V/A - Ethnic Minority Music of Northwest Xinjiang, China
Laurent Jeanneau and Shi Tanding have returned from the northwest corner of Chinas Xinjiang province with an amazing batch of recordings collected during the weeks leading up to the volatile Uyghur uprising of 2009. Armed with their trusty audio gear, the couple was set on getting married and recording various styles of regional ethnic music near the Chinese border with Kazakhstan. However, the local authorities suspected that the pair had other intentions, shadowing and interrogating them wherever they went. Their marriage in Shi Tandings home town of Ili would have to wait for another time (the marriage documents were delayed in processing deep within the Chinese bureaucracy) but the recordings, preserved here, display several magnificent and unique varieties of traditional Islamic folk music with traces of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish influences heard throughout. The players are Kazakh, Uyghur, Kirgiz and Mongol Erut musicians performing on a wide array of local stringed instruments including topchar, komuz, rushtar, rawab and tchang. One amazing example is Kurmanjiang Zaccharia, a Kazakh string virtuoso, whose lightning-fast fingers blaze up and down the neck of his two-stringed dongbra. Another is an epic 10-minute vocal muqam performed by a trio of Uyghur musicians on satar, tambur and dotar. Also featured is a Kazakh singing-style called Ay Ikesse performed by Aken (improvising poet-singers utilizing dongbra accompaniment), Kirgiz songs sung in the Manas style and played on the komuz, and Mongol Erut bai boor den instrumental pieces. The CD comes with a 16-page full-color booklet featuring photos of the musicians and informative liner notes chronicling the journey, instruments and styles documented, and background information on the performers by Laurent Jeanneau. - Sublime Frequencies.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
