Before Sublime Frequencies began their plunge into the gritty and forgotten corners of global music, there was Pat Conte, a curmudgeonly postal employee and WFMU DJ from Long Island with a basement full of 78s. In the '90s, he curated an impressive series of rather unusual compilations named after an enigmatic and semi-legendary collection of photographs published in the 1930s. This is the second volume in the well-deserved vinyl reissue of the series and it is everything I could hope for: an achievement made even more remarkable by the fact that Conte had never traveled further than Canada when it was originally issued.
Yazoo/Outernational
Given the absurd scope of this double-album (two decades, the entire world), it should come as no surprise that the material assembled is eclectic in the extreme.Conte did not get mired down in unifying themes or in-depth examinations of any particular culture. He just took all of his best finds from the period and put them on an album with some brief background information.It's an approach that works extremely well, as these songs are almost invariably excellent, surprising, or both.It is not often that a Puerto Rican Christmas song can gracefully appear in company with a devotional hymn to Krishna or an ode to the chastity of Kazakhstan's young women, but Conte's "kitchen sink" celebration of all things exotic and forgotten has an internal logic that suits the material just fine.Pat applied a similar approach to his cryptic and colorful liner notes, treating quotes from Charles Darwin, conductor Leopold Stokowski, some random Eskimo, and Pindar ("All things hateful to Zeus in the earth and sea tremble at the sound of music.") with equal gravity.
Conte's taste and judgment are pretty unerring throughout these 23 songs, as even the pieces that I didn't particularly like (a French bagpipe dance, for example) tended to be either compelling or unlike anything else that I have heard before.I found two string-based Greek pieces to be especially revelatory and haunting (even before I read their morbid descriptions): both A. Kostis's finger-picked tale of a school fire and Rita Abatzi's kanonaki lament about being buried and forgotten sound impossibly sad and remarkably contemporary.It is apparently not a big leap from 1930s Greece to current Eastern- and raga-tinged guitar music at all— and those two artists definitely didn't leave much room for any improvement.More importantly, I had absolutely no idea before last week that I would ever have any interest in Greek traditional music and now that I do, I suspect I will have a very frustrating time finding more of it (especially this good).It is difficult to understate how far ahead of the curve Conte was in his efforts to unearth amazing and hopelessly obscure music from the distant past and how brilliantly he succeeded.Anyone with a taste for the exotic and esoteric will find a lot to enjoy here, and probably even find at least one artist to become mildly (or unhealthily) obsessed by.
Pat devoted decades to dusty scavenging, endless archiving, and near-impossible research to realize this project and it shows.Zeus would not find this hateful.
Samples:
- Rita Abatzi, "Prepei Na Skeptetai Kaneis"
- Cuartetto Iberia, "Zacataque"
- A. Kostis, "Kaike Ena Sholio"
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