Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Transnational Media Thread
Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? (No, anime doesn't count, that shit has been thoroughly mainstreamed and globalised by now.)
For my part, I've been enjoying quite a lot of Mande music as of late (basically the folk musical tradition of Mali that began with the 13th century Mali empire). They developed a highly polyphonic music style independently from Western traditions, passed down through the centuries by hereditary griot storytellers; their music was modernised in the 1970s, fusing quite a lot with other styles. One of my favourite artists to play in this tradition is Toumani Diabate, a ridiculously prolific musician who specialises in the kora, a 21-stringed instrument that falls somewhere between a lute and a harp. Here is a particularly nice example of traditional kora music from him, and here and here are examples of some of the fusion he has produced. I find there's an exceptionally atmospheric, almost mystical sound to a lot of this music I can't get enough of.
When it comes to art, traditional Song Dynasty handscroll paintings are just incredible. Yes, I am continuing my recent trend of Sinoposting, deal with it. They were painted on these massive pieces of silk meant to be slowly unravelled from right to left, revealing different parts of the painting as it went along. Probably the most famous one in existence is Zhang Zeduan's impossibly detailed 12th century Along The River During The Qingming Festival, depicting the commotion in the Song capital Kaifeng during the Tomb Sweeping Day. Other art in this vein is the extremely fluent 13th century Nine Dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing by Ma Yuan, and Water Map by Ma Yuan, a uniquely liminal painting focusing on the rendition of water textures. (For Water Map, here are all the panels in the handscroll presented individually; I can't find it in the University of Chicago's archive of scrolls, and the one on Wikimedia is so large that it's capable of causing your browser to stall, and zooms in too much).
EDIT: A funny detail in the Nine Dragons scroll is the overabundance of Emperor Qianlong's massive seals and even poems throughout the body of the painting. While it's actually desirable to place seals on paintings - in fact Chinese paintings often leave spaces for stamps for collectors to leave their mark, with seals being a sign of history and provenance, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and Qianlong was unfortunately a prolific art connoisseur who had no sense of taste himself. I'm pretty sure I've heard him called "Stamp Demon" before in Chinese.
Hope I have something for every need!
I've been on a bit of a roll listening to gamelan lately (going to Singapore had something to do with it).
Your post reminded me of a kora jazz piece that someone introduced me to in grad school.
A Coptic Christian hymn that allegedly preserves some Ancient Egyptian musical forms. I can't speak to the accuracy of this claim, but it does sound somewhat different from other Oriental Orthodox fare I've heard.
Some Tech Indians doing very fun raga/rock fusion, from the same person who introduced me to kora jazz.
A stupidly catchy Moroccan song that properly clusters with Gangnam Style.
You said no anime, but maybe non-anime Japanese material is fair game? I rather like some of Shiina Ringo's songs.
I liked this Finnish Civil War era propaganda song, courtesy of none other than Sibelius. Also, the Soviet Armenian anthem is among my favourites.
The PRC's implicit cultural policy has evolved from overwhelming minority cultures to mining them for colour a while back. Some good things come of this, like this appropriation of a Thai-adjacent people's choral tradition for dark techno game BGM. The original, incidentally, sounds like this.
That is a good list.
Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two. It's such an utterly alien sound and it even still gets played as court music in Yogyakarta, here's a pretty good example of what it's like. Indonesia generally has a lot of very fascinating regionalised culture, much of which doesn’t get exported.
There's also other musical traditions in Southeast Asia that stem from a similar root of "bronze gong culture", such as the piphat of Thailand, Laos, Burma, etc and the kulintang of the Philippines and Borneo. All worth checking out in my opinion.
How was Singapore, by the way?
Saved this one. West African fusion pretty much never fails to grab me.
As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.
It's not all too common to see modern Mainland Chinese media mentioned in forums, so you get extra points for that. Been getting into a good amount of Chinese music too myself; there's a surprising amount of fantastic media from China that goes virtually unnoticed like the underground Beijing and Wuhan punk/post-punk scenes. RE-TROS is a particular favourite of mine, here and here are two songs of theirs.
There's been a lot of posts here about Mainland China's lack of global cultural appeal and why this is the case; I've been meaning to make a post in the Fun Thread detailing some excellent Mainland Chinese media that I think people should check out (for example the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 20th century works of ink-wash animation are beautiful in a distinctly Chinese way), but I'm lazy. The sheer amount of important media properties that are only culturally relevant in China and receives no traction outside of that sphere is staggering.
Sorry for the late response! I had a lot going on and it kind of fell by the wayside.
I see! I was vaguely aware there were different styles, but never succeeded at finding good videos where you could actually see the players play.
My first introduction to Gamelan actually came from a 1993 video game soundtrack, which had several Gamelan-inspired songs going with its more generally Austronesian flavour.
Long story, but I enjoyed it a lot. Contra what everyone had been saying, there was easily enough to do for 10 days, even though I didn't manage to get out to Malaysia (I got close to one day but Shuttle Tebrau tickets sold out just as I was fighting the website, and the locals scared me off the other route by talking about 3h immigration queues). The food was great, highlights included climbing into the Labrador AMTB battery (was that your rec originally? It seems like it was open to tourists for a while but now it's just a ruin sitting in a patch of forest) and the NUS Gamelan club's weekly jam session (seemingly open to all). At the Asian Civilisations Museum, they had a special exhibit on games. I hyperfixated on the design of the Cherki cards I saw there and went on a wild goose chase to try to get a set, only to find that nobody in SG sold them anymore; in the end one of the local friends ordered it online from an Indonesian supplier.
Shiina Ringo is not particularly obscure, just popular with a very different crowd from the usual ACG circuit. The JAGATARA album is fun, listening to it now. You should check out other Shiina Ringo songs (ex., ex.) as well, if you don't know them yet.
I unfortunately didn't vibe with the RE-TROS songs you linked, but they remind me a little bit of this German techno(?) album.
In terms of more mainstream mainland songs I know, there's a lot of TV singing competition vocal fireworks stuff some of which is pretty good, e.g. Zhou Shen. For a while, Youtube would also shove songs by Lexie Liu in my face every so often, some of which are relatively catchy. The one I linked stayed in my memory for its fairly authentic use of European crazy girl woo as source material.
A decent Taiwanese song that was linked to me. I also enjoy this A-Mei depresso.
Lastly, let me shill this Hungarian duo I got to see live a while back. They self-identify as jazz, but it's really more some sort of jazzy techno with vaguely Japanese melodic influences.
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