---True Panther Sounds---: Shredding Through The Vale of Tears, Chapter 1, Verse 1

Brother Dean and I have been kicking this idea around for quite some time (weeks? nay, months!) and I decided to give it a shot with this inaugural pre-weekend edition. As you may know just from a quick perusal of the contents of this modest blog, both Dean and I are voracious consumers of world music. He likes his a little more Ry Coodery, jammy, slick, capitalist, lame whatever

and I tend to go for what's happening in the streets, the unpaved dirt road, broke down shack, fetishiz’d image of third world musicians playing the truth, etc.

Anyway, regardless of how you slice it, there seem to be two ways to break down music that really has little to do with your own idioms. One is to marvel at its uniqueness and admire the semi-tones, crazy rhythms and whatever other spices they toss in. This is, I guess, how most people do it. But every now and then, dean and I play a little game in which we freak out at how unworldy this world music sounds. To skip a couple of steps, what I'm trying to say is that there are moments in which certain trax abandon the simple, plain folksy styles that one expects from a smithsonian-folkways recording and dudes bust out the jammy jams in a way that you never expected. RIFFS OF THE WORLD UNITE! You know what I mean?

Anyway, presented below are some tracks that are just mindboggling fierce in their commitment to rising about the hunter-gatherer bullshit that we put down on them and make a play at individual, virtuosic glory. AMEN!*