cos everybody hates a tourist
It's Her Factory has some thoughts on xenomania
Orientalism was at the back of my mind
The thing about Orientalism/xenomania/tourism, there's plenty to critique about it for sure, but it's better than
West-is-best-chauvinism/xenophobia/insularity, I'd have thought, on balance, at the end of the day...
talking of Orientalism: check out this dude Onra and his Chinoiseries -- beats made using samples from Chinese and Vietnamese vinyl crate-digged on a visit to Vietnam
Onra reminded me of Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers 1969 Canaxis project, which involved creating tape-loops out of Vietnamese traditional songs
in the piece there's a brief mention of Can (as in their "Ethnological Forgeries Series") but I didn't have the space to get into how Holger Czukay preempted Sublime Frequencies with “Persian Love” on his 1979 solo album Movies, based around a romantic duet he recorded off an Iranian "pop" station via short-wave....
or how the Canaxis/"Boat-Woman Song" idea probably was influenced by Stockhausen, whom Czuaky studied under... works like Telemusik, which combined electronic sounds with ethnic music and forged strange hybrids (the chants of Japanese monks merged with music from the Shipibo Indians of Amazonian Peru), or Hymnen, based around national anthems from all around the world....
which is basically the concept/method on this later Czukay piece, right, which is based around the anthem of the People's Republic of China?
oh there's loads more instances of Otherly-projecting tendencies in the past century of music... various currents in jazz and fusion (ECM, any number of examples there - Stephan Micus's unusual instruments, Oregon) to 90s ethnotechno (Transglobal Underground, Loop Guru) to Bill Laswellism to...
it's not all marginal-experimental dudes either, think the Sixties craze for Indian raga that influenced The Byrds and the Beatles... or composers like Debussy who was inspired by non-Western tonalities he encountered at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition
conversely, you then get actual denizens of "the Orient" who do the 4th World cosmopolitan thing themselves, otherizing the West and other parts of the Non-East globe too -- that's what a lot of YMO/Haruomi Hosono is about, as well aas obviously Ryuichi "Neo Geo" Sakomoto (who cited Debussy as one of his biggest influences)
clean forgot that Ryuichi did an album in 1985 actually called Esperanto . (Woebot's fave Sakomoto record as it happens)
finally found a vinyl copy of B-2 Unit this year