But can they play “Tusk”?

Do you love elephants? I sure do. So I was pretty excited when eMusic got the album Thai Elephant Orchestra: recordings of music by pachyderms. Inspired by artists Komar and Melamid, who did paintings with these same multi-talented creatures, downtown NYC composer and violin ace Dave Soldier, and his collaborator, elephant conservationist Richard Lair of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, conduct these enormously intelligent animals as they hit a xylophone-like instrument called a renat, tuned to a pentatonic scale (which gives the music its Third Worldy sound), gongs, slit drums, a single-string bass, and a thunder sheet, and blow through a harmonica. It’s way better than that cat who plays piano. Some of it sounds like giant wind chimes, some sounds like Buddhist temple music and some of it bears a surprising resemblance to… some of the tracks from Bjork’s fascinating soundtrack to Drawing Restraint, but mostly it sounds like Javanese gamelan music as played by a bunch of listless stoners. Besides being great fodder for the eternal “what is music?” debate, it’s just totally fun, and it made me smile.
A really good piece by Soldier about making the recordings is available as a pdf here.
(Note: this piece is excerpted from the May 2007 edition of the eMusic feature “Your Music” in which I highlight interesting tracks by sublime soft-rock artiste Lewis Taylor, raunchy ’70s party record king Rudy Ray Moore, early ’90s Scottish grunge-poppers Eugenius, Brazilian art-pop group Cidadao Instigado, and Armenian classical pioneer Komitas Vardapet)