Radio Java - Various Artists > Reviews (1)

I'm working my way through the discography and DVD's on offer by Seattle based world music record label Sublime Frequencies, so far I've been unimpressed with the offerings. Whilst there's plenty of rarities on offer, it's not been of a particularly high standard so far. Perhaps that's what you get from Burmese music, so I was quite excited to be moving onto something different.

I'm aware that there has been and still is quite a lot of decent music to come out of Indonesia, such a highly populated country was always going to bring quite a lot of different music. With 3 out of 4 Indonesians living on densely populated Java - the album Radio Java seemed as good a place as any to start.

What you get with this album is a mixture of folk, pop, hard rock, radio commercials, the sound of the DJ's.. basically the Javanese radio experience but all from your own living room. Each track is dedicated to a different radio channel spanning the whole island with Jakarta having several dedicated tracks.

There's a distinctly arabic flavour to some songs and this has to be down to the Islamic influence over Indonesia. It's a nice little insight into what's being played on the Javanese airwaves these days but I was disappointed to find the quality of the music was no where close to the likes of some of my Indonesian favourites - Dara Puspita and Koes Bersaudara.

1 Radio Jakarta, No. 1
2 Radio Surabaya
3 Radio Jakarta, No. 2
4 Radio Republik Indonesia
5 Radio Yogyakarta
6 Radio Jakarta, No. 3
7 Radio Bandung
8 Radio Solo/Bandung