idiot, I would like to draw attention to the really awesome Cambodian psyche / rock n' roll song which I played toward the start of my last radio show, and credited as "A2" by "Cambodian Rocks". I rather suspected this was a somewhat unlikely title for a record, and indeed subsequent investigation has led me to discover that Cambodian Rocks is in fact the title of a compilation album compiled by collector Paul Wheeler, which was put together straight from a bunch of tapes he picked up whilst travelling across Cambodia, and issued with no track info whatsoever. So it seems that when Shadoks came to put together their "Love, Peace and Poetry: Asian Psychedelic Music", from which I took the track, they ripped it straight from Wheeler's comp and simply called it "A2" cos it was the second song on side one.

There is a certain amount of confusion here, in that Wheeler's "Cambodian Rocks" was put out by a small and seemingly deliberately mysterious label called Parallel Worlds, and although it caused a bit of a stir amongst underground muso types, no further information, online or otherwise, was forthcoming. However, the "Cambodian Rocks" title has subsequently been hi-jacked/reappropriated by a label called Khmer Rocks, who have issued four volumes under that name. In their favour, they seem to be operating on a more well-informed/official basis, but on the other hand they also seem to be concentrating more on the slightly more staid pop music of Cambodia's bigger musical stars, rather than the fuzzed out "circle dance" craziness of the Parallel Worlds comp.

There is a certain crossover of tracks between the Parallel Worlds and Khmer Rocks comps however, and despite a few fragmentary/confused tracklistings I've found floating around the internet (the existence of two competing albums with the same name doesn't help!), thanks to this excellent post on Far Eastern Audio Review (what a great site, by the way), I'm pretty sure I have finally identified the song in question as "I'm So Shy", performed by Ros Sereysothea.

Got all that? - good.

Whichever way you look at it, the whole business is somewhat ethically and legally dubious, as highlighted by this brief but necessary blogpost. But, after the psyche geek/cultural tourist wrangling dies down, all we have left is the music, and the basic point is, IT IS UTTERLY RULE-ASS, and your chances of living as a happy human being are likely to be significantly increased by exposure to it. So here it is again:

Mp3 > Cambodian Rocks A2 / Ros Sereysothea - "I'm So Shy"

Labels: announcements, Cambodian Rocks, deathblog, jazz, Max Roach, Psychedelia, Ros Sereysothea