Taiwan Silk & Strings

Album review

Initiated by the English label Arc Music and selected by Simon Broughton, editor in chief of the magazine Songlines, the Musical Explorers series endeavors to put back on track the recordings of great sound seekers, who illustrate their passion for distant music or the fruit of their ethnomusicological work. This volume gathers recordings made in Taipei in 1973, by Deben Bhattacharya, a self-taught producer of Bengali descent, who notably worked for the BBC. Starting from 1949, Taiwan is led by military man and Chinese statesman Chiang Kai-shek, who baptized the island ‘Republic of China’ in order to counter Mao Zedong’s communist China. If, under his reign, this republic is just like a dictatorship, it won’t be subjected to as violent an ideological indoctrination as what happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The many Chinese artists who came to Taiwan have been able to preserve traditions which, on the continent, have been disputed, rewritten or annihilated. The subject of the title of this compilation is the silk used to manufacture the strings of some instruments. The delicate resonances of the pipa and yueqin (types of lutes) and of the guzheng (a zither) dominate the first three pieces. Later, you’ll discover the performances of more orchestrated music, in which bamboo flutes, cymbals and gongs broaden the sonic field and draw less intimate landscapes. You’ll also find, accompanied by Chinese instruments and sung by a chorus, a dance melody from the Amis, an aboriginal people who inhabited the island before the arrival of the Chinese. Finally, the volume ends on the solo of a sheng, a spectacular bamboo mouth-blown organ. It’s an authentic and exotic trip through space and time. © BM/Qobuz