Hello.

I made a couple of trips through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Laos in the late 1990s and bought a bunch of cassettes of local music (this being one of the main things that drew me to traveling in the region). I thought it might be a good idea to post those tapes here for posterity before they disintegrate further, since I’ve never seen examples of some of these types of music released outside their countries of origin. I’ll do my best to include a scan of the cover, and a word or two about the music if I can.

I also brought a cassette recorder on my second trip in 1998, so I have a number of extremely unprofessional and low-fidelity field recordings that might be of some interest. I’ll be posting those as well, along with some basic explanation of the circumstances surrounding their creation.

These are all sourced from a bunch of tapes that have sitting in a shoebox in my closet for more than 10 years, and other than the field recordings are the result of multiple generations of dubbing and hence the sound quality is definitely not the cleanest, but I hope you find them interesting in any case.