The Trip. Psychedelic Music from the Hippie Trail

— Pt. 4/4 From South Korea to Singapore

A
Kim Hee Gap — Shanty (Sailor’s Song)  3:07
Akari Ishikawa and his Group — Saitaro Bushi  3:03
Priti Sagar — Jeevitam Atee Sundaram/Nicholas Microfined Aspro  3:05
Brigadier General R. Pringadie & Rita Zahara — Lela Ledung  2:47

B

Manja Ria — Misaluba  2:51
Kassim Slamat & The Swallows — La-Karebna 2:46
Pattie Bersaudara — Ku Sesalkan Dikau Pergi  3:17
Pancy Lau — A Long Stream of Tears  2:25

Expect unexpected music from the 1960s and 1970s, mixing Western and Eastern elements, remapping your knowledge of pop music along the way. Hear Italian shouters, East-European freak beat, Anatolian rock, Kurdish spiritual pop, Uzbek folk pop, Pakistani soundtracks, Nepalese folk beats, Mongolian pop, Indian Bollywood scores, Malaysian rock’n’roll, Philippine surf pop, Singaporean dream pop and many sounds more — for all lovers of the danceable, the mind-expansive, and the sure-fire hits. Come on and take the trip…

With Pt. 1/4—From Italy to Turkey you have been travelling from Italy via Hungary, Slovenia, Greece, and Lebanon to Turkey. With Pt. 2/4—From Turkey to Nepal you have been travelling from Turkey via Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia to Nepal. With Pt. 3/4 you have stayed for awhile in Pakistan and left for India. With Pt. 4/4 you will travel from South Korea via Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines to Singapore. Here the trip ends.

“Pt. 1/4—From Italy to Turkey” has been released in May 2015.

“Pt. 2/4—From Turkey to Nepal” has been released in September 2015.

“Pt. 3/4—Picnic in Pakistan” has been released in April 2016.

Compiled by the curator of “Bosporus Bridges Vol. 2,” “Saz Beat,” and “Saz Beat II,“ on Corvo Records’ sublabel Global Pop First Wave.

All tracks have been restored and remastered for full sonic impact at Calyx Mastering, Berlin.

To my surprise, Klaus, a record dealer at the Leopoldplatz fleamarket in Berlin, knew about Anatolian Rock when I told him about the Bosporus Brigdes compilations. He told me that, in his hippie days in the beginning of the 1970s, he had hitchhiked to Istanbul to make his way from the Pudding Shop Café to the Far East. That is how the idea was born to re-create a soundtrack for the Hippie Trail, the trail of the psychedelic hippies from Europe to Asia.
The result: a series of four 12″ records, called “The Trip”. What could the travellers have heard back in the days? Especially: which previously unknown sorts of music, combining Western and Eastern elements and thus establishing new styles of pop music? For some years now, thanks to many re-releases of some labels interested in historical developments, pop music history tends to be re-mapped. Instead of focusing on a tiny number of old centers, a new multipolar view has emerged: besides the classics of the Anglo-American realm, other pop music styles, which combine local and global elements, have been given more attention. Pop music history is one thing, hybrid pop music history another. For sure the latter cannot be thought without the impulses of Anglo-American pop music, nevertheless it is a music of its own kind, being more and more considered and recognized as such due to the growing influence of post-colonial ways of thinking. The series of “The Trip” shares this line of thinking. The trip starts in Italy with almost familiar sounding rock music, and travelling from there to the East, to less well-known shores of familiar-unfamiliar hybrid music, due to the mixes of global with local elements. What it so special about it, is the exceptional musical versatility, which characterizes the musical modernity in non-Western countries.
Holger Lund, curator of the series “The Trip”

And so the epic trans continental quest which began in 2015 with the release of the first of Corvo’s themed limited edition vinyl only series of compilations reaches its conclusion with the arrival of the fourth and final leg of this incredible audio journey – From South Korea To Singapore. Things get off to a lively start amid the busy South Korean jazz vibes of Kim Hee Gap’s ‘Shanty’ (Sailor’s Song’) and Akari Ishigawa And His Group’s intense Japanese fuzz psych before the sounds start to become progressively more exotic in the form of Priti Sagar’s ‘Jeevitam Atee Sundaram’ – apparently the soundtrack for an Aspirin commercial no less. From here on transplanted blasts of 70s Afro rock (via Malaysia) and the contrasting hues of what sounds like 60s melodic garage pop from Singapore and The Phillipines give way to the collection’s closing hybrid of Western pop and traditional Oriental styles – Pancy Lau’s ‘A Long Stream Of Tears’.

— Grahame Bent, Shindig! Issue #65