Gending Wedikengser - Yogyakarta, Java (Musique du Monde, vol 3, 1974)

It's very very easy to treat Gamelan as a kind of background music, especially the deliberate, plodding Gamelan from Java like we have here. I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, as when I'm reading, the only music I can listen to is instrumental, and even then only of a particular type like Gamelan. In a deliberate effort, therefore, to counteract this bad habit of not giving music my full attention, I've been playing Gamelan at maximum volume in my office. This piece rewards loud listening, or at the very least headphones, as there are undercurrents of sound working at cross-purposes (in a good way) to the main "melodic" line, both rhythmically and tonally. For no particular reason the image popped into my head when listening to this of a man stepping deliberately from harbor pile to harbor pile, and in the midst of each and every stride he's buffeted by seagulls. Yet he still makes it across the harbor.