Somewhere outside of Dalat, Vietnam, January 1st 2009. Field trip!  Who wants to see a silk factory in the Vietnamese countryside?  I was skeptical, too.  I usually skip these kinds of things when traveling as touristy wastes of time.  But I gotta say, I’m glad I went.

I don’t think I ever spent any time thinking about how silk is made.  So I never knew about how the silkworm grows into a moth (Bombyx mori for any budding entymologists out there) that lays hundreds of eggs, each of which will grow in turn into a worm that wraps itself in a silk coccoon with some 500 meters or more of raw silk, and how a factory will allow one in ten of those worms to grow into a moth to mate and to continue the cycle, and how the rest are boiled so as to more easily unravel the coccoon, and how the silk is then threaded into a spooler that teases the silk from the boiled worm (the worms are often sold to people who eat them), and how the silk in its unprocessed form is unbelievably strong.  And I definitely would not know that those looms that are used for weaving the silk into patterns, the looms that by the look of them are probably exactly the same looms that these people have used for the last fifty years, sound like this, clanking and banging away in unison, out of time, phase-shifting, back in unison and back out again, hypnotic, powerful, massive.

Siem Reap, Cambodia, December 20th 2008. Fast-forwarding through Egypt, which was amazing but yielded no audio recordings, and through Thailand, where I was sick and spent all of my energy just to keep myself from keeling over and curling up in the fetal position.  Arrived in Cambodia in Siem Reap, which mercifully wasn’t as crowded or as degenerate as Bangkok.  By which I mean I was only offered a prostitute once.  The first night in town there was a blackout that lasted an hour and took out most of the old town area.  The children squealed when the lights went.  The adult locals shrugged it off as a semi-regular byproduct of third world life.  The tourists seated in the dark at the many restaurants hoped their food was fresh.

The next day I woke up at 4am and did a nighttime bike ride through the dark over to Angkor, the ancient city of temples and pyramids, about 10 or 15km from the place I was staying.  The plan was for my friend Stephanie and me to see the sun rise at the top of Phnom Bakeng, which has a fantastic view of the surrounding jungle and of Angkor Wat, the main attraction.  The roads are unpaved for huge stretches, making it a bit of an intense ride, particularly when you’re relying on the headlights of passing tuk-tuks to light the way.

At the place where most tourists were stopping to walk over to Angkor Wat, I asked a driver where Phnom Bakeng was, and he pointed down the road a bit.  We biked on and turned off when we saw what we assumed was our destination.  It was still dark, but according to the map we were in the right spot.  We climbed up the pyramid’s tiny stairs, most of which were hardly big enough to get a solid hand-hold, and none of which were big enough to actually step on without turning a foot sideways.  I’ve done more intelligent things in my life.  Not recently, mind you.  But we got to the top without falling, and we were the only two people in all of Cambodia to be there that day for the sunrise.

It wasn’t much of a sunrise, visually speaking.  The pyramid is surrounded on all sides by jungle, the foliage of which does a good job of keeping the pyramid in the shade.  We sat at the top and listened to the birds and animals waking up, a chirp here, a hoot there, and waited as the sky gradually started to lighten.

All of a sudden we heard a sound that came out of nowhere, something distant and unplaceable.  It was fairly quiet at first, and I thought that maybe it was something mechanical, a factory somewhere or a truck backing up.  And then the sun started to come up, and the noise was everywhere, crescendoing loud enough that you wanted to hide from it, loud enough that I thought about earplugs, loud enough for it to be scary and awe-inspiring and holy.  It lasted for a good ten minutes, until the sky was light.  And then just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.  I’m still not sure exactly what it was.  Maybe cicadas of some sort, but I’m nobody’s entymologist.  To me it was what it was, and what it was was a symphony, millions of violins all trilling an E, nature announcing the sun epically, dramatically, as it should be announced.

We sat still for a few more minutes, a bit in shock.  Eventually we climbed down, carefully, and walked over to the sign that we hadn’t been able to read in the dark.  Turns out we weren’t at Phnom Bakeng at all, but Baksei Chamkrong—by most accounts one of the less spectacular temples of the area.  Thank god for that.

Istanbul, Turkey, November 26th 2008. How do you get people to pray five times a day?  Once is a lot to hope for, twice is pushing it.  Five?  It seems inconceivable to me, secular American.  And yet every day devout Muslims all over the world do it.  The adhan—call to prayer—helps.  In times past the Muezzin would climb to the top of the minaret and belt it for everyone to hear.  These days the mosques in Istanbul rock the phat sound systems up in the minarets, so there’s no need for climbing.  A couple of loudspeakers, a couple of tweeters and a subwoofer and you’re all set.

The call doesn’t so much go out as it does erupt from the speakers.  In some parts of the city it is louder than others, I suppose depending on which mosques are clustered where and how big they are, the acoustics of the surrounding streets, and so forth.  It blasts and radiates outward, beautiful and even a little frightening in both its suddenness and its passion, the sadness of the song something similar to the Hazan’s chant in Jewish synagogues.  Both Hazan and Muezzin sing with the weight of their people on their backs and in their voices.

As a listener, on the street you are first startled by the adhan coming from the mosque closest to you, then a second later you hear the same call to prayer coming from the mosque down the street, and then the one a few blocks away, then one in the adjacent neighborhood, until the whole city seems to be crying out in longing for salvation and guidance through Allah.  The only other time I’d heard adhan was on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn; this is a wholly different experience.

[Sorry about the wind, I lost my windscreen!  Trying to find a piece of foam to MacGyver a replacement… -Ed.]

Istanbul, Turkey, November 24th 2008. Whoever designed the turnstiles you hear here deserves some sort of award for the everyday application of genius.  Istanbul has an estimated population of somewhere between 12 and 19 million people.  The difference between those two numbers is mind-bogglingly just shy of the estimated population of New York City.  It’s not hard to imagine how fatiguing life here could potentially be; the traffic, the overcrowding, the pollution, the magnitude.  Somewhere along the way during its very long history you’d think that someone might have suggested putting a little more thought into city planning.

And yet!  Just listen to these turnstiles beeping and whistling and chirping back their different sounds in endless combinations, like the pulling of levers on slot machines.  I couldn’t decipher the patterns of what determines the particular sound each one emits.  Not too shabby, Istanbul.  Commuting via the metro and tramway and ferry is necessarily going to be at least slightly more pleasant than if the turnstiles sing just a single note, endlessly repeated throughout the day.  And who knows, maybe you get lucky and hit the jackpot?

Hydra, Greece, November 18th 2008. I’m going to stop apologizing for being delinquent in posting.  Sometimes living gets in the way.  You know what I mean, twitterers?

Here’s a quickie just to get back in the swing of things.  After Paris and a few days in Orniac, a tiny town of maybe 100 people in the midi-Pyrenees region of France, I skipped over to Athens, Greece, to meet up with my friend Moira and to play a show with dalek at the An Club.  To go from Orniac, which probably looks exactly as it did 300 years ago, to Athens, a crowded and polluted modern city, was a bit of a shock in its own right.  But immediately after, Moira and I took the ferry over to the gorgeous island of Hydra, where I am fairly certain the human beings are outnumbered by the stray cats, and are unquestionably outnumbered if you include the donkeys, chickens, and stray dogs.  The transition felt something akin to being dunked back and forth in hot then cold then hot water.

Moira and I took a few amazing hikes, including one up the hill away from the port to where the farmers work, picking olives and nuts and fruit to bring back down the hill on their donkeys.  We took a wrong turn and somehow ended up on a sidewalk that, judging by the eruption of barking and cawing and hissing, was a farmer’s private path.  The caged and leashed dogs, the penned chickens, the cats huddling together—animals everywhere.  I was too slow on the draw in getting my audio recorder out; I only caught about thirty seconds of it before the farmer peeked his head out to see what was happening.  He pointed in another direction and smiled, showing us the way up the hill.