*~* A Weekly Radio Show of International Music *~* 3WBC 94.1 FM Sunday 5 - 7 pm ALBUM REVIEW. Album: Australia: Songs of the Aborigines and Traditional Music of Papua, New Guinea Musician: The Aboriginal singers go uncredited but a few of the Papua New Guineans are named. The Australian sections were recorded by Wolfgang Laade, a Professor of Ethnomusicology from the University of Zurich. The Institute of Papua New Guinea produced the rest. Label: Lyrichord 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, Go back to the front page. See one of Gaisberg's playlists. See Gaisberg's Tempting Links page. The fonts in the title image are called Wet Napkin and Bretonscrawl Type. Find them here.