Wreckin’ Ball, by The Hub (review)

tural production in India (if not elsewhere ) will find something to cheer in the chapter entitled “Cassettesand Sociopolitical Movements.” Particularly noteworthy here is the only instance of pastiche (the cut and paste to which magnetic audiotape lends itself) mentioned in the entire book: a remarkable homemade cassette-copied and distributed widely throughout India, to the disdain of Indira Ghandi’s fascist-leaning Congress Party-that utilized “sardonic monologue”and sampled popular song lyrics about inflation, corruption, sugar prices and Ghandi’s alleged gender-reassignment surgery (p. 246). Cassette Cultureis a fascinating and painstakingly researched book that formulates complex responses to some difficult questions while avoiding obvious solutions. It tries to draw out to what extent cassette-basedIndian popular music has been historicallyand economically determined by technological “advances” before and after cassettes,whether cassettes promoted diversity or the homogenous fare so often associated with products of mass culture, and whether the availabilityof productive means to reach broader class constituencies led to a more progressive model of music production and distribution. As evidenced by the last several chapters, vital folk music and oppositional foment evolved in Indian culture partly due to the democratizing properties of a technology easily lent to personalization. Perhaps Cassette Culture’s strongest feature, nevertheless, is Manuel’s methodical and detailed statement of authorial motivation for writing the book; for this reason, it avoids many positivistic pretensions that trouble ethnographic scholarship,and on the basis of methodological candor alone it is recommendable to social scientists of all ideological persuasions. 1 COMPACTDISCS j ELSEWHERES Hal Rammel. Grafton,WI: Penumbra Music. 1994. Reviewed by Curtis E.A. Karnow, Landels, R i p 4 and Diamond, 350 Steuart Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.E-mail: . Hal has an electroacoustic sound palette he invented in 1991.He holds it in his left hand, almost like an Old Master holding a paint palette, and sort of plucks and rubs and blips and bloops with his right hand. The results are fed to an amplifier. A thousand variations emerge from this simple thing, most of them recognizably stringy-the stringyquality that is found notjust in plucked gut, but in the low slow screeching of a raw rubbed string, all the way to glassy water sounds and leaves rustling in the silentjungle. This is a far range, and from the album picture and the drunken, weaving, tubular sounds in one of the pieces, I think Rammel twists thin metal spikes in and around the strings, performing acupuncture on a clump of rubber bands. When Rammel says “elsewhere,”he means away from the machine and into the “inexhaustible detail of the natural world.” The sounds of this unmixed and unedited CD, recorded live, hearken to jungles, water and the interiors of old trees. A few of these pieces have that depth of endless detail, but many others are irritating on the surface, a flat sequence of squeaky twisty whistles and jagged metal saw sounds: teeth on steel and glass. I bow to the inventor, but I wish that someone who could integrate these ad lib episodes would take over. PLACES, TIMES AND PEOPLE David Borden. Silver Spring, MD: Cuneiform Records, 1994. Reviewed by Curtis E.A. Karnow, Landels, Ripley and Diamond, 350 Steuart Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.E-mail: . Borden uses his electronic keyboard in most of these pieces as a musical instrument . These days, that is odd. Sometimes the keyboard is a violin, sometimes brass, but most often Borden uses it as an electronic keyboard, with repetitive hints of Philip Glass,the circular sounds of early Terry Riley, and through most of it all, a sweet,rhythmic soft pouncing on the keys, ranging from piano, harpsichord and harp to a lowly growling timbre not seen in wood, a rhythmic constancy,a gentle sort of sound that I may have heard once maybe 20 years ago when 1 was in California, then. The first piece here has the date 1978in its title. . . . Borden unabashedly likes his people; his friends; Leon Kirchener, his teacher at Harvard; and country places west of Ithaca, New York. He writes with slow expansions here, massaging the slight variation and melodic repetition, as if he were...