My work
under the name Naing Naing is comprised of “Frog music”, “ice cube music”,
“washing machine music” and many more, each source of sound being regarded and
used as a new musical instrument.
Those
virtual instruments I have being developping since 1999 came up after a long
hunt for exotic instruments which first involved traveling overseas, looking
for teachers and purchasing instruments such as sitar, sarangi, sarod, tabla,
santur, slenthem, charango, balafon… and I also studied gamelan in Paris. (All
those exotic sounds were meant to be make TEAR OF A DOLL experimental hardcore
more colourful).
So very
naturally when I relocated in Rangoon, Myanmar I immediately started learning
burmese harp and later PATTALA (bamboo xylophone).
The harp is
called SAUNG in spoken language and SAUNGGAUK (the K is just a glottal stop) in
written language, so I’m used to say “saung”.
The next
Naing Naing album features different styles of music performed by concrete
sounds. It is one of those rare albums in which the works of JS Bach and the
Ramones can appear side by side within a single concept... And it had already a
piece of music from South-East Asia : the ice cube gamelan (live version
available on YouTube), so I decided to include also two pieces of MAHAGITA
(Myanmar classical music), one on each disc.
I recently
recorded them at Djengo Hartlap’s studio. Check TAW HNIN TAUNG SWE (Forest and
tooth-shaped mountain) in mt player.
Last but
not least, the upcoming album will be a double CD with really much more
surprises than what I am revealing now…