Customer Reviews

Discover Indonesia

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My exposure to Indonesian music was pretty much limited to the glories of the Gamelan until I bought this album. What an eye-opener! This one disc offers an awe-inspiring cross-section of the phenomenal diversity and beauty of Indonesian music.

On the strength of it, I eventually went back and bought about three quarters of the albums its tracks are drawn from.

Buy this disc and marvel at the near-endless variety of humankind's musical expression.

Having mostly heard gamelan music from Indonesia, I was dazzled by this collection of mostly non-gamelan styles. This is a great introduction to the Smithsonian Folkways series of recordings from Indonesia. Because the style and mood changes so much from song to song, it is not well-suited as background music. But if you listen to each song to find out what appeals to you, this is the best way to choose from among the 20-odd recordings on Folkways.

From one of the world's lesser known great musical traditions, this CD is a cornucopia of lesser known traditional and not so traditional Indonesian music, each one surprisingly different and original. Some of my favorite: the meditative "Padang Magek", crazy hybrid of "Stambul Bla" and the guitar (?) in "Sampeq Penihing" . I am sure the producer had a hard time choosing these 15 songs out of the original 20 CDs. A great valued CD, although now I can't help pondering to collect the whole set!

a collection of mind numbingly bad music- maybe this stuff would appeal to music collectors or specialists but for the average listener such as myself it is the worse CD I own. There is a variety of music but most of it is repetitive and boring, like some bad recordings anthropology classes get to hear. Don't buy this if you are looking for something like the Rough Guides or Putumayo collections of international music.