FROM THE LINER NOTES of the WEST COAST POST-ASIATIC VINYL

 

"Post-Asiatic" is a term I invented around 2002, while I was running an experimental music series at a Chinese restaurant and tiki room called The Jasmine Tree in Portland. It was a way of succinctly describing to the press a movement of musicians and other performers who arrived at their commingled bodies of work by interpolating the traditions of various Asian and Middle Eastern peoples through a distinctly Western deconstructionist methodology. By and large, these troupes and individuals resided on the West Coast, and as the years passed and the Work continued this sub-sub-genre grew both in number and in the ambition and mastery of its component artists. Last year, I received the first submission from a band identifying itself as "post-asiatic" whom I did not personally know. It's strange the way words work.

 

The word connotes the inherent contradiction of the music it describes. Despite the respect and reverence we feel toward the cultures which inspire us, the post-asiatic ouvre has a certain minstrel-show element that's difficult to ignore. From a lifelong gestalt of images transmitted through movies, books, and live performances; a pan-asian aesthetic emerges that is true to no existing tradition. Through costume, movement, and sound we reflect a deeply-flawed history of appropriation on the part of the entitled and ill-informed Occident. We paint ourselves with white make-up instead of blackface.

 

On the upside, the post-asiatic influence has in most cases been positive on the forms we emulate, and even saved some arts from extinction. Odissi, arguably the world's oldest form of dance, has all but died out in India but survives in the United States among mostly "white" practitioners; Hijikata and Ohno's creation of butoh was in the simplest terms a meeting of German postmodern dance with the most ancient Japanese peasant spiritualism; and the entire history of bellydance begins with suspiciously post-asiatic roots in the Victorian burlesque period.

 

So please don't take offense at the fumbling of our clumsy fingers at the fragile crystalline perfections of the Orient. From love our desire springs, and like a callous lover we mar the object of desire in our quest to understand it. 5000. - Noah Mickens, Halloween 2006