Not simply a musical presentation, "From the Forests of Tigers and Spirits"
(© 1996 Flare Productions) is a depiction of Hmong culture: the recordings
were all made on location, in their natural mountain environment. Since this
allowed some undesirable background noises to be recorded, a large part of
the engineering involved minimizing the effect of these anomalies without
sacrificing fidelity.
The
Kheng, as Hmong's essential musical instrument, is played with dance by the
headman of a village. Movements of both the performer and the recorder made
maintaining a consistent volume and feel in the mix particularly important.
The Jambrai is a bamboo flute with a metal reed. It is an extremely rare instrument,
played here by a 42-year-old man. Recorded in the field where he works as
a farmer, the sounds of workers had to be reduced, and even a tractor was
edited out. All music is played solo in Hmong culture, except at funerals.
The Hmong traditional mouth-harp, or Jan, is often used to express lingual
messages. These messages are usually of love and courtship: the player speaks
from his heart, while using the Jan to disguise his voice. Recorded indoors,
it was necessary to balance the volumes of player and audience, as well as
to edit out some of the performer's coughing and breathing breaks.
Red
Tape's involvement needed to be absolutely transparent throughout to convey
with honesty the quality behind the source recordings. Editing 30 hours of
source material down to 1 hour without losing the culture's poetry was an
amazing challenge. The relationships of the Hmong artists to the final sound
on the CD had to be examined sociologically to establish a spectrum of material
that conveyed the incredible breadth of the traditions of these people. The
master source recordings were also prepared as CD-ROM archives, 11 discs in
all, to insure the original recording's integrity for the next 100 years.
