‘Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop and Funk From The South China Sea’ 

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. Ayo Kedisco, Boogie, Pop and Funk from the South China Sea is the newest album from independent label Soundway Records. Disco funk, city pop and synth tracks from the 70s and 80s jostle side by side in this cross-genre compilation, curated by Alice Whittington, also known as DJ Norseca. The album highlights the ways in which Southeast Asian countries were establishing a new national identity post-independence, as well as the burgeoning music industry in the region at the time. To discuss the album and accompany the documents, the history and discoveries made along the way of producing it, Alice joined Monaco's Maile Evans in the studio here at Midori House.

1:23My mother is Malaysian and I've spent a lot of time in Malaysia with my family out there. And a very long time ago I just started buying records at the bottom of department stores in basement bins and that kind of thing with no sort of clear direction other than I just really liked these sounds that I was picking up and I just couldn't find it anywhere else outside of Asia. It was just not a popular genre or region of music for quite a long time. But I feel like probably in the last five, ten years with the rise of K-pop and a lot of Japanese culture and a little bit more accessibility to Southeast Asia as well, that people outside of Asia are finally starting to see it as having some value.

2:10about five years ago when I was in lockdown. I was doing a lot of live streams with the Vinyl Factory and a couple of other platforms and did quite a few Asian-specific mixes, which resounded really well, especially because a lot of people of Asian origin were experiencing a lot of hate during that time. I just thought there's something there. I feel like it's connecting to a community that I hadn't been connected to before.

2:50The focus for this record is from the mid-70s to the late 80s. You're bringing these tracks together, all coming from totally different areas, local labels. What was that like, trying to find these people? Were they still making music? Were these labels still running? What was that search like? It was really difficult, to be totally honest, because firstly there's a language barrier and trying to get hold of these different releases and labels and work out whether they still existed, even that they were still going. A lot of them went bust or defunct or were bought out by majors. All the countries in this compilation and this scene have a border with the South China Sea, or what you would call that body of water that is contestable.

3:37Among some countries. At the time, that's what it was called during the 70s and 80s. You'd see all those countries bordering there and they had a lot of cross-pollination between each other once air travel in the 70s really started to become more affordable. Yeah, it's been a journey discovering not just the music but then all the history that went behind it. That's how the whole concept came together was the realisation that actually as much as they're all very different countries and cultures and languages that they all have a lot of common history.

4:32In that time, a lot of these countries were newly independent. And so at that moment, they are forging their own identity. What were those sort of first inklings like? It was fascinating because independence is a very difficult thing to achieve, not just as a government, but as an identity, I think. Everyone's got their own idea of what independence is and identity is. And a lot of these governments that were coming into power straight after independence had a specific or at least a direction that they wanted to go in, but the populace didn't necessarily agree with that. So there was actually a lot of censorship, especially in Indonesia and Singapore.

5:13They were trying to create their own identity, to celebrate their roots and heritage, and simultaneously reject a lot of Western ideas because of colonialism. And yet at the same time, the economic boom and the way that the general citizens were embracing new technology and a lot of Western culture as well, you know, through entertainment and that kind of thing. was a real power struggle between a lot of these governments and the people. Habibi, Habibi, Habibi ya Habibi Habibi, Habibi, Habibi ya Habibi There's Ahmadi Hassan, who is a Malaysian artist, Islamic artist, and his track is Habibi Mari Bersatu, where he actually is pleading with the Malaysian people to come together and to unite in the spirit of independence but also as progression.

6:23Instead of everyone bickering over what the national identity should be, he's trying to say, let's celebrate all our different identities and move forward and create this one whole.

6:41In the record, you've got a range of different genres. Was this something you kind of knew was going to be part and parcel of doing this project? Definitely started off with disco because it was more popular in my mixes and DJ sets. As I started digging further and further into the labels and the artists that were creating this music, they had so many other genres and influences that were coming through and it just felt a little reductive to reduce it to one. There's a bit of fuzzy rock on there as well and city pop. It's not so much a genre-specific compilation as it is an ideals compilation.

7:24So all of these songs are very hopeful. They're very celebratory. They're also searching through their own languages and instruments and traditions to create this new identity.

7:46Your interest is also, I guess, behind the scenes, how these releases first came about. What were you learning about the modern music industry and how that was developing or shifting during this period as well? Gosh, there was so much. hence why I had to make this zine because it wasn't all going to fit in the sleeve of a vinyl record. I have still reduced the word count in the zine from my PhD-type thesis that I initially wrote. But what I found really, really interesting was that shellac, which is also used in nail polish, but is actually from the lac bug and that is almost exclusively produced in Thailand and India, that is how all the records were initially made.

8:29were made of shellac as opposed to vinyl plastic. If it weren't for that region's contribution of this material, who knows how we would have even gotten to the stage of vinyl records because before they were just on wax cylinders, which only had a very, very short lifetime. And shellac is a lot softer, not waxed, but it's softer than vinyl. So it does have a shorter life than vinyl, but it lasted so much longer than waxed and actually then allowed them to put it as a flat record, circular record, as opposed to a cylinder and it just transformed the way that music was consumed, transported, recorded.

9:24I think some really interesting observations from that region is, you know, unfortunately, colonialism did have a really strong hold on the region in the 20th century. and for better or worse there were definitely some technological improvements and exchange of ideas between the West and Asia but it meant that a lot of corporate interests entered Asia before they had really developed their own economic prowess and the governments had control over the economy So it meant that a lot of major labels already had a chokehold on the industry by the end of the Second World War because they were using records and broadcasting on radio stations as a way to propagate anti-access propaganda because they were trying to, obviously, the Second World War and they were trying to reach the people generally.

10:27but obviously with so many countries occupied by Japan, it was quite difficult to disseminate information to the local populations.

10:55along the way in compiling this you're meeting lots of vinyl collectors so i wondered what you were learning from them and their recollections maybe some of them seeing these records when they were first out or have been also on this journey of appreciating this music. Some of these collectors who are a bit older grew up in the 70s and 80s and were there to see firsthand what the music industry was like and it's been interesting. A bit like with disco over here, that kind of music went out of fashion for quite a long time and a lot of other traditional kind of genres went out of fashion for quite a long time as well because people were searching for the next new thing or the next trend that was coming primarily from the West.

11:38The collectors that I spoke to were just really excited that people have finally taken interest because vinyl collecting, other than in Japan, has not been historically something that people were interested in in Southeast Asia. so the quality and I guess the storage of vinyl hasn't been at the same level as say Japan or other countries where people could afford and were interested in collecting vinyl so a lot of this music is harder to come by from this region unless there was a specific kind of culture that collected it but we don't really see that as much So trying to dig up this vinyl was really difficult for me, but also for these other collectors who have been searching just for years and years for these artists that they knew existed or that they grew up listening to.

12:35And a lot of it was also on cassette as well, because that was just the cheapest and quickest way to get music out into the public sphere.

12:56And the response so far to this release has been pretty strong. Yeah. Yeah. Were you expecting it to sort of fly off the shelves in this way? To be honest, no. I downplayed it in my mind, and also I guess because I've been working on it for three years, it had kind of lost its shine in my own mind in a way. But I think it's come at a time when there has been quite a surge of interest in Southeast Asia and there's quite a few musical communities that are really taking off, particularly in Bali, Hong Kong, even Manila. I think it's riding, luckily, a wave of renewed interest in what this region has to offer in terms of music.

13:51Even locally in Southeast Asia, it's still quite a young scene of vinyl, but also just older music collecting. It doesn't have to be vinyl because there has been such a surge of economic prosperity and an aspirational element of wanting to emulate other developed countries that perhaps have bigger GDPs. so a lot of that kind of music got left behind in an attempt to catch up as people sort of thought to the rest of the world and now we're kind of realising that actually that was such a really important part of the shaping of the identity.

14:45Another key part of putting together the record but also the scene is to actually have documentation and have it written down Tell me about the importance of actually putting this to paper and doing the fact checking and making sure it is a record of a moment in time That's the thing I've definitely found with reissue releases is the fact-checking is just so important. And like you say, there's a lot of oral tradition and sometimes the facts can get in the way of a good story. But what I found in researching, just out of my own curiosity, was actually there was no real academic research around this region's musical history.

15:24There's one book called Malaya, one about Singapore, and one sort of about Indonesia. But other than that, no real academic research has been done into the modern music history of Southeast Asia. And I was kind of disappointed, to be honest, because I really wanted to know those facts myself and get a clear picture of sort of the wider movement and progression of these regions. And it just ended up that I did a lot of reading of online articles, JSTOR. I did Zoom calls with different experts and interviewed artists and labels themselves, just finding little clippings from different newspapers.

16:10Things like the National Archives of Singapore were really helpful in looking up the same kind of information, but it was a labour of love and I feel that it's just really important in terms of celebrating the intersectionality of all these countries and cultures. This is me trying to kickstart a conversation because as soon as I started talking about this with other collectors and enthusiasts about music and that kind of thing, we just started sharing all these amazing stories and that's what part of the zine is, is getting people to tell stories that they knew about artists and the region as well and in a way kind of have a community feel around the storytelling.

16:57It's a history that deserves to be told and is absolutely fascinating.

17:10Thank you very much, Alice Whittington there. A Yoke Disco Boogie Pop and Funk from the South China Sea is out now. The show was edited by Maile Evans and Elliot Greenfield, and I am Fernando Augusto Pacheco.