Oudaden: Photo by Tan Hee Hui

The 12th Rainforest World Music Festival, recently held at the Sarawak Cultural Village, a one-hour drive from Kuching city in Sarawak, Malaysia, was an astounding success.

The H1N1influenza pandemic did not deter more than 5,000 festival-goers from turning up to the opening concert on Friday evening. Overall, the three-day festival attracted over 20,000 local and foreign visitors, who converged at the different Sarawak ethnic longhouses dotting the cultural village.

Thirteen international and four Malaysian bands were featured, offering a diaspora of traditional and fusion scales. The festival was divided into workshops held during the day and formal showcases in the evening. The workshops, themed according to musical instruments, allowed festival-goers to watch up-close the headline musicians who explained the background of their traditional musical instruments.

The evening performances attracted thousands of visitors that came prepared to sweat it out and party.

Unfortunately, several glaring aspects of commercialization marred the festival. One of the grouses among some festival-goers was the entry fee to the Bidayuh longhouse (in the past, there was no such fee). Therefore it prevented many from heading there to chill out, and even deterred some from buying bottles of home-made tuak (fermented rice wine) from the longhouse residents.    

Many food stalls around the festival site also charged higher prices in comparison to previous years. Some visitors complained about having to pay more, sometimes almost double previous years, for things like sandwiches and beer.

All these prompted many festival-goers to complain about the festival’s organiser, the Sarawak Tourism Board’s profit-making agenda. And this clearly affected the down-to-earth qualities associated with the festival in the past.

Even some selections of the performers were off-the-mark. China’s Red Chamber, whose “plucked string”-based, classical and fusion Chinese music lacked energy and pizzazz, and rendered them lacklustre. Their brand of mellow music was unsuitable for the large setting where the main stage was located. And it obviously didn’t go down well with the party-mad-crowd who’d wanted more upbeat music.

New Zealand’s Moana & The Tribe’s impressive troupe, which included Maori warrior dancers, did not win over some world music purists among the crowd.  Melissa Wong, an audience member from Penang, Malaysia, said the overwhelming pop and blues rhythms overshadowed the group’s traditional indigenous Maori music elements. It didn’t sound alluring when they combined a heavy contemporary twist with the traditional poi rhythms.

Morocco’s Oudaden’s brand of Amazigh (Berber) music and energetic musicians were one of the festival’s highlights. By combining traditional percussion with the banjo, electric guitar and drums, they produced trancey and passionate music with lyrics about the subtleties of love as well as economic and social difficulties in their home country.

Also delightful to watch was Indonesia’s Sekaa Jaya Jenggala, a gamelan ensemble who performed rare forms of traditional bamboo music, aided by traditional Balinese vocal effects of “Cicak, cicak, cicak!” Their music sounded romantic, melancholic and exotic, and paid tribute to both this world and the supernatural world. While listening to their calming melodies and percussion-filled rhythms, which were at times fast and furious, one could imagine being transported to a world filled with frenzy and tranquillity in equal measure.

At times, they played melodies with evocative nuances that proved the versatility of gamelan music by adapting it to contemporary musical forms. This earned enthusiastic responses from the crowd. By and large, the group managed to entertain without much fanfare. Their performance was simple and their music was a force.  

When the Jeff & The Vida band from the US came on it was a joy listening to their traditional Appalachian bluegrass music. Watching their masterful string-band instrumentation, with roots in New Orleans and Nashville, was memorable. And their performance of highly melodic original ballads, filled with joyful and heartbreaking lyrics, was striking.

Hungary’s Muzsikas performed in the style of traditional Hungarian folk bands, offering plaintive songs with rhapsodic modal melodies and fiery fiddles over driving drones. The group’s set was at times unpredictable and constantly changed pace.

Poland’s St Nicholas Orchestra also offered traditional folk music with lyrics and melodies inspired by their discovery of written and aural archival records. Overall, their music sounded thoughtful, as if was paying tribute to their native country’s living folk traditions.

To Finland’s Jouhiorkesteri credit, they are one of the few bands around the world that have revived the art of playing the jouhikko bowed lyre, which is Europe’s oldest bowed musical instrument. Rarely heard outside of Finland, it thankfully featured in Jouhiorkesteri’s showcase.

When watching one of the band members playing the jouhikko to produce raspy fiddle sounds with a slithering, edgy pitch, paired with the sounds of chamber music, the overall experience was unconventional, but a crowd-pleasing experience. Such qualities also best describe the festival overall.

— Photos by Tan Hee Hui

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