Music that refuses to fuse

Nepalese Fingers
Produced by Boris Goudonof Dream
Produced by U. Srinivas and Michael Brook
Both available from Larrikin Records
Reviewed by Sujatha Fernandes
From the Hindu festival of Holi, in which people crowd the streets throwing coloured water at each other, to the numerous temples and pagodas that line the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal has remained a vivid mosaic of cultures, with more than 30 different languages and a hundred different ethnic groups and castes. This diversity is largely due to Nepal being the meeting point of two major cultures — the Aryan-Indian and the Mongolian-Chinese.
Nepalese culture is a mixture of Hindu, Buddhist and Tantric rituals and beliefs, and the Nepalese have maintained cultural and religious traditions which have long since disappeared from other parts of Asia.
That is why the sounds recorded by Sydney-based record producer Boris Goudonof during his visit to the high mountains of Nepal sound at once beautiful and yet not quite like anything you've heard before.
The songs on Nepalese Fingers are sensual and exuberant, and reflect the diversities in people's lives: rural and urban, hill dwellers and plain dwellers, from street processions and religious ceremonies and everyday village sounds.
Some of the sounds convey the aura of the mystical temple cities, with the hypnotising drone of monks chanting and the soft peal of bells outside. Other songs are strongly rhythmic, with loud, piercing reed instruments and very fast drums, giving a sense of the headiness of Nepalese people, intoxicated as they usually are with either politics or religion. Throughout Nepalese Fingers there are traffic sounds, voices chattering, water and birds woven in, continually giving a background to the music.
What is special is the real sounds and music taken from real people and musicians. However, Goudonof has combined this with western synthesiser sounds. Similarly in Dream, the artists attempt to combine Indian and western music in what they refer to as "an ambient-crossover-techno-fusion record".
Unfortunately, the effect in Dream is to take away the intensity of the music and reduce it, at best, to a background music suitable for dinner parties or Indian restaurants. Also, in Nepalese Fingers, rather than adding anything, this "fusion" reduces the potency of the music. The electronically produced sounds of the recording studio somehow tone down the realness of the music.
Maybe the differences between the high-tech modern sound studio artist and the Nepalese street musician are too much to bridge. Nepalese people make music with whatever is around — banging with sticks, spoons, anything available. Their music is spontaneous, and cannot be written down or practised. This kind of music refuses to be subdued or turned into polite background noise.
As well, the ideas of "fusion" have a political element which cannot be ignored. Attempts at fusion between eastern and western music are informed by the historical and political setting.
The history of colonialism is one in which the rich and varied cultures and religions of the east have been subjugated by empires of the west. It continues today with the domination, by the west through global mass media and the imposition of an MTV monoculture. These are an all too vivid reminder that "fusion" has been carried out in a number of ways, all resulting in the appropriation of a particular culture.
This is not to suggest that the record producers intentionally set out to appropriate another culture. In fact a share of the royalties on Nepalese Fingers will be put back into Nepal through Austcare.
While Dream sounds very much like Indian music toned down to fit the stereotypes of "relaxing Indian music", Nepalese Fingers refuses to be fused, and its strong appeal and interest come from the impossibility of "civilising" it.