What lies within the modern third world city is, however, never predictable and seemingly always a makeshift improvisation on the collision of ideas. Since the beginning of the age of reproduction it seems that the most apt manner of tapping into this collision is via music. And this has been best surmised by the Sublime Frequencies catalogue. Be warned: SF is not a 'Let's Go fill in the blank' approach to a territory; this is the here and now of a place, where the difference between 'territory' and 'place' can be seen as the difference between fiction and reality.
Alan Bishop, perhaps best known as one third of the freak statesmen Sun City Girls, acts as field recordist/curator of the Sublime Frequencies collection. With the recent release of Radio Algeria, SF has now published 29 CD's and DVD's that map Mr. Bishop's globetrotting over the last 20+ years. The discs themselves act as much as an aid in defining the particularities of the music of the regions that he has documented as they elaborate on how improbable it is to succeed in pigeonholing one particular sound into territorial bounds.
Thus, Mr. Bishop's vast array of recordings taken directly from AM/FM stations, as well as field recordings from the streets, suggests that the relationship between borders and culture was nothing more than a colonialist dream. And the ramifications of colonialism can certainly be heard here on Radio Algeria. Over the course of 11 tracks this disc smears together Berber pop, Andalusian orchestral, Traditional Islamic, Roots Rai, as well as an assortment of other Sub-Saharan and Arabic musical traditions that defy the country's territorial boundaries.
Also, the strong residual remnants of French pop are heard throughout, as one would expect from a country that remains predominantly French speaking. Radio Algeria is thus the sort of unintentional commentary on the western lie that is multiculturalism; that is of course unless one includes the occasional Eastern flourish in the odd American hip hop sample.
The strongest moments in the Sublime Frequencies catalogue are perhaps when Mr. Bishop disconnects the DAT recorder from the radio and hits the streets with mic in hand. There, the novelty of what made 'world music' such a flash in the pan in the era leading up to the internet falls on deaf ears and what we are left with is the documentation of moments in time.
Sadly, there are no such moments on Radio Algeria. But the audio quality of Mr. Bishop's radio extractions are impeccable, although it would have benefited this compilation immensely if he would have included more of the daily jock-talk and local advertising that creates a time/place set and a context for wonder to run ramped.
In sum, if you find yourself staring at this disc at your local record shop it will only do you good to pick it up. What the Sublime Frequencies records contain that is inherently lacking in most other musics today is indeed the very essence of why we have always created and listened to music: it is a document of ideas and a whispering from a specific moment in time.
For the very best examples of this, however, one should seek out Cambodian Cassette Archives (SF 11), Bush Taxi Mali (SF 12), the stellar 2-disc Radio India (SF 14) or, of course, the most bizarre SF release of all, Radio Pyongyang (SF 22). With this catalogue it can finally be said that there was never any such thing as 'World Music', only the musics of time and place.
