THE WINDOW IS OPEN

today’s radio show: special guest Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic for The New Yorker. info & google-oracular screenshot here.

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in other news, Dr Auratheft follows up his excellent Doabi Gypsies mix with a new one: The Gypsy Trail Revisited, a nice soundtrack to the whirled music discussion at Wayne’s World.

Auratheft writes: ” I just want to show – in sound – that identity is a problematic and ideological discourse. And it’s dangerous to think there’s something like a Judeo-Christian Foundation of Europe. There are many roots and routes, tracks and trails, narratives and stories, texts and contexts. Let’s make our own atlas, folks. This is what we share. Or expressed in sound and music: listen & learn.”

all this talk of identity makes me think on the following Charles Simic poem, from The World Doesn’t End:

simicpoem

 

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There’s a gorgeous, gentle album which fits into these discussions — apparently I wasn’t the only one who brought it to Auratheft’s attention after hearing Doabi Gypsies. ‘Imagined’ by ney player Kudsi Erguner, the full title is: Flamenco & Musique Soufi Ottoman: L’Orient de l’Occident: Hommage à Ibn Arabi, Sufi de Andalucia.

أبن عربي

L’Orient de l’Occident – El Alba de la Unión

orientliner

(my scanner put in those waves, it must be as heat-fatigued as i am)

8 thoughts on “THE WINDOW IS OPEN”

  1. Anyone else slightly uneasy about the way the term “Gypsy” is thrown around here? Should we discuss context here? Or Etymology? In E. Europe that term has a very different..err…’tone’ than say, in the States. And Gypsy would seem to erroneously indicate Egypt. So who, or what are we talking about here, from a musical perspective?

    I loved the Doaba mix btw, Doc. But, as a person of Czech-Roma decent, it’s a tough call on this one. In the interest of full disclosure, I call my friends “mongs” sometimes. Which also isn’t very nice.

    Dope mix!!!!

    URL.

  2. good points Urly. it is a little weird. i assume Auratheft is tapping into a loose idea of gypsy as mobile identity (his map; the Latcho Drom notion, etc). but you are indeed right that the term signifies quite differently & sensitively depending on where one is!! i no longer have any idea what ‘gypsy’ means to most Americans.
    (when I think of gypsy, i think of roma shantytowns outside of Spanish cities and all the ways mainstream Spanish society renders them invisible.)

  3. i guess it depends on whom you ask. for a while i found myself simply substituting ‘roma’ for ‘gypsy’ when i wanted to describe that loose social formation that tends to be described in these ways. it was brought to my attn, tho, that such substituting serves as hegemonic in its own ways (not all ‘gypsies’ are ‘roma’). of course, this search for the proper term for what is hardly a single people (is there any such thing?) brings us back to auratheft’s well-raised concerns re: identity //

    that poem says it well

    so does auratheft’s other “exotic,” “post-euro” mix title: “nomads and monades”
    http://siebethissen.blogspot.com/2006/11/nomads-monades-tales-of-oneness.html

    & so does mouse on mars’ idiology —

    what qualities does the one have…

  4. yep mr. rupture, exactly. I was in Granada recently and witnessed that very ‘invisibility’ you speak of. It seems the term gypsy is another floating signifier head without a body, conjuring up images entirely dependent on context. the socio-logic discussion could go on and on. but as far as the msical side of the identiry, i think it needs to be elaborated on, instead of getting lost in some stereo(typical) field of “wandering street musician” jive. there’s far more substance to the music represented here, and I think the umbrella term ‘gypsy’ just does the music very little justice. i want to know more about the specific musical genealogy(s) at work here. ya mean?

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