Each Sporting Enormous Sunglasses

I figured Onra was Chinese.  He put out three albums called “Chinoiseries”.  My friend sent me the third album this morning.  Layered, tasteful over funky beats the “Chinese-ness” of it all appears in the form of a movie sound track cut here and a snippet of someone’s conversation there, with some erhu and pipa clips looped tastefully.  I sent it on to my step son, suggesting he give a listen.  He liked it as I assumed he would but he also asked “I wonder if this guy knows what the samples are actually saying?  

I told him, “relax” he’s Chinese.  Ahh, but he wasn’t.  He looked and Onra appears to be French.  So indeed, how much of what he’s sampling is he able to comprehend?  Certainly it doesn’t matter much.  There is an interesting picture on the cover.  I reckoned that it was from somewhere in Hong Kong in the sixties with a dusty, sepia-toned cover photo of a trio in a sports car before a pagoda, each sporting enormous sunglasses, far too weird to be anything but real.  They could be from Taiwan.  But somehow I associate this guys’ bad haircut with British rule.

I played it over and over today and I suppose I’ll do the same tomorrow.  This third in the series seems to be the best or at least suit me most properly.  The first two have interesting moments, but this one seems to really seems to have created a durable atmosphere.  

So I looked up Onra on Wiki.  French, yes.   But there’s more.  There, you see, his father has Vietnamese heritage.  The records sampled on this are both Chinese and Vietnamese.  Perhaps the photo is as well.  But he chose the French adjective that he did to name these creations.  China is an absorptive civilization.  Neighboring countries are all fare game.  You don’t need anything more to claim a fleeting legitimacy with some rivulet tracing back up into the parent civilization.  

Wednesday, 4/12/17