Traditional Islamic folk music from China, with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish influences: Kazakh, Uyghur, Kirgiz and Mongol Erut musicians on stringed instruments like topchar, komuz, rushtar, rawab, tchang.

Infectious songs and rootical instrumentals — the fifth SF album presenting Laurent ‘Kink Gong’ Jeanneau’s amazing documentation of the vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers.

Limited, gatefold LP version of the first SF CD release in 2003: droning beat pop, early Orkes Melayu songs, Batak Tapanuli, traditional Minang, and rare folk drama from the Indonesian island, from cassettes.

Gong, angklung and gender wayang under the direction of Anak Agung Gede Mandera.

Sacred and secular vocal polyphony.

1970s garage and psychedelic rock, raw folk blues ballads, and country-and-western music from Shan State in Myanmar’s Golden Triangle.

‘As with many other ethnic groups of the area, a traditional singing pattern is used with each singer adapting words to context. Many of these songs express intimate, strong emotions that bring tears to the performers while they are singing. The cascading mournful feel of this music is beautifully transcendent. You’ve never heard anything like it.
‘Instruments used by the ensemble include the babi (single tree leaf ) and mepa (tree leaf rolled up into the shape of a horn or mirliton), a chiwo (three-stringed bowed instrument), a labi (six-holed bamboo flute), a lahe (three-stringed small lute) and a meba (vertical reed instrument).’

‘Sublime, ethereal minimalism: the first drawing together of Onogawa’s soundtrack compositions, plotting a decade of music for films by cult filmmaker Gakuryū Ishii.
‘Sequenced into an album by Onogawa himself, this retrospective spans a fertile period of collaboration with Ishii, through soundtracks for three remarkable films — August in the
Water (1995), Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), and Mirrored Mind (2005) — where the cinema is texturally and sensually imbued with the spiritual, ambient, dreamlike quality of Onogawa’s music.
‘The sound Onogawa conjures for these films is elegant and patient, often spare or essential in form, but saturated in a strange and otherworldly, poetic emotion and atmosphere. Boundaries are crossed between New Age and science fiction, passing through blissfulness, melancholy, and paranoia, towards enchantments of mood and colour.
‘It’s notable that the compositions on this album straddle the millennium, with a fitting mix of divine and uncertain themes. New listeners might hear links to Mark Snow’s work for the X-Files and Millennium, or the soundtracks of certain future-facing and future-fearing Japanese anime or cyberpunk.
‘Onogawa’s music adds great depth and tenor to the sensory experience of the films themselves, but it stands just as strongly as a listening experience on its own terms; a virtuosic example of Ambient that changes in hue when turned in the light. Remarkably, like Ishii’s films, Onogawa’s work has never been widely available outside of fervid underground fan posts, usually sourced from extremely limited and private CDs limited to Japan.
‘This retrospective seeks to remedy that, presenting Onogawa as one of the great composers of the last three decades.’

‘Mind-melting West Javanese gong pop, recorded in 2007 at Jugala studios in Bandung, based on a Javanese secular village music and dance tradition known as ketuk-tila, which was transformed into a popular studio music in the early 1960s by the producer Gugum Gumbira, founder of Jugala. With vocals by Idjah Hadidjah, one of the key historic voices of jaipongan, the situation here is disorientatingly heavy, low bpm gong pressure coming straight from the originators. It is a much less dainty affair than classical Javanese gamelan, and less febrile than the fully automatic Balinese variant. Hadidjah’s golden voice sews together shifting polyrhythms that would baffle a watchmaker; the whole is embroidered by rehab and underpinned by Mariana Trench level bass drops. A second disc features a set of thoughtful electronic reworkings’ (Frances Gooding, The Wire).

Sundanese ritual music for the goddess of rice and the ancestral spirits, performed by Pupung Supena and Tahya — tarawangsa fiddle with ostinato accompaniment on kacapi zither.

Dangdut is a raucous Javanese mix of Indian film music, transatlantic rock, scraps of Middle-Eastern pop. Kroncong songs with ukelele-style accompaniment (and brass band settings here) run way back to Portugal.

Six deeply spiritual pieces from the Kinko School, developed in eighteenth century Japan by wandering zen monks for whom this flute music was a pathway to enlightenment.

Subtle, calm classical trio music — for shakuhachi flute, koto zither and shamisen lute — influenced by Buddhism.

Musical accompaniments to kabuki theatre, by this pre-eminent Japanese chamber orchestra, with voice, shamisen lutes, fue flute, and kotsuzumi, otsuzumi and taiko drums.

With accompaniment on the sanshin lute — a lovely, melodic blend of Japanese, Chinese and South East Asian styles characteristic of the Okinawa archipelago (formerly the independent kingdom of Ryukyu).

The medieval story of the Heike clan — combining drama and heroics with Buddhist reflection on the ephemerality of existence — sung by Kakujo Iwasa and Kakuryu Saito, with lute accompaniment.