LAYA PROJECT- SIX COUNTRIES, THREE RELIGIONS, ONE OCEAN + ONE DISASTER = WHOLE LOTTA MUSIC

Even before the Boxing Day Tsunami hit the Indian Ocean in 2004 I knew something was wrong. I was lying in bed enjoying the moment in my house up near the Golden Triangle in Thailand. We had just moved into a larger house, you see, and so our bedroom was now on the second floor, balcony and all, ‘room with a view’ you might say. Suddenly a rumbling below shook me out of my reverie.

“That was an earthquake,” I told my wife.
“That’s not possible. Thailand doesn’t have earthquakes.”

‘They do now, either that or this house is falling down,” not an impossibility given the shoddy construction techniques that are commonplace in the Kingdom.

Assuming that people down South also felt the same quake- much stronger there than the measly 2.2 Richter rumble where I was- they should have been running for their lives… uphill. Because at that point there was still time to save oneself from the tsunami. No percussion wave can outrun the speed of sound, you see, but a fast jet can. I bet they will do just that next time, run for their lives.

By the time I turned on my TV an hour later it was too late. The wave had hit hard and the first reports were coming in. Phuket got blasted. Of course at that point even THEN there was still time for southern Indians to get out of harm’s way, since it would take several hours for a wave to travel that distance. Aceh on Sumatra in Indonesia was already history, of course, they Indonesia’s strictest of Muslims- and not coincidentally most westerly community- the first to go under the wave, something from which they have yet to fully recover. And the aftermath was brutal, some 230,000 killed, the worst affected countries being Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, in that order. Stronger earthquakes have been recorded, and stronger tsunamis, too, but none have wreaked more havoc on human populations. Though Thailand received much of the associated press (and aid), its death toll was relatively minor. But here’s the difference: its death toll was largely tourist, i.e. rich foreigners.

Fresh flowers love fresh ashes, of course, and good things can come out of the worst disasters. One of these was the Laya Project by EarthSync, a production company based in South India. Originally conceived as a world music ‘documentary’ of the disaster and the response to it, what resulted was a Baraka-like work of filmic art that tells stories with pictures, and consciously omits tear-jerking tabloid shots in favor of life-affirming images that refer to an open-ended future rather than a painfully punctured past. And it not only comes with soundtrack, in fact the soundtrack IS the film, or at least central to it. What better way to affirm life than through music? And ‘re-mixers’ have finally found their calling here, too. Thanks to Yotam Agam and Patrick Sebag, the original music has been respectfully enhanced for a quality listening experience, not butchered for the ‘mash-up’ tastes of surfers and tubers who spend more time interacting with a screen than they do with real life.

If these songs of six countries seem to evoke the Indian tradition over all others, there’s a reason for that, too. The Indian tradition pre-dates all other civilized and civilizing traditions in the region. Sanskrit is to the Thai language- and others- what Latin is to western languages. To this day the Indo-Malay ‘bahasas’ owe more of their vocabulary to ancient Sanskrit than they do to the Arabic of the Arabs to whom they owe their religion and cultural existence. But in spite of this common ancestral base, modern countries of the region are largely fragmented and even hostile to one another, religious fundamentals lost in the rush to fundamentalism, all in response to the overwhelming sweep of history.

And while the genetic roots of the region may be as diverse as East and West can be, the cultural nexus is similar, and these are the systems by which we operate. Both sides of the Indian ocean are a microcosm of this subconscious divide, Indo-Aryans on the sub-continent divided into Hindus and Muslims, Austro-Asians in the Southeast divided into Buddhists and Muslims, the result of historical and religious forces at work, social caste and godhead, one or many, face or faceless. When disaster strikes, many of these artificial divisions and unanswerable questions fade away. The Muslim scholars and the Buddhist priest chant together, and all parents are looking for their sons and daughters, and a return to a better life.

This is an area largely overlooked by Putumayo’s ‘groove & chill’ approach to world music. It’s not up to local traditions to adapt to our modern Western tastes; it’s up to us to adapt to theirs, or at least accept and appreciate them. If ethnomusicologists and ‘re-mixers’ can help this process along, then more power to them. What Earth Sync has accomplished here is no better or worse than what other unsung heroes have done elsewhere, not the least of which include companies like Sublime Frequencies and people like Laurent Jeanneau, scrounging the world’s outback for scraps of music that are as important as mitochondrial DNA in deciphering who we are and where we came from.

I’ve been to WOMADS and WOMEXES and music festivals all over the world, but nothing surpasses the night at the Sapa ‘love market’ in north Vietnam some fifteen years ago when I listened to two tribal Red Dzao lovers singing their hearts out- literally and antiphonally- getting the words and the rhythm just right… before the big plunge, before the tides of history make them forget. Speaking of tides, check out the Laya Project when you can, both film and music. It’ll do you good.

Thailand and Mississippi-- Tsunamis, Hurricanes, and Home

When the tsunami struck southern Thailand three years ago to this day, Christian Thais asked me, “Is this it, the Apocalypse?” That’s what I want to know. You tell me. I felt that one, too, the earthquake that is, hundreds of miles away up close to the Golden Triangle. I was lying in bed on the upper floor of a house we’d just moved into. I thought it was falling down. Then I turned on the news a couple of hours later. Of course, other countries got hit much worse, but they were not major tourist destinations. Thailand had less than five thousand casualties, while Indonesia had more than one hundred thousand, but Thailand got the movie. Indonesia got dried food. India and Sri Lanka both had far more casualties than Thailand, but Thailand got the sympathy vote. Thailand markets itself so aggressively, that sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just publicity. It’s doubtful that half of what is taught in Thai schools as history is accurate. Immigrated from Mongolia? Huh? Why, because the region is called ‘Altai’? O-kay. Nobody’s sure who ruled the historical kingdom of Nanchao, so Thais claimed that, too. It’s like the old SNL ‘liar’ character played by Jon Lovitt. “Yeah, that’s right…” The psychology section of a typical Thai bookstore is filled with books on marketing. I shit you not. “I’m OK, you’re OK?” Naaa… How about, “I’m rich, you’re not.” The local Big C supermarket in Chiang Rai goes by the textbook in its marketing ‘techniques’ designed to confuse the customer, get him lost, and make him overpay. They’re evil. They’re the only game in town. I don’t want to talk about last week’s elections.

Then the next year a swath of coastline from Mobile to Houston was removed from most maps, and even worse than that in New Orleans, which got something of a double-bypass ‘soulectomy’, unlike anything seen since the War of Northern Aggression. I watched that from a stool in my favorite watering hole back home by the triangle. Let’s clear the air right here right now- nobody could have prevented the Katrina disaster, short of moving the entire city. I’m no big fan of the Bushmaster, but calling ‘racism’ because of N’awlins is a little irresponsible. He IS sleeping with Connie after all. It’s true; I read it on the Internet. But everybody ‘down there’ always knew that the Big Easy was a disaster waiting to happen, just a little too big and a little too easy for its own good. Maybe the people actually straddling that river of denial didn’t know, or care to acknowledge it, but in Mississippi we all knew. N’awlins was where you went to get lost, where you went to die if nobody loved you any more, where you went to do things ungodly. Sometimes those things ungodly would find you whether you went looking for them or not, part of the Napoleanic Code of Injustice. Everybody was in on the corruption. It can’t go back like it was before. Everything’s different now. Everybody’s watching. New Orleans will be re-born better, if not bigger. Global warming? Apocalypse? Why Aceh, New Orleans, and Phuket, home to thousands of jihadis, junkies, and other assorted pragmatists? Eschatology is the starting point of religion, mortality sandwiches.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about home. This is America. This is Christmas Day. Channel 28 here has nothing but a fire burning on TV all day. Talk about reality TV! But that triggers memories, just like it’s supposed to. You can go home again. Maybe Thomas Wolfe can’t, but I can. I have to, to see what I missed. Many histories are possible. How do you know which path you took until you actually arrive somewhere? Everything is relative to the point of measurement. That’s what time travel is all about, experiencing the same place at different times, without necessarily having to travel the entire distance to get there. You’re only limited by speed and memory. You can do it in pure memory alone or you can actually get up off your butt and go there. The only question is: what home? Americans have no ‘home of birth’ the way Asians do, the way Latinos do, the way most of the traditional world does. In Thailand you never lose that; that piece of land is your claim to nationality. Without a house registration, you are nothing. Rents are low, btw. A few years ago all Thais had to go to their ‘birth home’ to vote, like Mary riding Joseph’s ass all the way to Bedlam, belly full with baby and the future of the world. Fortunately it was a bright clear night. Except for the Deep South, America knows little or nothing of this. Up north the kids grow up and move out west while the old folks move to Florida. Nobody’s left on the old block except the second-string team, the ones who wanted to go somewhere and be something but couldn’t break the pull of gravity.

Hub and spoke traditional systems still hold sway only in the old South, so maybe you move away then move back, on and on in some succession of tentative pokes at the outside world, testing its limits against your own, with some sort of ‘breakthrough’ more to be feared than welcomed. This is possible largely because most ‘outsiders’ don’t especially want to move there in the first place, though that’s changing. Little by little the restless mobile virtual America is taking over, allowing people the freedom to fail without being subject to ridicule ‘back home’, simply because there is nothing there. Killers go berserk to seize their moment of fame simply because that’s all there is left in a virtual world, a body count and ads sold. In Mississippi everybody still knows everybody, and you can go back and find your best friend still sitting in the same old comfy chair you left him in ten years ago, older Budweiser. This conveys a certain responsibility upon all parties involved, kinda’ like village Communism, rule by jealousy and judgment.

But that’s still the dark side. This is not N’awlins, long drowning in the swamp, choked on its French roots and its Spanish moss, and Mississippi’s maybe a little too close to home. That’s the hand I was dealt, after all, not the one I chose. I still love it, of course, but with the love of family, not the love of spouse. I’m not Asian, my wife keeps reminding me. I’m American, forever young and rebelliousness by definition. After many trial runs, Flagstaff was the home I chose, or at least the US ‘home base’. It’s a dry cold. After ten years of semi-residence, I still keep a mailbox and a storage unit and a contingent of safe havens and various unresolved projects. Welcome to my world. After many more geodesic meanderings and tentative pokes and partial penetrations of South America, the elliptical orbits began to center around some ‘strange attractor’ in Asia. This took the form of a little brown-haired brown-eyed girl that could figure out a way to be a pain in the butt to the statue of Lincoln, all the while propping him up with enough faith and courage to keep coming around for more, though not enough to ever feel totally fat and sassy. I stay hungry. Who really knows what ol’ Abe is doing when not looking honest for the tourists, anyway? Scratching that pain in his butt, probably.

Well, the girl and I tied knots, literally wrapped at the wrist in white twine, and that meant that Thailand was to be the home I inherited, albeit with conditions. Chaotic love keeps you in random orbits that only appear normal when averaged. Call it the ‘flutter-by’ effect, related to the inverse ‘squared squared’ law of love in chaos, in which gravitational love is felt in direct proportion to the square of the distance from the source, not the opposite as in classical physics. Any closer and you crash on the rocks of bankruptcy and dependence; any farther and you drift into the ether, attached only in memory. The moon is slowly drifting away, after all. We just tend not to notice. It looks to be the same size as the Sun. That will change. This is a quantum world, after all, contrary to common sense, where familiarity breeds contempt, and everything is the opposite of what it seems. Your beer-drinking good-time buddies are the people who hold you back and you rely on the kindness of strangers to accept you at face value, your own best face. Only a few friends transcend the ordinary back-slap of gratuitous condescension and become a surrogate family, still there when the old man’s long gone and old age is coming on. This is my America, positively Fourth Street. Every city’s got one.