"Pieces performed on bamboo instruments from around the world."

David Hopkins
WERGO Schallplatten GmbH - WERGO SM 1082-2 281 082-2
1991

Track	Title	Kanji	Length	Artist
1	Bulu Perindu		05'03
	Ancient resident of Earth, bamboo predates people by some 100 to 200 million years, so: Flutes came before people! One bamboo culm leaning against another rubbed holes the wind whispered through; Birds pursuing bugs or building nests drilled other 'notes' in other internodes... Long afterwards the human race came wandering down the path of spontaneous mutation and built its villages beside the groves. Bamboo, moaning in the windy midnight, made melodies that seemed played by spirit fingers, strange lips... a ghost orchestra of ancestors come to mumble down the long tube of dreams. Someone then, inspired by the seemingly haphazard processes of nature, experimented opening holes in adjacent internodes of the same culm. This practice of making these 'bulu perindu' or weeping bamboos has persisted in Malacca and on some of the Oceanic islands (Guadalcanal, Maewo, New Britain). In this region of the world human music is often played upon rows or bundles of bamboo pipes and stamping tubes of bamboo struck against stones or on the ground.
2	First Season, The		06'46
	From North Korea to Indonesia lies a sweep of latitudes equaling that from the North Pole to Greece. Roughly half of the world's population lives there. Music is a central part of their lives and bamboo is central to that music. Bamboo's eminence is ancient, recorded in the oldest known classification of instruments. Over four thousand years ago, under the emperor Shun, instruments were divided into eight materials, each with a corresponding cardinal point of the compass, a season of the year and an element of nature represented by one of the eight trigrams of the I Ching. Bamboo was associated with the east, the direction of the rising sun, which linked it naturally with Spring, when culms rise with all the thrusting energy of the sun itself.
3	O Zone, The		01'58
	In the garden, by the fountain, I breathed into the void...
4	Arc-en-ciel		02'56
	The mouth bow is one example, another being the clapped-together boomerangs of the Australian aborigine, of a weapon being turned to less deadly purpose.
5	Ancestral Voices		08'37
	The third largest island on Earth, New Guinea shares between its two modern political halves, a traditional culture as diverse and colourful as its famous birds of paradise. Many tribes make many musics. In the Madang and Middle Sepik areas the tones and overtones of traverse flutes are said not only to evoke the spirit world, but to be the cries of the spirits themselves. The largest of these flutes - up to three meters long - are invariably played in pairs (sometimes regarded as male and female), but collectively given the name of one particular ancestor. These 'spirit flutes' are often accompanied by large slit-drums (garamut), which are also given an ancestral name. The garamut of New Guinea are made from a hollowed tree-trunk, but in other parts of Oceania slit-drums are also made of bamboo.
6	Mountain Pasture		03'43
	The flute has always been the lightweight companion of wanderers, wind-whipped shepherds and homeless gypsies playing to a lonely immensity of stars. Flutes are certainly more of the mountain and open pasture than of the street or living-room and when they are played in more civilised surroundings often seem a sound in exile, from another world or another, more inward dimension - from cosmic rather than merely social strata of our being.
7	Ba Mbuti		04'21
	Deep in the cool shade of the Ituri forest, central Africa, dwell the huntergatherers we call Pygmy, but for whom the Bantu term is Ba Mbuti. While racially, culturally and geographically distant from the Yanomami of Brazil or the Penan of Sarawak, these 'little' people share in common with tropical forest dwellers around the globe a love and respect for their sylvan world which, it can only be hoped, does something to counter, in terms of global'Gaian' energy, the destruction of the great rain forests by us 'big' people.
8	Bamb-oi-oi-oing		02'04
	The little ideophone known to the English speaker by the misnomer Jew's Harp, is widespread throughout the world. The non-European versions are often made of bamboo, for example, the 'subing' or 'kinaban' of the Hanunoo, Philippines, who employ it in courtship.
9	Bambu Dreaming		01'46
	When the first Europeans set foot in Australia two centuries ago, they encountered a people whose lineage dated unbroken back to the dawn of mankind itself- an encounter which the aboriginal Australian has had cause to regret ever since! These people of the Dreamtime played an instrument which seemed to resonate with the vibration of the Earth and recall the very morning of creation. The white man called it 'didjeridu' (from one of the rhythmic phrases employed), but many tribal names exist for this end-blown trumpet including yiraki, magu, Ihambilbilk, etc. It is also known as 'bambu', and indeed, although the instrument is usually made from a wooden branch, which has been conveniently hollowed-out by the white ant!, bamboo is sometimes used in the regions of Australia where it flourishes.
10	Amerindia		15'41
	As with the Australian aborigine, the indigenous people of the Americas have had no great cause to celebrate their 'discovery' by Europeans some five hundred years ago. Since the time of the early conquistadores, contact with the white man has heralded extinction for the American 'Indian' on both continents. Imported disease, slavery, forced conversion to an alien religion, murder by sword and bullet has reduced once proud and populous tribes to a mere remnant of acculturated and demoralised beggars, herded into human zoos to become objects of anthropological study or tourist attraction, or in the case of some forest-dwellers, left to the mercy of ruthless loggers and prospectors. Unless world opinion (that's you and me!) can persuade governments and development agencies to change their policies towards these "progress hindering minorities", then when we are sipping our last drop of drinkable water and breathing our last lungful of pure air, these people will have already vanished!
11	Culmination		04'46
	While bamboo is not a native to Europe, it has proven itself a hardy colonist and has successfully thrust its culms up into unexpected skies! Perhaps on the remote western islands, which seem, until now, to have escaped the consequences of excess, it is still possible to hear the grass, but surely it is right, where we have the means and wherewithal to examine and exploit the very real potential of bamboo, that we should most be listening...