[book : davidtoop:oceanofsound]

In his time, McPhee was a pioneer among musicians who had fallen, or were to fall, under the spell of Indonesian music. Varying degrees of gamelan influence can be detected in the work of John cage, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Philip Corner, Olivier Messaien, Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Terry Riley, Peter Sculthorpe, Wendy Carlos, Don Cherry, Jon Hassell and, in very recent times, Australian composer Paul Schutze and london sampling band Loop Guru. A sound akin to Javanese and Balinese gamelan filtered through dense layers of contemporary sources suffuses feature-film  scores such as Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Maurice Jarre’s The Year of Living Dangerously and Yamashiro Shoji’s Akira. This last, a Carmina Burana for the electronic, post-linear, folk-digital age, hypnotically counterpoints a relentless dark rush of Manga apocalypse imagery with hyperactive percussion, electronics and “Balinese Tantra” (whatever that may be), courtesy of Ida Bagus Sugata. [......]