Exploring Gong Culture of Southeast Asia (SUB ROSA SR509) is a double CD collection (also available as a single LP of excerpts) by Japanese sound artist Yasuhiro Morinaga released on Sub Rosa. The title pretty much says what you need to know. Recorded throughout 2017 and 2018 in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, these recordings are divided into mainland and maritime discs and present a beautiful and hypnotic overview of “gong culture”—music played on metal gongs—throughout SE Asia. Gong music here is essentially rural, communal and collaborative. “As a music of rural people it honours and sacrifices those animals essential to farming and subsistence—buffalo and rooster—along with spirits, healing and harvesting, celebrations, crops and death.” (from David Toop’s introduction to the set). In Morinaga’s view this music, belonging as it does to ethnic minorities scattered throughout SE Asia, is beyond borders. “I began to dream of redrawing the cultural map of Asia using sound. The borders that exist between musical cultures are very different to borders established politically…Gong music perhaps presents us with a key to unlocking these hidden histories.” (from Morinaga’s liner notes).
There are other instruments and voices chanting and singing, providing a fuller picture of the musical life in these regions, but the gongs are the stars here. Close listening reveals remarkable differences in styles of playing, in tones produced by differing gong sizes and shapes, in melodic, harmonic and rhythmic contours from one group to the next; and yet at the same time connections can be felt and understood with repeated listening. The “Eagle Dance” from Luzon Island in the Philippines somehow sounds closer to the Cambodian Punong gong ensemble’s “Offering to the Spirits” than it does to other recordings from the Philippines.
Almost equally important to Morinaga is the act of field recording itself: the environmental sounds, the chatter of village life, the spaces in which these performances were recorded and how these affect the resonance of the gongs and the vibe of the performances. Some tracks (especially the “knobbed” or “nipple gongs”, such as those played by the Ede Bih of Vietnam) produce sustained trance-inducing overtones when played together. These overtones sound very different when bouncing off walls in an enclosed space than they do outside in the open air. The players seem to be taking advantage of such differences and the way complex overtone harmonics create their own beating patterns as the sound waves propagate, further compounding the rhythms of the actual striking of the gongs.
Yasuhiro Morinaga is an interesting character: ethnographer, field recordist, sound artist, composer, filmmaker and I’m sure many other things. We met several times in Japan where I lived for a five month residency in 2019. Like me he had an interest in early recording and the intertwining of ethnographic field work and recording technology and took me to meet a Japanese collector of antique Edison cylinders and talking machines that he wanted to work with for the score he was producing for a huge multi-media performance of Setan Jawa by acclaimed Indonesian director Garin Nugroho. I was introduced to Yasu through Moushumi Bhowmik, another interesting character (I seem to collect them). Moushumi runs the wonderful Travelling Archive in Kolkata, an archive of field recordings from throughout the Bengal regions of India and Bangladesh. Sublime Frequencies released an LP called The Travelling Archive of her work which I produced, and she introduced me to Deben Bhattacharya’s widow with whom I made the Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road book and 4CD set, also for Sublime Frequencies. Deben was another collector of field recordings similarly interested in documenting musical traditions that seemed to connect more to each other and to unfathomable histories than to specific regions. He released many LPs of his recordings alongside radio shows and documentaries—a huge influence on my own and Sublime Frequencies work in general.
It seemed logical that Yasu’s gong recordings should also come out on Sublime Frequencies. We discussed a possible two or three record set, we sequenced recordings and took it to the bigwigs at Sublime Frequencies (Full disclosure about this review, now that you are nearly done with it, I am friends with Yasu and am rather biased towards his work…). I have been with Sublime Frequencies since its inception and am good friends with co-owners Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet, so Yasu’s gong project seemed a slam dunk. But for some reason (Idiocy? Drunkenness? Brain aneurysms?) they passed on it. Perhaps the expense was daunting, and they HAD recently released an LP of music from Vietnam, Music of the Bahnar People from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, that had a bit of overlap with Morinaga’s recordings. I felt terrible. I believed I was a big record producer, making things happen…but nope. Then I thought of Sub Rosa, specifically because of the David Toop project Lost Shadows: In Defense of the Soul, an incredible and room-clearing collection of recordings from 1978 of Yanomami shamanism from the Amazon. I had no connections to Sub Rosa, but Yasu’s work spoke for itself and thankfully they saw fit to release it. And a good thing too. Morinaga’s work adds another chapter to the complex world of Asian gong culture and takes its rightful place with other fascinating releases—The Music of Indonesia series on Smithsonian Folkways (especially volume 12 Gongs and Vocal Music from Sumatra), David Blair Stiffler’s Music from the Mountain Provinces of the Philippines on Numerophon, the two volumes of Lyrichord’s Muranao Kakolitang: Philippine Gong Music, Playasound’s Gong’s Vietnam-Laos, Kink Gong’s beautiful LP Gongs of Cambodia and Laos. I’m sure there are more. It is another piece of the puzzle of humanity, strengthening the belief that there are ways to define culture and humanity beyond geo-political borders.
The package comes with detailed notes by Morinaga, an introduction by David Toop and lovely photography by Naoki Ishikawa, a mountaineer, adventurer, author and highly awarded photographer. These photos would have looked amazing in the LP-sized book I wanted to include with the LPs if my vision for its release on Sublime Frequencies had happened—CD packaging often leaves a bit to be desired, frankly.
If you want to go deeper into Morinaga’s work, he has a series of self-released CDs that include many more recordings from his archive. More info on his other projects can be found on his website.
Many thanks to Rob for this guest review. Rob is a member of Climax Golden Twins, who released an excellent new double album at the end of 2022.