Amazon.co.uk Review
The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv represents a unique collection of rare folk recordings from around the world. It began over a century ago in September 1900, when a Thai song and dance group went to Berlin to perform and the musicologist Carl Stumpf decided to eternalise them with the aid of his Edison phonograph. His recordings became the basis for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, which was his ambitious attempt at creating a musical map of the world. Wergo's four-CD box is a distillation which, with its accompanying book, reflects both worlds beyond worlds and the heroism of their German explorers.
There's something oddly potent about the preserved echoes of long-dead people, and this box offers five riveting hours of such things. Like the last Japanese "goze", recorded in 1964: these blind women-minstrels, who accompanied themselves on the shamisen lute, formed a social institution in a region of Japan where eye-disease was endemic. Like the wax-cylinder recording of a Yamana initiation song on Tierra del Fuego in 1923, which was a rarity even then. Like the "twin-song" recorded on the shores of Lake Victoria: for the Bavuma tribe, twins represented a dangerous spell which had to be tamed by musical rituals, which the Roman Catholic church has since stamped out. But we also find remarkable continuity. The pan-pipe tradition of Latin America hasn't changed a jot in 70 years, nor has the Javanese gamelan. Sufi song in eastern Turkey today is indistinguishable from the 40-year-old version in this magic box; ditto rebab-playing in Cairo.
If you want to know how Jewish Yemenites sang in 1930, or how Tashkent fiddlers played in 1905, listen in. You can hear how oarsmen sang as they ploughed up and down the Yangtse river in 1912, and how fishermen sang on the rivers of Uganda. What did Cameronian flutes sound like in 1908? A flock of doves. Here is Mahatma Gandhi's favourite singer, and the Zulu diva Princess Magogo, plus clucking hens; here is how choirs once sang in Ibiza (spookily strange), and how Kosovars declaimed their epics half a century ago. Amazing stuff. --Michael Church
See all 27 tracks on this disc
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