Reminiscing on the sounds of Nepal…

I’ve just returned from a wonderful two week holiday in Nepal, and still have the jetlag and dodgy stomach to prove it.  I’d like to extend my thanks to the automated review-writing robot which has been filling in for me for the last two weeks – I think the results have been pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.  Couldn’t train it to post replies to all your comments on its posts (leaving comment moderation off may have been slightly risky, but seems to have worked out fine); otherwise it seems to have managed to maintain some semblance of business as usual round here.  I’ll melt it down now to provide the material for several dozen metal statues of Buddha to liven up this grey-looking place a little.

Before I went I decided on my return I would write something about Nepal’s musical culture.  Having been there I realise that this would be pretty impossible for me to begin to do it justice.  The demographics and topographics of the country mean that it is split into so many different ethnic groups each with their own local folk traditions.  Add to this the strong influence from neighbours to the north (Tibet) and south (India), and the position is muddied yet further.  Hence this is to be by no means an authoritative discourse on Nepali music!

The Nepali folk groups I saw in Kathmandu used tabla, accordion, wooden flute, funny little violins and tambourine; sometimes women would sing over the top in vocals sodden with reverb and at stratospheric pitch.  These are the same vocals you would hear drifting out of open doors all over the country from tinny radios, which somehow added greatly to the effect (the Sublime Frequencies Harmika Yab Yum compilation, while brilliant, doesn’t accord with my experience of what the locals were tuning in to).  And these were the same vocals you would hear from the local music video channels – three minute cut-price Bollywood, in which young women would wag their fingers furiously at their straying husbands. 

You would find it hard to walk down the street in Pokhara without hearing the strains of the Buddhist mantra “Om Mani Padme Hom” blaring from a Tibetan refugee’s craft shop.  The mantra is repeated 108 times (an auspicious number; I’ve never heard the word “auspicious” used as frequently as I have done over the last two weeks) over what became an increasingly tedious new age backing track.  Chanted prayers were de rigeur around the vast temple at Boudha; thankfully they were entirely a capella.  One Tibetan musical instrument (well, meditation aid would be more accurate) which did take my fancy was the ubiquitous singing bowl, which when rubbed with a stick builds a loud ringing drone like a little metal Buddha Machine.

I came across some of the Tharu tribe in the Terai, who as well as having developed complete immunity to malaria (no-one appears to have worked out how, I would have thought this would have been a priority for someone) have a neat line in musical performance (pictured above).  The men of the tribe have a brilliant ritual which involves co-ordinated fighting with sticks; all the more impressive when the power failed half-way through and yet they continued unabated without accidentally bashing each others heads in.  Tablas drove the music into rhythmic spirals over which war-like chants would repeat intoxicatingly.  I think that monkeyman may have captured a video of some of this, and if I work out how to do so, I’ll add it here.

(Oh, and I saw a young Nepali band covering “Another Brick In The Wall” in very earnest fashion.  They were quite adamant about their needs vis-a-vis education and thought control.  It was quite amusing). 

Listen to “Sorathi” as performed by Krishan Gurung and Jangal Singh here (amazingly, you can buy the compilation on which this features from dexohouse), and a track from Harmika Yab Yum, “Ram Saran Nepali”, here (you can buy that from boomkat).