Nomad Codes

consistently rewarding compilations in years. The cuts range from 130-bpm Macedonian fiddle jaunts to Puerto Rican Christmas tunes, from Abyssinian religious chants to ominous Japanese court music, from down-and-dirty klezmer to the psychedelic minimalism of a Javanese “new song.” The instruments include Ukrainian sleigh bells, Sardinian triple pipes, Vietnamese moon lutes, and Ethiopian one-string violins. Though some of these tunes were little more than entertaining ephemera for the folks who made them, Conte’s choices sound like masterworks today, a profound and playful artistry lurking beneath their alien vernaculars.
    Falling in love with these tunes can be dangerous—one risks both the politically dubious spell of exotica and the postmodern heresy of recognizing universal emotions in these distant sonic subjects. But when I hear Smyrna’s Rita Abatzi sing a mournful cafe dirge over spare instrumentation worthy of Joy Division, or the Swedish master Eric Sahlström play an airy, bittersweet strain on his medieval-era keyed fiddle, or Trinidad’s Lord Invader rail with vindictive mirth against “hooliganism” over the exuberant clarinet in his “Old Time Cat-O’-Nine,” I hear the basic beats of the human heart.
    That’s not to deny the bizarre shit herein. Sardinia’s Efisio Melis pulls a Rahsaan Roland Kirk on his triple pipe: while a drone cycles miraculously without a breath-stop, his hyperactive pastoral dance builds to a chaotic cluster of insanely trilling birds. Master Manahar Barve’s “Gungru Tarang” is a simple Indian folk tune played on harmonium and violin, but the melody is echoed by suspended clusters of differently tuned bells that sound like astral cloudbursts or the resonating sighs of sylphs. And the strangest cut doesn’t come from the jungles of Borneo or the steppes of inner Asia, but from France. On “Jabadao de Quimper,” the Bretagne duo Les Freres Sciallour plays a squealing folkmetal leprechaun jam on their eerie little druid pipes.
    Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction leeched the aura from art, an aura that in indigenous music is nothing less than the lived spirit of passing time. Before recording (or musical notation), even the oldest musical forms were contemporary or not at all. The magical glue that unifies The Secret Museum ’s otherwise disparate recordings is the afterimage of that aural aura, of the moment when technological reproduction and the commodity form had just begun to capture and irreparably reconfigure the evanescent flux of musical memory. Only the most smug technophiles would deny the autumnal tone this poaching lends these cuts, a melancholy deepened by the knowledge that nearly all of these musicians must be dead, and most of their lifeworlds severely eclipsed.
    But false nostalgia is a sucker’s game, and it’s mushy-minded to interpret the greasy fingerprints of colonialism that gum up these cuts as signs of tyranny and loss. After all, in the hands on non-Western musicians, imperialist flotsam like violins, clarinets, Christian choruses, and pump organs offer opportunities for syncretic mutation, from the unmistakably African polyphony of Nigeria’s Eleja Choir to the flattened bridge used by a Rajahstani violinist to allow for drones in “Jat Song.” Even though the harmonium’s lack of micro tones does violence to Indian modes (and pissed off purists in its day), this Victorian contraption had become, by the time Professor Narayanrao Vyas recorded his ecstatic hymn to Krishna’s mom, one of India’s most definitive popular instruments.
    Folk music has never been pure; its creative mutations, cannibalizations, and cross-cultural thefts make up its living continuity as much as the conservative retention of rhythms and tunes. Certainly “Kapirigna,” a manic Afro-Portuguese/Sinhalese street romp recorded in Ceylon, is as “authentic” as it is scrambled. But what about “Naidasay Toy Pusoc,” a Spanish-tango-inflected Filipino tune recorded in L.A. by a Visayan Islands duo using the newly invented dobro? Beats me.
    I just keep coming back to that spooky technological aura, the snap crackle pop of weathered 78s that defines early recordings the way washed-out videotape defines ’70s sitcoms. Today, computerized signalprocessing is getting pretty good at remastering these old platters. But one man’s noise is another man’s message, and though the rarest of Conte’s cuts were initially “more noise than