Album: VA — Music of Nat Pwe — Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma) Vol. 3
Год/Year: 2007
Стиль/Style: Speed Gamelan
Страна/Country: Burma (Myanmar)
Формат/Format: MP3
Качество/Quality: CBR 192 kbps
Размер/Size: 90 MB (artwork included)
As somebody on the InterNat aptly remarked before: "Wild psychedelic speed gamelan for transvestite ghost brides." — My favorite SF release so far, and one of the best and most craziest things I've listened to in 2007.
Tracklist
01. Sein Moota / Kyaw Thet Aung: "Shwe Ku Ni Pwe Daw"
02. Bo Hein & Bo Mein: "Master of the Nine Cities"
03. Bobadin: "Di Kanar Manduit"
04. Bobadin: "Mother Jhan who curses the people"
05. Sein Moota / Kyaw Thet Aung: "Come to Taungbyone"
06. Nilar Lawin: "Ahmay Jhan"
07. Sein Moota: "Taungbyone Min Lay"
08. Sein Moota: "Pay Kyaw Chit Tae Doe"
09. Bobadin: "Business is better now because of the Nats"
10. Sein Moota: "Small Nat Celebration in our neighbourhood"
11. Bobadin: "Nat Pwe"
12. U Kyaw Nyunt / Yee Yee Thant: "Father Kyaw the Drunk Nat"
13. Maung Maw: "Yo-Yar Nat Pwe"
14. Nilar Lawin: "Kyame Nat Kadaw"
15. Kyaw Thet Aung: "Min Hnitpar Pwe Taw"
16. Nilan Lawin / Kyaw Thet Aung: "Khuni Nan Ka Kyaw"
62:12 min
Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma) Vol. 3
"Music of Nat Pwe"
2007
Sublime Frequencies, SF035
In Myanmar (Burma), many people believe in ghost spirits called NATs. These spirits are historical figures who met tragic or violent deaths. They are said to possess the power to assist or devastate the lives of those who recognize them. A PWE is a ceremony held to appease a Nat. Pwes are arranged daily throughout Myanmar for many purposes including the achievement of success in business, a happy marriage, or improving one's health. A Nat is summoned through a Kadaw; the flamboyant and charismatic master of ceremony dressed in elegant costume. The Kadaw is a spirit medium, singer, dancer, storyteller, and magician who exposes the crowd to a living incarnation of the Nat. Cash money is thrown and cigarettes and whiskey are hand delivered by the Kadaw to the willing faithful. Audience participants are often ecstatic, spontaneously launching into trance as the Nat spirit possesses their bodies while the melodically ornamental and thundering sound of the Nat Pwe orchestra plays on as perhaps the last great internationally unknown musical juggernaut existing anywhere. This collection of music documents the phenomenon known as the Nat Pwe orchestra. There is absolutely nothing like it anywhere else on earth. If you are looking for some music to groove to, soothe your mind, or relax to, this is NOT for you! This is some of the most jarring, intense, and maniacal music being created on earth today. Your head will be spinning amidst the cranked reverb and echo of the vocals as they swirl like locusts in a floating graveyard as the bells, cymbals, and tuned metal bars crash and spill down an endless staircase while the hand drums and Hsaing-Wang circle of rhythm pound the beat in and out of a million twists and turns until you’ve either had enough or you get with the program. Turn it up and submit. This is what it’s ALL about, schoolboy!
(sublimefrequencies.com)
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Another volume in Sublime Frequencies series of compilations documenting the amazing and mysterious music of Myanmar (aka Burma). The first volume was an intense barrage of manic Burmese pop, the second focused on guitar music of Myanmar, and this new volume is all about the Nat Pwe. You may remember the DVD on Sublime Frequencies from a while back, which visually documented various Nat Pwe's in Burma, and if you were like us, you were completely blown away, by not just the spectacle, but the amazing music as well. For those new to the Nat Pwe, Nats are ghost spirits, most often historical figures who met tragic ends, and who are believed to have the power to change lives, for better or for worse. So Pwe's are ceremonies designed to appease the Nats and occur on a daily basis, for almost any reason, health, good luck, weddings and new businesses, but like any powerful ceremony, they cam also be used for evil.
The festivals are amazing. Celebratory, wild and raucous, huge floats, giant phalluses, people throwing money and cigarettes, costumes and headdresses, lots of crossdressing, lots of drinking, folks going into trances... all to the strange and amazing strains of this fantastical music.
And it is fantastic, some of the wildest and most jubilant music we've heard. The root sounds are definitely Burmese, the percussion and the vocals will definitely sound familiar to fans of Burmese music, this is somehow even more manic and spirited. A dense assemblage of bells, cymbals, gongs, xylophones and drums drums drums. A gorgeously clattery percussive wonderland, dense and complex, with vocals that soar over the top, drenched in reverb. It's all acoustic, but it sounds so loud and incredibly intense. And beautiful. Hard to describe, as all great music is, it makes you want to dance, and trance out simultaneously, powerful, emotional and so wild and wonderful.
Compiled from numerous live recordings, and featuring many popular Burmese songs and many famous Burmese performers. As always, tons of liner notes, and amazing photos. And if this has at all piqued your interest, see if you can find a friend who's got that now out-of-print (bummer!) DVD, as the Nat Pwe's have to be seen to be believed!
(aquariusrecords.org)
* * * * *
I know we have a tendency to harp on about the Sublime Frequencies releases but it's not our fault that they just keep getting better and better is it? Last month it was the killer Thai Pop Spectacular that caught our ears, and this month we've been stopped in our tracks by this latest collection of music from Burma. Now Burma's no stranger to the news recently (unless of course you read The Sun) so it's nice to get a look in to some of the quirks of the culture rather than just have mixed messages thrust forth from varying sources. This particular disc goes into the rather curious culture revolving around ghost spirits or Nats, these Nats are the spirits of historical figures who met tragic or violent deaths and the Pwe is a ceremony to appease the Nat. Got that? Good because the music featured here is all taken from these Nat Pwes and recorded in live performances by the great (and omnipresent) Alan Bishop, a man who one day shall surely turn into a Nat. Played using a variety of acoustic instruments centred around a drum-circle; gongs, cymbals, bells, bamboo sticks, xylophone etc the sound of the music is almost like a pop take on the sound of the gamelan orchestra, with dreamy reverberating vocals washing over the most gorgeous cyclic percussive patterns. I've been quite taken aback by the absolute beauty of this material, a beauty that is hard to pin down but totally addictive, whether it's the wavering ghostly vocals or the insanely complex rhythms combined with harmony, it's a disc that stands close to the top of the Sublime Frequencies catalogue. Totally essential music...
(boomkat.com)
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I listened to this album for the first time on September 28th. Burma was in the headlines. “More deaths in Myanmar, and defiance”, said the New York Times. “Burma seals off key monasteries”, said the BBC. “Troops open fire in Rangoon reprisal”, said The Age. The Guardian had a rolling report on its newsblog: “Irrawaddy, which is back up again, reports that protesters were fired at in Rangoon’s Tamwee townships after being sealed in by a pincer movement. It also has a grim picture of blood-stained sandals abandoned on the street today.”
Then on the same blog there was a man in Rangoon, or Yangon, who told us that life around the area where he lived seemed normal. People were going about their everyday business. They weren’t running through the streets, trying to shield monks from thugs, or flattening themselves against the ground dodging bullets fired at them by their fellow Burmese. This is the side of Burma we don’t often hear about in the news and it’s the Burma that Sublime Frequencies gives us in its Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar CDs, a series that has now reached its third iteration.
On this compilation we’re listening to a religious festivity, the nat pwe, the fruit of a merger between old animism and the latecomer, Buddhism. The nat in nat pwe is a reference to the nat spirits, powerful supernatural creatures who attach themselves to places, families, natural forces, objects, or activities like travel or business. “Business is Better Now Because of the Nats”, claims a translation of one of this album’s song titles. The pwe is the ceremony through which the nats are summoned and asked to help, or at least not harm, the living. There are 37 greater nats and uncounted lesser ones. The king who decided on the exact number of greater nats was also the man who introduced Buddhism to his Bamar kingdom, which was roughly at the centre of what is now the broader part of Burma. His name was Anawratha. The introduction of a hierarchy was not only a clever religious move, making animism more conceptual and therefore closer to the Buddhism he wanted his people to adopt, it was also a good Machiavellian idea. Kingdoms thrive on hierarchies. It meant that dead kings could be incorporated into the list of 37 important nats, lending some of that beyond-the-grave gravitas to their living descendents.
A nat pwe is led by a nat kadaw, or gadaw, someone who has ceremonially married the spirit. Nat pwe are accompanied by musical groups known as hsiang waing. Those are what we’re listening to on Music of Nat Pwe.
Most of the instruments here are percussive. Gongs, drums, and xylophones bang around at the forefront of the songs. There’s also what sounds like an end-blown wind instrument of some kind. It has a febrile buzz, as if there’s a reed involved. The inlay refers to it as an “oboe”, and it does sound rather like an oboe, though more cantankerous and ludic than the western instrument, more like a cranky young bee.
All of the tracks feature singing, sometimes male, sometimes female. The inlay offers us some translations. “I am a nat khadaw and I am surrounded by all the nats!” sings a woman on “Kyama Nat Khadaw”. “There is no one who does not fear Mother Jhan!” they tell us on “Mother Jhan Who Curses People”, naming a bad-tempered nat, a “rough, bitter woman” who refuses to be pleasant. The nats, like the old Greek and Roman gods, come with character flaws. The nat Father Kyaw, the subject of three songs here, is a notorious drunk.
The compiler, Alan Bishop, calls the music “jarring and intense — orchestral bedlam blazing like a runaway freight train” and so the songs must sound when you see them live, but despite the piercing oboe-things and the clashing of gongs, the music on Music of Nat Pwe is sweet and catchy at heart, less jarring than the Isan music this label gave us in August on their Thai Country Groove compilation. “Mother Jhan Who Curses People” starts off with a screaming oboe but once the singer comes in the song begins to grow hooks. There’s a nice one in the chorus, something like, “Jhan bon” sung on an arching pair of notes, the first syllable going up and the second down.
Even the oboe-scream is catchy, in a shrill, winding way. It squiggles up and down as if it’s riding a rollercoaster along a strand of DNA. The lullaby “Tuangbyone Min Lay” is intriguing, like a Lata Mangeshkar romance track crossed with the sound of a western neoclassical minimalist composer experimenting with Balinese gongs. Songs are raced through with relish. The xylophone in “Business is Better Now Because of the Nats” moves at a skipping gallop and when the oboe comes in then the whole racket starts to remind me weirdly of a Hollywood musical, a big production number, with a call and response between the hero and the chorus. Sein Moota’s female singer rocks all over “Small Nat Celebration in Our Neighborhood”, and Muang Maw’s duet glide and shriek through “Yo-Yar Nat Pwe” with raucous joy.
The CD cannons forward like someone running downstairs off-balance, unwilling to stop because they’re afraid that they’ll fall over. It’s rowdy, happy music. If you haven’t listened to folk songs from this region before then Music of Nat Pwe is a good place to start, and if you’re already enamored of the first two Myanmar CDs or in love with the Thai ones, then this is a good place to continue on from.
(popmatters.com)
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