Digital Archeology and New Mythologies

Derek Beres

When I first heard Karsh Kale’s Realize in 2001, an aural gateway blew wide open in my ears. I had been familiar with prior East/West collaborations, most notably Canadian guitarist/producer Michael Brook’s epic work with qawwali great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as well as figures like Ravi Shankar recording with Yehudi Menuhin and Philip Glass, and Zakir Hussain’s finger tapping alongside John McLaughlin and Mickey Hart. Yet Kale’s album had an urban edge splintered with gorgeous strains of bansuri, sarangi and, obviously, tablas, the two-drum set that his name is synonymous with. The Asian Underground was burgeoning across the ocean, yet Realize was a horse of completely new colors. This record was the birth of what he himself dubbed Asian Massive, as well as the roots of my first book on international electronica and world mythology, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music.

The book focused on the people behind the scenes like that Massive movement, as well as Bill Laswell’s inimitable Tabla Beat Science, Barcelona’s groundbreaking flamenco hip-hoppers Ojos de Brujo, the unstoppable Polish dub-folk of Warsaw Village Band, and many others. During the three-and-a-half year journey that culminated in the writing of this book – as well as the nearly two-and-a-half since its publication – one theme kept and keeps appearing through all my interviews and research: the computer is the first world folk instrument.

Folk instrumentation has defined and been defined by geography. The sintir is the patented bass lute of Moroccan Gnawa music; the legend of sitars and sarangis grew from the Indian tradition; the djembe would be the inner and deep voice of African rhythm; the incredible tonal range of the pipa would put Chinese standards on the map; when bass became king in the studio, Jamaican dub was born. Instruments grew and evolved and were shared so that, over time, zithers like the santoor were remixed into the cimbalom when Indian became Hungarian folk, and ouds were transported around the Middle East for centuries before appearing in underground Manhattan night clubs by a wild Italian prodigy playing effervescent strings over house rhythms as dancers danced and screamed.

Soon after Global Beat Fusion I put forth my first mixed-CD, Moving Stillness, on a label in Australia, a country I’ve never been to. It included artists performing South Asian, African and Persian instruments, mixed by them and me in ProTools, and released on two continents a half-world apart. Two years later I produced a remix album of Malian bluesman Vieux Farka Toure, featuring eleven different producers that sampled songs from a record made in Niafunke, recycled ingeniously with thick layers of trumpets, congas and bass. Now a man that stepped into his small African studio with an acoustic guitar, a calabash player and a dream has an accompanying remake that he blasts as he drives around desert terrain. The checks I receive for my various employments, much like the music I listen to, comes from somewhere and ends up in my account, and then leaves nearly as quickly, often to my chagrin. This instrument plays many songs.

I was speaking with a good friend yesterday about how unfortunate it is that many people, when speaking about global politics and societies, begin with a form of negative theology: we need to end this, we must fix that, this must happen in order to … until the next order needs to be retooled and reconsidered. This form of psychology borders on neurosis, because the overall theology isn’t liberating, but imprisoning. It is to constantly consider what should be, rather than what is, and creates the need of dominating peoples and ideas rather than experiencing them. There are many faces and facets of globalism, and the amount of creative sharing and exploring is astounding.

I am fascinated by the mythological and sonic connections of cultures, unconscious and attempted. Long before the music-as-commerce mindset came to dominate our perception of sound, the ceremonial rituals of voice and instruments were a sort of cosmic salve between humans and communities. The Indian raga is an expression of attuning oneself to the cyclical rhythms of nature, assigning various scales and notes to different times of day. Pakistani qawwali, Iranian ghazals, Indian bhajans and Moroccan gnawa are all devotional song forms performed as a conduit between individual and universal. Today these sounds are being dropped into laptops and recreated anew for the modern temple: dance clubs. Of all of these dizzying soundtracks constantly created and recreated, the most interesting bilateral exchange occurred in nineteenth-century Jamaica, where a sudden group of Hindus were to influence the very roots of one of today’s most popular music forms: reggae. This story is one amazing microcosm of how cultures converge and reform.

Rastas, the non-religious community springing from social turmoil in Jamaica in the 1930s and ‘40s, was rooted in Ethiopian folklore and their king Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie I). Many defining images we now associate with Rastas did not develop in Africa, but rather through Indians arriving in 1845 to work at Halsie Hall, a Clarendon sugar plantation. They mingled with local blacks and quick bonds were formed. The infamous Jamaican spliff derived from the Hindu ganja (more commonly ganga), their word for cannabis sativa, and the emphasis many Rastas place on marijuana’s role in religion stems from the Hindu bhang, a ganja elixir (and, obviously, smoking the good herb). The popular term “collie” derives from Kali, Hinduism’s dark goddess, referred to as “Kali weed.” Indian Ayurvedic medicine mingled with local botany, and early Rastafarian Leonard Howell (the first man to develop a sustainable Rasta community when founding the Pinnacle in 1940), also went by the name Gangunguru Maragh, a play on Sanskrit. While the Rasta name Jah derives from the Old Testament, there is little doubt the Hindu chant Jai – used in ritual songs to shout “Jai Krishna, Jai Kali” and such – influenced the Jamaican word for their homegrown version of Brahma.

Perhaps the two most interesting cultural parallels are dreadlocks and liberation. Africans in Jamaica saw themselves bound by slave lords. Turning to the biblical tale of Sampson, whose locks grew long and matted while imprisoned, their new coiffures began. Dreadlocks were not a part of the original Rasta code, as they already had enough problems with law enforcement; Rastas were defined by long beards more than matted hair. The practice came from sadhus, Hindu mendicants that had grown hair in tight locks for centuries, often associated with the god Shiva. The basis of Rasta philosophy, redemption, also derived from Hindu philosophy, something Howell studied when reading about Mahatma Ghandi. The forced Christianity Africans were taught never offered any sense of the transcendent, of liberating oneself during life and not after it. So while enslaved Africans found solace in reinterpreting scripture, it was not until learning about karma and the cycles life of that Rastas applied this to their own situation. Upanashadic scriptures mingled with Biblical mythology and within decades Robert Marley remixed the song.

Our situation today is equally fascinating. Issues like war, genocide and human rights need to be constantly addressed. Yet these must not exclusively dominate the media. Underlying global artistic movements is a silent revolution that used to require oceans and years to embrace. This is not to imply that the cold keys of computers can replace the intimacy and necessity of human contact. Yet, within the unfolding and remixing of a global culture, musicians and producers are redefining modern identity through sound. If we were to travel back centuries and question the yogi what this was, he would have replied: Nada Brahma, everything connected through music. Pythagoras, who studied with such sages before developing his highly evolved mathematics and sciences, would have agreed. Today physicists and biologists hear the chords and melodies of microscopes as the fugue continues. Just as DNA is the process that human bodies wear life after lifetime, our songs survive and outlast us as well. When we embrace the sometimes uncertain – yet never unexciting – flow of this process, the sages would have only one word to utter: Samadhi.

Image: "Cosmic Tabla Delay Meditation" courtesy of whiterainbow via Flickr.