ISSUE DATE: April 19, 2021
UPDATED: April 10, 2021 00:31 IST
This is a wonderful and generous collection of digitised tracks from all over the world, music recorded on 78rpm shellacs between the 1920s to the ’60s. Not the usual collectors’ fare of classical music maestros or jazz and blues numbers, Jonathan Ward’s Excavated Shellac is a mind-boggling array of local music traditions, vocalisms, instruments, ensembles, interludes and poetry which makes us think about sound, timbres, dissonance in new ways. Most of the musicians in this collection are from performing communities, peasants and working class, nomads and migrants, who crossed borders, carrying their instruments and singing, absorbing host traditions, adapting to technology. There are forms of lute, flute and drum as accompanying instruments, just as the guitar in its many forms is also ubiquitous. The range and throw of voices, piercing, raspy, broken, textured with sustain and sonic residue, is a revelation.