Thailand: Music and Songs from the Golden Triangle

Unreconstructed field recordings of folk songs and instrumental pieces may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but this collection provides a fascinating glimpse into a territory rarely visited because of border clashes, ethnic rivalries and the poppy trade – the Golden Triangle, a mountain region overlapping Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. The recordings were made in 1979 and have only recently been mastered and edited for release.

While it would be impossible for the album to be wholly comprehensive, we hear an assortment of tracks from the Meo, Lisu, Shan, Lahu Nyi, Akha and Karen Sgaw peoples. In the space of a small album booklet, not everything can be properly documented. But this is worth buying for the variety of ethnic groups recorded, the story of the troubled region and the many voices and instruments, which range from three-string lutes, five-tube mouth organs, drums and metal gongs to the curious Stroh violin – a fiddle with a metal sound-horn.