Taking an older song and putting a dance beat behind it is nothing new
anymore. I'm not even talking about sampling. I'm talking about a producer
taking a track like Eddy Grant's immortal "Electric Avenue" and not
necessarily updating it but somehow making it different while retaining the
uniqueness of the original. And, of course, there are the fellows who took
Gregorian chant and turned it into a dance hit several years ago. But the
project known titled RED SANDS DREAMING takes the whole concept a few centuries
further. Wait. Make that several millennia.
Those of you out there with long memories and even longer life spans will
remember a project David Bryne and Brian Eno did back in 1980 or so entitled
MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS, a groundbreaking work that combined what we
would now call dance beats with "found" sounds such as chants, radio
evangelists, and the like. RED SANDS DREAMING is a logical extension of this.
What a group of producers, known in the aggregate as the Global Collective,
has done is take aboriginal chants, songs, shantees, whatever you call it
some of them over 40,000 years old ---we're talking even older than Gloria
Steinem -- and set them to heavy electronic beats, utilizing loops, samples,
the kitchen sink, anything that works in tandem with indiginous instruments.
As the liner notes are oh-so-quick to point out, permission of the musicians
was obtained --- no Pipes of Pan deal here, folks, everyone got paid, and the
Aboriginal musicians had full control over the project. Gee, most of the
white musicians in this country don't get a deal that good. And let me tell
you, no, let me testify to you, this music works. Does it ever.
The reason this project really works is neither of the genres involved here
are compromised at the expense of the other. The dance beats, as one would
expect, are primal and primitive, and the percussive instruments of the
Aboriginals are, well, percussive, as is dance music. While the liner notes
go into detail about what each track is about (I'd hesitate to call it a
translation) you might want to skip those and go straight to the music, at
least the first few times through, and ride the music. It's not hard to
imagine this music in your favorite dance club, not hard at all; yet it is so
alien to the experience of most of us, both in its utilization of the
aboriginal chants and its combination with the familiar dance beats, that it
is almost as if this sound comes from another world. And, in a very real
sense, it does.
I am hoping that RED SANDS DREAMING doesn't get lost in the shuffle of world
music. This is music that is not only original, but also incredibly good.
You'll listen to it 500 times and hear something new the 501st time around.
It'll open up brain tunnels you never knew you had.
