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Published on 5/8/08
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Implicitly insulting and painfully vague, world music is a clunky appellation at best, an antibrand that hollers, “Sounds from an insignificant otherwhere: nerds only!” What’s so hard about identifying place names and styles, as Ian Nagoski does lavishly in Black Mirror’s liner notes? The first fruit of the Baltimorean recording artist, writer and record-store co-owner’s 14-year romance with 78rpm records from all over the earth luxuriates in the specific, but its 24 tracks flow like water across national and genre boundaries.
Not that the compilation doesn’t weave an intricate web or lack surprises: Nagoski simply sequences really well. On the subtly lascivious “Kamanagah,” Syrian-American violin virtuoso Naim Karakand re-creates a single-reed instrument’s snake-hypnotizing powers; the track would seem to have little in common with what follows, the relentlessly percussive, Thai classical ensemble piece “Phleeng Khuk, Phaat.” Regardless, the songs work beautifully together, the first two blows in the album’s extended bout with mundane expectations. It isn’t surprising, given Nagoski’s locale, that the comp also offers an intriguingly fractured capsule chronicle of the 20th-century immigrant experience. Like Karakand, the legendary rembetika singer Marika Papagika spent most of her life in New York. Her transcendently down-and-dirty “Smyrneiko Minore” provides the best introduction imaginable to Greece’s klezmer equivalent. Nagoski even finds a place for exemplary Anglo product, to the extent that Pipe Major Forsyth’s otherworldly “Mallorca” might get you to actually like bagpipe music.
—Rod Smith
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