CDs from Malaysia
Did you know there is an experimental music scene in Malaysia? It’s pretty small still, but there are two labels that are putting out things on CD fairly regularly. The most active is Herbal International run by Goh Lee Kwang, but the Xing-Wu label has also put several titles as well. Both labels seem really keen to release European artists at the moment, especially ones from France. In the most recent batch from Herbal are a double CD by Jean-Luc Guionnet, a collaborative disc by Eric La Casa and Cédric Peyronnet, and a reissue of the second Beequeen album. Beequeen are a Dutch duo and create really nice ambient textures with minimal organic rhythms and “Time Waits for No One” is one of their better early works. Cédric Peyronnet is better known as toy.bizarre and like his collaborator Eric La Casa is known for working field recordings into lovely compositions. Their duet together is entitled “La Creuse” and finds them mapping a particular area in central France. Eric La Casa was previously in a trio called Afflux, and one of the other members of this group was Jean-Luc Guionnet. On his double CD “Non-Organic Bias” he presents three long works. They focus on the organ which he plays in a very experimental way exploiting lone tones and silences with great dynamic effect. These works would have sounded at home in Deutsche Grammophon’s Avant-Garde series of LPs. Quite a different facet of Jean-Luc’s work is heard on the CD “Le Bruit Du Toit” where he plays saxophone. This album released by Xing-Wu is a duet with original Fushitsusha drummer Seijiro Murayama. Recorded at a temple in Japan, the two improvisations reveal a delicate attention to timbre and close listening to each other. The third member of Afflux. Eric Cordier, is represented on another Xing-Wu disc called “Dispositif: Canal Saint Martin“. Recorded in collaboration with Emmanuel Mieville, this disc takes another approach to field recordings as it is a real time composition made by placing 30 microphones around the Paris city hall and manipulating them via laptop triggered ’sonic objects’. Although not French, Michael Northam and Seijiro Murayama met in France and Switzerland and slowly developed the album “Moriendo Renascor“. A meeting of acousmatic composter and free improviser has resulted in a finely detailed meditation on small sounds and drones. But that is not all from Xing-Wu as we also got the one release they have done featuring only Malaysian musicians. “Shàng” presents the three artists who I believe to be behind the label. Each presents a very different work. Tham Kar Mun is very minimal with sudden outbursts of sound and Yandsen presents solo improvised acoustic guitar. However for me, the best track here is the 26 minute “Funeral” by Yeoh Yin Pin. Based on a recording of a Chinese Taoist funeral ceremony, the sounds here are just magical and reason enough to own this disc.