The backstory to Music from the Mountain Provinces positions it as a set of field recordings, all captured on tape during life-risking ventures into the Philippines during the late 1980s. David Blair Stiffler, a veteran documenter of uncommon sounds for the Folkways label, took a small crew into remote mountain regions of the country on three separate occasions spanning 1986-88, ultimately getting kidnapped at gunpoint and held for 18 days on their final journey. Incredibly, as documented in the liner notes on this release, Stiffler simply carried on recording while in captivity, although many of those works were confiscated by the rebel faction who abducted them. Despite such bravery, these recordings have never surfaced before, with the passing of…
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…Folkways head Moses Asch preventing their release at the time, and the reliable Numero Group now picking up the pieces many decades later.
Like the best recordings of their type, Stiffler’s work here gives a strong sense of place. The natural world around the musicians is as important an ingredient as the instruments and vocals of the musicians he encountered. His use of space is important, too. On one track, simply titled “Man Whistling”, the recording takes in every breath of its player, making it feel like you’re about three feet away while it was being played. Elsewhere, acres of room expand outward—on “Lullaby” the instrumentation is so distant it sounds like it’s a different song, being played somewhere else, in another time entirely. Sometimes chatter drifts in and out of the mix, or leaves crunch underfoot. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to the playing, which is often taut and disciplined. The ensemble of gong players that opens up the album makes it arresting right from the beginning, with tension and pace gathering quickly then loosening at the close.
While working through Mountain Provinces it helps to have Stiffler’s liner notes to hand, to provide a sense of journey as he ghosts through various regions on his journey. He points out the political turmoil in the Philippines in 1986, discusses how these cultures struggled to maintain their identity at the time, and sets the scene by describing it as a mix of “spectacular landscapes and a cultural heritage of blood feuds and head hunting.” There are distinct phases to the record, with the July 1988 trip, for example, focussing on throat singers and other vocalists in a region around where Apocalypse Now was filmed. It’s appropriate they landed in a location once deemed filmic, as the problems around Mountain Provinces give it the air of something like Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which focuses on the struggle to pull a huge ship over a Peruvian mountain. Stiffler’s battle was more internalized but no less difficult, as he exited the region with recordings lost, his life just about intact, and with no end product to show until now.
Moods shift dramatically across the pieces Stiffler and his team managed to capture, from the light and airy trio of “Bamboo Zither” songs to the positively doomy “Group Singing with Gongs”. On the latter there’s an air of creeping tension, a feeling perhaps easy to ascribe from an outsider’s perspective when bearing in mind the political strife in the region at the time, but certainly hard not to notice as a cacophony of discordant gongs builds over its ragged course. Most striking is one of the few recordings to remain from Stiffler’s bout of captivity, which features a woman singing a lullaby to her baby. There’s tenderness and fear in her voice, especially when it descends into bouts of un-language, where the woman simply hums the melody of the song and her inflections beautifully rise and fall.
Although Stiffler’s liner notes to this compilation are reasonably comprehensive, still some holes remain in the stories surrounding these songs. Mostly, we don’t get to find out how long they have been around, or how off-the-cuff the performances are. Some are undoubtedly songs passed down through generations, but whether they pick up different shades and colors as the times change remains a mystery. One such track, named “Rice Winnowing Song”, bears a dream-like quality, rendered by the layering of the women’s voices throughout. On “Rice Winnowing Song” it’s easy to drift off and forget the world, just as it’s easy to imagine the world impinging rather more heavily on material that becomes torn around the edges. The broad range of feelings captured is what gives Music from the Mountain Provinces its strength—this is a vivid snapshot of a particular place and time, with all its divergent moods bursting into life again after being lost for so long.