Nomad Codes

visit to Indonesia: Radio Java is a surreal fever dream of spliced commercial broadcasts; Night Recordings from Bali features field recordings of raw and giddy village gamelan; and Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra Vol. 1 culls the choicest cuts from their collection of sometimes nameless street-side cassettes, and which includes at least one tune that the Girls have covered, with more passion, as a single. The jewel in the batch is Nat Pwe: Burma’s Festival of Spirit Soul , an hour and a half DVD devoted to Burma’s nats: godlike spirits of the dead who take possession of transvestite mediums, consume liquor and cigarettes, demand fistfuls of cash, and grant boons.
    The Bishop brothers hope that Sublime Frequencies will fill a gap in what Alan calls “international recordings,” presenting unusual documents with a passionate informality rather that the clinical dissections of Smithsonian/Folkways or the high-tech fetish of lots of world fusions. “It doesn’t have to be funded,” says Alan. “You don’t have to go to school to learn how to record or to learn how to interpret a foreign culture or bring it back and spin it for someone. You don’t need to have five hundred microphones, you don’t need to gather up these people for recording sessions and pay them a thousand dollars a piece. As far as I’m concerned, its open season, and you record what you want to record.”
    “It’s disappearing too,” adds Rick. “It’s good to get it while you can.”

    By the standards of multicultural propriety that shape the discourse of “world music,” the Sun City Girls are, well, rather crude. Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra Vol. 1 , for example, offers only vague credits and no compensation to the original artists. Alan insists he tried to track down the publishers, to no avail, and he adds there is no money in it anyway. “When it starts selling like fucking Outkast I’ll fly to Medan and start handing out Benjamins to anyone who looks like these guys.”
    More disturbing is the absence of the prose and packaging that usually mediate international recordings. The Nat Pwe DVD comes with a short bibliography and some brief explanation, but the film itself offers no informative voice-over. Combined with some very long takes, the lack of an anthropological filter is uncomfortable, invoking the raw bafflement and delirious boredom that travelers taste when they find themselves confronting something beyond their ken. This confrontation is key to the Sun City Girls. Theirs is an ethnographic surrealism that stalks the marvelous, using the encounter with confounding and unusual human practices as a neuron-pumping portal into the outside. Their surrealism can be coarse, even prurient, and calls to mind the Mondo Cane world of international shockumentaries that were popular in the 1960s. Interspersed with the Nat Pwe footage, for example, Rick has included phantasmagoric clips of snake handlers, drunks, toothless kids, merrygo-round beasts, and lots of disarmingly cute girls. Occasionally the camera’s gaze will rest on faces whose return stares suggest a smoldering hostility, a resentful recognition of recording’s fundamental theft.
    However “problematic,” the Sun City Girls’ relationship to third world music culture is an extension their own dark romanticism of travel. “We’re always looking for the end of the line,” Alan says. Most tourists seek otherness, of course. But in the words of Peter Lamborn Wilson, tourism deconstructs difference while true travelers experience it. Tourists (and many consumers of “world music”) buy prefab images of the exotic, but travelers fall in love—or become entranced. Without a doubt, such enchantments run the risk of Orientalism. But there are many babies in that bath water. How many of us become armchair Orientalists when the headphones are on?
    During one of our chats, Alan invited me to take a turn at the gamelan. I crouched down, and, fumbling about, asked him how to play it. “My philosophy is that there is no set way to play any instruments,” he told me. “Obviously there’s a sense of respect for how to play something like the gamelan. But to give in to that respect you don’t do right by tradition. Tradition is not about slavish imitation. The last thing I want to see is a bunch of fucking white guys playing Javanese gamelan proper. It’s disrespectful.”
    The term struck me as odd. Many people, after all, would consider the Girls’