Sublime Frequencies’ Vision of What World Music Means Today

Releases from the label have encouraged listeners to rethink dusty, academic notions of the genre.
Illustration of the founders of Sublime Frequencies
The founders of Sublime Frequencies see music as a series of ephemeral thrills.Illustration by Gaurab Thakali

In June, 1987, four men met at the Empress of Russia, a pub in London, and reinvented world music. Scholars and archivists had been documenting non-Western musical traditions for at least a century, as had, later, record labels such as Folkways and Nonesuch. Many technological innovations in film stock and sound recording had been spurred by the desire to record the cultural customs of the distant other. The men at the pub, all involved in the music business, were inspired by more modest aims. For one thing, they were frustrated that some record shops were filing the Nigerian guitarist King Sunny Adé, famous for his sparkly, ecstatic West African juju tunes, in the reggae section. At other shops, Adé’s records were tossed into the undifferentiated mass known as Rock/Pop, where they were overshadowed by ABBA. The men began sending stores materials for promoting artists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. World music was meant to make the consumer experience easier.

Their efforts paid off. In 1988, an article in Newsweek described world music as an unlikely fad, a harbinger of where pop was going, now that rock was, as one d.j. put it, “totally dead.” Yet “world music” took on icky connotations, as a too easy way to convey that you were a cultured and cosmopolitan listener. And it relied on a kind of legibility. Rock may have been dead, but marketing musicians to listeners in America and Europe still required Caetano Veloso to become “the Bob Dylan of Brazil” and Adé “the African Bob Marley.”

Throughout the eighties and nineties, listeners interested in a different version of world music began following the Sun City Girls, an experimental trio consisting of Charles Gocher and the brothers Richard and Alan Bishop. The group had formed in 1979, inspired in part by the Bishops’ Lebanese grandfather, who played the oud, an ancient stringed instrument of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. The Sun City Girls also drew on its members’ travels around the world, their songs sometimes seeming like dilettante approximations of West African guitar music or Southeast Asian pop.

In the early two-thousands, the Bishops and the sound recordist Hisham Mayet started the label Sublime Frequencies. It was initially a response to the reigning approach of ethnomusicology, which they perceived as prizing a kind of detached, academic expertise. Sublime Frequencies’ early releases revelled in zealous naïveté and randomness. Its CDs skirted legality—adherence to copyright would have made releasing many of the recordings, full of unknown performers, practically impossible. One early compilation comprised Cambodian pop songs culled from the Oakland public library. The most enchanting releases were audio collages, which focussed on the Middle East and Asia. “Radio Sumatra,” from 2005, features hectic snippets of FM-radio broadcasts from Indonesia, interspersing local news and performers with blasts of Western pop music. Sublime Frequencies’ most bizarre release is “Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia,” from 2004, which is essentially the unprocessed sounds of insects in Thailand, Burma, and Laos.

The label’s cavalier attitude toward intellectual property troubled some people. Asked about the fact that a Sumatran pop compilation lacked credits and attribution, Alan Bishop said, “When it starts selling like fucking Outkast, I’ll fly to Medan and start handing out Benjamins to anyone who looks like these guys.” The albums helped teach a certain kind of consumer—the adjectives “indie” and “hipster” are often used—how to hear the rest of the world differently. In a book on the label, from 2016, the musicologist Michael E. Veal and the journalist E. Tammy Kim called its approach “punk ethnography.”

Attempts to resist deep-rooted prejudices often result in slightly softer forms of prejudice. The ethnographers of the mid-century sought out indigenous sounds with a sort of patronizing benevolence, documenting vanishing forms of expression against a backdrop of colonization and exploitation. Although recording music rarely rises to the level of plunder, the power imbalance between the expert and the native subject was stark. Sublime Frequencies wanted to represent the scenes it was witnessing as a series of ephemeral thrills, not as museum pieces. Its works also acknowledged the inescapability of the West. During the two-thousands, Sublime Frequencies specialized in music from the so-called Axis of Evil, bringing texture to places like North Korea, Syria, and Iraq. Its most famous new releases featured Omar Souleyman, a Syrian wedding singer whose aggressively peppy, wailing electronic dance music found fans in Björk and Four Tet.

In recent years, Sublime Frequencies has returned to some of the touchstones that inspired its founders. In 2017, the label released “The Photographs of Charles Duvelle,” a book-and-two-CD set revisiting the work of the musicologist and photographer Duvelle with Disques Ocora, a French label devoted to documenting folkloric music from around the world. A few months ago, Sublime Frequencies released “Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road,” a book-and-four-disk collection recounting a 1955 trip that the musicologist and field recordist Deben Bhattacharya took from France to India.

Bhattacharya grew up in Benares, a member of a Bengali Brahman family. He was drawn to British art and culture, and moved to England, where he worked for the BBC as a radio producer. In the mid-fifties, he persuaded a record label to allow him to search for obscure music in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and India, and also in Bedouin camps whose travels intersected with his.

Bhattacharya was as inexperienced at recording as these musicians were at being recorded—you can hear singers clear their throats just before starting, cars driving by in the background. The result of Bhattacharya’s trip was an album titled “Music on the Desert Road” (1958). The Sublime Frequencies set includes unreleased recordings, as well as notes and images that Bhattacharya collected along the way. It’s an absorbing and intimate collection of sounds—funeral chants, poetry recitations, Bedouin love songs, performances of fiddles, spoons, clay-pot drums. One track, recorded on the border of Iraq and Jordan, consists of someone eking out a rhythm line from two coffee grinders. On “Ballad of the Shahlaan Family,” the singer, a man identified as Hazim, wails and moans for about ten minutes, trying to braid his voice around his bowed spike fiddle. At one point, through the din, you hear him cough, and I have never felt so present in a piece of music, so reminded of the performer’s physicality.

It’s impossible to listen to this—or many other Sublime Frequencies releases—and not think about legacies of strife and conquest. Bhattacharya’s travels compelled him to confront the limitations of fellowship, even as he and those he met on the road basked in the same gorgeous song. At a party in Baghdad, a Kurdish man named Mr. Mizoory asked him why it was so hard to befriend a European. “There is always something, a thin curtain between us however deep the friendship seems to be,” Mizoory said. Near the end of Bhattacharya’s travels, he recalls a man from his home town, once a rich landlord, who now happily devotes himself to teaching music. The teacher’s words come back to Bhattacharya: “I have lost everything. I have lost nothing.”

In the early two-thousands, I was looking for records in a cluttered, eight-story antique shop in Johannesburg. My listening habits were fairly provincial, informed largely by American traditions of soul, jazz, and rock. I wanted records that were unusual but didn’t stray too far from these formulas, such as those of the Nigerian artist Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat style. I took a stack of records home, and was initially disappointed that none of them sounded as I had hoped. But, during the next few years, I revisited these albums, and they provided a window into different versions of South African music, from swinging, sax-heavy township jive to bluesy, percussive Cape Town jazz, clunky anti-apartheid party raps, and all-white garage-rock bands dutifully covering Bob Dylan protest tunes.

I was in South Africa as a guest of the Red Bull Music Academy, an initiative of the energy-drink company. Red Bull had paid for young producers and d.j.s from around the world to come to Cape Town and attend a two-week academy. They went to lectures, made music with one another, and played at local clubs, where African variants on dance music, like Kwaito and Hiplife, dominated. Nobody was required to drink Red Bull. It seemed an odd way for a corporation to spend its money.

In time, thanks partly to the dissolution of the traditional music industry, Red Bull became a trusted patron of underground art, hosting academies throughout the world, funding radio stations, journalism, and teaching sessions. (I have appeared on its radio shows and written for its publications.) As a self-consciously global enterprise, the Red Bull Music Academy helped nurture a cosmopolitan ethos within dance music. In Red Bull’s wake, other Web radio and live-broadcast efforts emerged, such as NTS Radio and Boiler Room, which reshaped how musicians and fans around the world saw and heard one another. Meanwhile, the surging mainstream popularity of K-pop and Afrobeats has scrambled our sense of pop’s metropoles. When everyone is watching the same videos, and using the same software, no music remains truly regional.

Earlier this month, Red Bull announced that it would stop working with Yadastar, the marketing and consulting firm that built the music academy, and that the academy’s work would be winding down. Many people mourned its closing, suggesting how far attitudes have shifted from its inception, when it seemed like a tax scheme for an energy drink. These days, experimental art often views corporate largesse as necessary. The closing was a reminder that much of contemporary culture is produced by companies that don’t see themselves as archivists, or as custodians for the future. Art is just content, and it vanishes, too. ♦