Gamelan Theory

The Weekly Wes Whine

This week I continue to whine about MySpace.

Regular visitors to this blog know that I like the music and the music videos. I am especially fond of out-of-the-way world music. I noticed that the only easy way to put music on my MySpace site was to get it from MySpace itself.

OK. First of all, would it hurt the management at MySpace to make the list of all genres immediately accessible when you are ready to search for music? Is it necessary for these puppy-killers to put the full list into a box you access only after making an initial inquiry? Or does the sadistic rush derived from knowing that we all have to make that extra step essential to maintaining their proper sado-masochistic balance?

Secondly, let's glance at the list, shall we?


WHAT THE HELL?

I admit, sometimes I'm looking for Balinese gamelan music, and I'm so picky I'm not prepared to settle for Javanese gamelan. Especially Northern Javanese. But I'm not so crazy as to expect to see a genre of Balinese-but-not-Javanese-gamelan on MySpace music.

And I don't! Instead, we get Screamo? Shoegaze? Acousmatic-slash-Tape music? Two categories of trance, both called trance?

Melodramatic popular song? That's gotta be a joke. That and hyphy. Resurrection of HiFi?

And through it all, nothing that fully takes in world music. Oh sure, Latin, african, afro, Chinese, J(apanese), K(orean), German, if you like pop. But no place to put the gamelan.

MySpace hates me, and they hate my music.

Gamelan Revealed

Video Find of the Day

I fell in love with gamelan music when I was living out of my '69 Rambler in the 80s. I had a Radio Shack knockoff of a Walkman and a handful of discount cassette tapes for all my entertainment needs. One of them had gamelan music. I liked to try to imagine dances to it. I thought it might look something like this, which is from elibris, who has many beautiful videos of performances like this one.



I had much more trouble imagining the musicians playing the instruments. The liner notes said hammers were used. But what did the things hammered look like? Now with this next video, my find of the day, I can see. I especially enjoyed seeing the part where it looks like a guy is playing ashtrays. Look for that starting at 1 minute 59 seconds into the video.