I presume that some of these are field recordings; the set’s booklet, though wonderful, only hints briefly at how the whole thing was put together. (“Portlable recording equipment has its limitations,” notes the introduction, apologizing for the regrettable fact that “[s]ome of the folk music selections cannot reach the fine sound of European and American concert music.”) What you’ve got, then, are twelve two-sided slabs of vinyl at 33 and a third r.p.m. that sound like voices from the limitless beyond. Doubtless some of these were recorded in American recording studios, in Hollywood or New York or Nashville, and were carefully calculated to provide the paying sponsors of the project with exactly the native touches they’d asked for. Just as surely, though, some of them were recorded by a guy with a portable two-track reel-to-reel, who’d spent several days travelling under less than ideal circumstances to get to an Iranian village where the locals of the Mamsami tribe hade consented to be recording singing the song about love, whose chorus went like this: ay sar kotal, pa’in kotal vay dodar ordu diare ay na’i gol, gol na’i gol vay dodar nomadi mumurdom |