AUSTRALIA - Songs of the Aborigines and Music of Papua, New Guin

S t a r i n a r T o r r e n t s - M u s i c O f O u r A n c e s t o r s
Shamanic, Tribal, Ritual, Sacred and Indigenous Music

Australia - Songs of the Aborigines and Music of Papua, New Guinea (1963)


collector: Wolfgang Laade
originally released on LP as Lyrichord LLST-73318
recorded: 1963
possibly out of print


Field recordings by Wolfgang Laade, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the
University of Zurich, sponsored by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies.

Australia is a collection of thirty-six songs, twenty-nine of them Australian
and the last seven from Papua New Guinea. The music is arranged in blocks,
with all twenty-two of the tracks from the Cape York Peninsula gummed together
in a single droning chunk, followed by the livelier, noisier Elcho Island
section and then a varied sampling of Papua New Guineans. This is sound
practice if you are an ethnomusicologist, but to a casual listener it cries
out for some editorial interference.

Leaven Cape York with Elcho Island. Set those feathery, hesitant Cape voices
bouncing against the didjeridu and clap-sticks of the Djadbangari Dance Song
(track 23). Follow the shy tobacco-tin drumming of the Women's Wungka Dance
Song with track twenty-five's bold animal impersonations. Scatter the Papua
New Guinean songs through the rest. And please stop spelling Papua New Guinea
with a comma. It looks odd.

Here's a problem though: before you mixed the songs together you would first
have to change the sound quality of Wolfgang Laade's field recordings to match
the cleaner tones of the tracks from the Institute. The Cape York recordings
are particularly muddy, and even the superior pieces from Elcho would sit badly
next to, say, the Explorer series that Nonesuch is currently re-releasing.
One comes away with the impression that Lyrichord wanted simply to fill a disc
and snatched up whatever they could find without being too discriminating.
This is bourne out by the notes inside the CD cover, which look as if they
have been copied, unchanged, from two different sources with two different
styles of prose.

Australia: Songs of the Aborigines and Traditional Music of Papua, New Guinea
has its moments, and the last section is a handy, quick overview of a variety
of Papuan traditional music from the Daru area in the south, but, taken
as a whole, the compilation is interesting rather than enjoyable,

pay attention to:
23 - Djadbangari Dance Song 'East Wind'
24 - Karidyeri Dance Song
25 - Didjeridu Solo a Trial And a Crying Child
26 - Didjeridu Solo a Big Truck on the Mission
27 - Bunggul Dance Song 'Seagull'
28-29 - Bunggul Dance Song 'Spider'

There's Wiryi on yirdaki, considered to be best yirdaki player on Elcho Island at the time.

Quality: 256Kbps + cover


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