Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics

Beyond any doubt the most wondrous and strange world-music compilation in recent memory, Black Mirror features two dozen selections culled from the collection of musician and archivist Ian Nagoski, who also celebrates his enthusiasm for the wilder shores of auditory experience as one of the owners of the True Vine Record Shop in Baltimore. “I paid approximately $125 for all of the recordings represented on this disc,” writes Nagoski in the CD booklet. “I never drove more than 30 minutes from my home.”

Shop locally, listen globally: All of the tracks have been digitized from 78rpm records produced between 1918 and 1955—pretty much the span between the birth of the recording era and the rise of rock & roll. There are marvels: “Kebyar Ding, I” was part of the first Balinese gamelan music to reach Western ears, including those of Colin McPhee, who would become gamelan’s great American advocate. (Nagoski’s detailed annotations read like a secret history of ethnography.) “Nam Nhi-Tu,” from 1930, is a sample of Vietnamese monochord performance using an instrument called the dan bau. And who can resist anything by Representatives of the Democratic Youth of Indonesia? Their late-1940s vocal piece “Djanger” offers apparent social commentary and a chorus of juxtaposed male and female voices.

The choices aren’t exclusively Asian: There are Carpathian wedding songs, uilleann piping from 1919 Brooklyn and Finnish Socialist poetry interpreted by a ten-year-old Swedish boy, accompanying himself on zither. Somehow, we think, the marketing department at Starbucks won’t be able to touch this.