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LP
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CREP 098LP
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Eight years almost to the day after releasing his unique re-interpretation album of his field recordings made in the late '90s in Tanzania, Kink Gong is back with another volume of bushmen madness. Here's what Kink Gong aka Laurent Jeanneau has to say about his end of millennium trip: "My experience in Tanzania is now over 20 years and most of the so-called remix was started in Tanzania and left un-finished, then eventually retouched in Vienna, Paris, Shanghai, Kunming, Dali or Vientiane. 20 years later I searched my Tanzanian files and rediscovered unfinished tracks which are being now refreshed on this new record. Back to the early days of the XXI century, when I lost my health trying to survive with the Hadzas, the last bushmen in northern Tanzania. In 1999 James Stephenson from NYC invited me to join his Hadzas friends. I would leave the bush to rest in a place with enough food and electricity and start to edit, loop and work on the original recordings, to trans-form them into organic abstract compositions, the only instrument I had recorded a lot with the Hadzas was the malimba and I bought different malimbas in Arusha to take back with me to Europe, I used either the original recordings or me playing malimbas on some tracks and applied some electronic treatment to it, at that time I used Roland synths for some tracks. The original recordings are related to scenes at night by the fire with the Hadzas, but also three different types of celebrations, 'Epeme Men' was recorded on a moonless night with men and women singing and dancing in complete darkness in Mangola, an Hadza camp. 'Irawk Drum Under the Rain' was recorded during daytime at a Multi ethnic gathering at the Franciscan Spanish catholic mission with a crowd dancing and singing under heavy rain while an IRAWK large (and wet) drum was being played, Northern Tanzania. 'Makonde Island' was recorded in southern Tanzania at the border with Mozambique and is a pure scene of trance taking place on an island where the Makonde fishermen off the coast of Mtwara, get wild, hitting plastic containers for the sound, drunk and stoned men and women are hysterically jumping and falling on each other, ending up with a few wounded. Once again, I'm responsible for this act of multicultural sabotage, but don't forget that you can always listen to the original recordings on the Kink Gong recs collection." --Laurent Jeanneau, Berlin 2023.
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CREP 085LP
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Kink Gong is back with his unique take and re-interpretation of the music he's been recording and documenting for years in the South East Asian highlands. Zomia Vol. 1 takes the conceptual idea of Zomia, proposed by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South East Asia (2009), to construct its very own mythological soundscape inspired by a semi-utopic region where state rules don't apply. Zomia might be (almost) gone but Kink Gong is keen keep its spirit alive by releasing a series of albums celebrating the region's quasi mythological features.
"Zomia is an idea, a concept that, not so long ago, there were two very distinct worlds in southeast Asia, the valley VS highland/hinterland, the civilization VS the primitive, paddy rice VS slash and burn agriculture, Buddhism VS Animism, fixed territory VS movement/migration, written system VS oral culture, the state VS anarchy, property VS squat, controlled population VS autonomy, bricks VS bamboo and wood and, at my level museumified traditional mainstream music VS real emotions/songs of devastated lives and/or gongs ceremonies with buffalo sacrifices, extreme heat in the valleys VS shade in the jungle. I could go on and on but let's not forget that Zomia is disappearing fast, if not altogether already. How many of the people I've recorded are still alive? As you might know, before composing new music from my own Zomian experience (from 2001 to 2014 in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China) I had to find those musicians, be able to communicate with them, record them as good as I could with very limited finances and gradually release a collection of 160 CDrs. It is very important for me to make sure you to listen to the fantastic original recordings before or after you've listened to this experimental reconstruction I called Zomia. Expect more volumes to come, this is my biggest source of inspiration, and the reason why I've been involved for years in constructing a mythological experimental musical Zomian soundscape." --Laurent Jeanneau, Berlin 2020
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Cassette
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SUC 010CS
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On Music Is Not A Copy, Kink Gong turns crystal pop into syrup musak, a skippy glitch digital re-configuration of Chinese popular music, sounding like a broken unrelenting CD player under Beijing's main underpass. There's no one else making music like this, be it destructive or celebratory -- dive in, never come back.
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2LP
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CREP 053LP
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Another unique document of Kink Gong's, aka Laurent Jeanneau, collection of surreal soundscapes of augmented field recordings, this time turning into his love/hate relationship with China into a mesmerizing soundscape of unclassifiable music. Jeanneau on Dian L: "Before becoming Kink Gong I had different names, one of my projects, designed by cultural circumstances in China at the beginning of the 21st century, was Dian Long ('electric dragon' in Chinese). I landed in Shanghai in 2000 in order to make music and recordings of whatever. Faced with the cruel tendency of modern China to reject tradition and embrace full on bling-bling culture, my option was to attack this music industry commercial flavor by destroying it. I had in my bag a faithful portable CD player who knew how to turn syrup into crystal. Later, reaching Yunnan in 2001, I discovered the reality away from the bling-bling of eastern towns and did a realistic soundscape of it."
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CD
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AKU 1006CD
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Psalmody, small bells, big cymbals, gongs and drums -- this puzzling collage of Tibetan Buddhist rites recordings is hypnotizing. It opens the way to the state of trance. The slight electronic arrangement reminds the listener that reality is not so far. The two twenty-minute tracks instantly convey an unknown and fascinating universe. Mantra chanting accelerates, horns become more insistent and a mystical atmosphere arises. With Tibetan Buddhism Trip, Akuphone starts to explore ritual and ceremonial music, here with a subtle mix of field recordings and electronic handlings. Over the years King Gong, aka Laurent Jeanneau, has specialized in the recording of ethnic minorities, particularly from South East Asia. He has recorded over 160 albums and his work is now largely well-known around the globe. An impressive collection allows him to manipulate, assemble, and reconstruct his field recordings in order to create new sound landscapes. Recorded in Tibet and Yunnan (China) between 2006 and 2013. Recomposed in Berlin in 2016. Includes unseen pictures.
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LP
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AKU 1006LP
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LP version. Psalmody, small bells, big cymbals, gongs and drums -- this puzzling collage of Tibetan Buddhist rites recordings is hypnotizing. It opens the way to the state of trance. The slight electronic arrangement reminds the listener that reality is not so far. The two twenty-minute tracks instantly convey an unknown and fascinating universe. Mantra chanting accelerates, horns become more insistent and a mystical atmosphere arises. With Tibetan Buddhism Trip, Akuphone starts to explore ritual and ceremonial music, here with a subtle mix of field recordings and electronic handlings. Over the years King Gong, aka Laurent Jeanneau, has specialized in the recording of ethnic minorities, particularly from South East Asia. He has recorded over 160 albums and his work is now largely well-known around the globe. An impressive collection allows him to manipulate, assemble, and reconstruct his field recordings in order to create new sound landscapes. Recorded in Tibet and Yunnan (China) between 2006 and 2013. Recomposed in Berlin in 2016. Includes insert with unseen pictures and download card including a live performance in Bristol.
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LP
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CREP 017LP
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Another unique document of Laurent Jeanneau aka Kink Gong's electronic deconstructions, this time stepping away from his usual Southeast Asia area of expertise and releasing some of his first reinterpretations and field recordings made in the late '90s in Tanzania, Africa. "December 1999, Tanzania. I had an appointment with James Stephenson an American friend from the 90s in NYC, he used to skip the American winter every year to be with the Hadzas bushmen and other Tanzanians tribes in Tanzania. Whilst there, James and I lost completely track of time and did not give a shit about what day Christmas was, or New Years for that matter -- with the majority of the planet knowing they were heading into the 21st Century. At some point end of December or early January 2000(?) we asked a group of Hadzas we were hanging out with, 'what's the date today?' None understood the question but one Hadza who had been sent to school in the early 70s answered that we must be in 1975! Tanzania in 1999/2000, this intense trip away from all the millennium bullshit celebrations. I gathered all kinds of sounds, not only music, that expresses proximity and that was the first time I decided I was going to remix those raw recordings into a decent soundscape. It was also the first time I was pleased with the result -- to go into a direction of redefining world music, away from the commercial clichés. This has been the direction I've taken and focused on ever since with the recomposing of my Asian recordings" --Laurent Jeanneau, Berlin, 2015. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Cover photography by James Stephenson. Limited to 500 copies.
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LP
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CREP 002LP
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2015 repress; originally release in 2011. Kink Gong aka Laurent Jeanneau is a field recording artist based in Dali, China. He spends his time recording ethnic minority music, mostly in Southeast Asia, and releasing the results on his own CDr label, Kink Gong Recordings, as well as occasionally contributing to Sublime Frequencies compilations. He also composes electronic music that includes and transforms those recordings. For Xinjiang, Jeanneau based his soundscape around the recordings he made on a 2009 trip to the frontier region of Northern China, Xinjiang. Spreading from Mongolia to Afghanistan, it is the biggest Chinese province. From various locally made recordings, including Kazakh Dongbra jams, Uyghur Dotar riffs, and various regional radio interferences, Jeanneau constructed a melting pot of ethnic-related weirdness packed with mind-blowing virtuoso recordings. Simple and beautiful, this music makes people fall into visionary reality. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering by Rashad Becker. All tracks were recorded on location in the ILI prefecture, Xinjiang province, China, by Laurent Jeanneau.
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