An Amazon Soundscape

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This CD brings together recordings made by the French ethnomusicologist Jean-Michel Beaudet in French Guyana between 1978 and 1981. Beaudet set out to record the extraordinary music of the 1000-strong Wayãpi tribe who are to be found along the banks of the Upper Oyapock river near the Guyana-Brazil border. As Beaudet points out in his copious sleeve notes, for Amazonian cultures there is no essential difference between "music" and the sounds of the environment. Appropriately, then, this CD captures the Wayãpi's music in its original context, its chants, clapping and melodies played on "tule" - or giant reed plant clarinets - inseparable from the constant noise of the rain forest (as though to hammer home the point the CD's opening track captures the crepuscular rain forest without music, or at least without human-made music). All of which could indicate more of an anthropological exercise than a recording one would actually choose to buy, but not at all. This is deeply joyous music, music performed for hours and hours without pause in its original form, music accompanied by bird-imitating dancing, joke-jousting and great drinking binges.