Various (Touch 33): Islands in Between

When I took this off the shelf I imagined I was holding possibly the last surviving copy of a cassette that had long been forgotten. A few seconds on Google revealed how wrong I was. Thing is, I'd never connected Touch 33 with the Touch run by Jon Wozencroft and friends. At the time I got it, never having been a Face reader, I'm sure I'd never heard of Touch or Wozencroft.

This was the mid-eighties, and I was on a mission to track down some Balinese gamelan music, inspired by mentions by the likes of Fripp and Reich (mentioned before). The gamelan section at the Woking branch of Our Price was sparsely stocked, so I had to rely on niche distribution channels, which in those days meant a photocopy of a typewritten catalogue obtained… where? Perhaps by sending an SAE to an address in the classifieds in the back of the NME, or picking it up at the WOMAD festival. There might be a 50-100 word description of the release, if you were lucky, but that was all you had to go on when deciding whether to buy or not.

The description of this cassette obviously mentioned the magic words Bali and gamelan. But it's not a straight recording of gamelan music. As I think is a feature of several Touch recordings, there are field recordings of environments, like "nightfall by a bridge near the Monkey Forest, Ubud". Then there are original compositions inspired by gamelan music but written and played by Jon Keliehor and Orlando Kimber. Plus some bona fide gamelan and flute pieces from Bali and Indonesia.

The Touch catalogue is well-documented, and you can see the full tracklisting and sleevenotes on their official site here or here. Significantly less officially, it appears you can download the whole release for free via this blog, though I haven't tried.

Discogs entry for this album
Wikipedia entry for this album
Rate Your Music entry for this album