Benjamin Tausig. 2025. Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 262 pp. ISBN 978-1478031703 (pbk). https://www.dukeupress.edu/bangkok-after-dark

The unpublished diary of Lucy Pizey recounts her experiences in 1894–1895 whilst touring in Australia with the Fisk Jubilee Singers as their piano/organ accompanist. The troupe has influenced contemporary music in Australia based on their popularization of songs still being performed in genres such as spirituals and gospel. The diary provides glimpses of what ‘life on the road’ was like for a twenty-four year old, unmarried and unchaperoned Anglo-Australian woman in an otherwise all African-American troupe. Notably, race-based issues or antagonisms are absent from the diary, which is significant given the context of the final decade of the nineteenth century leading up to the legislation of the White Australia policy in 1901. Reasons for intra-personnel disagreement based on personal behaviour are recounted but race was not one of them. The diary highlights how musicking as a demanding and capricious occupation has not changed appreciably for contemporary musicians touring in Australia—different eras and modes of travel, but similar challenges.

Chris Gibson. 2022. Starfish. 33 1/3 series. New York: Bloomsbury. 137 pp. ISBN 9781501387005 (pbk).

Deirdre O’Connell. 2021. Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 424 pp. ISBN 978-0522877649 (pbk).

Fumitaka Yamauchi and Ying-fen Wang, eds. 2024. Phonographic Modernity: The Gramophone Industry and Music Genres in East and Southeast Asia. (With contributions by Shuhei Hosokawa, Fumitaka Yamauchi, Andreas Steen, Yung Sai Shing, Ying-fen Wang, Jason Gibbs, James Mitchell, Philip Yampolsky and Tai Sooi Beng on Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, colonial Indonesia and colonial Malaya.) Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. 366 pp. ISBN 978-0-252-04612-4 (pbk).

This transcript records the conversation between seven authors of volumes in the 33 1/3 Oceania influential album series, published by Bloomsbury since 2022. The authors discuss the varied approaches taken in the series and outline the development of their own book. A range of key issues are explored, including editor and reader response, the tension between academic and popular writing, the ‘album’ concept as nostalgia, and access to the artists.

Peter Keppy. 2019. Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age. Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936. Singapore: NUS Press. 288 pp. ISBN 9789813250512 (pbk).

This article examines Aotearoa/New Zealand woman musician/songwriter Aldous Harding in terms of freak folk, laughter/humor, identity theory and settler studies. Laughter and humor are viewed as distancing devices that question aesthetic experience and emotional identification; and as responses to popular music historically, focusing on the emergence of “freak” in relation to 1960s counterculture, folk music and their post-punk re-invention in the 2000s as “freak folk”, also recuperating unusual, mainly woman, folk musicians. By comparing her practice to mockumentary and herself to comedians, Harding highlights her own “freakiness”, her use of multiple voices, unusual performing style, “gurning” and self-presentation in videos, also connecting to Pakeha settler identity anxiety and to feminist accounts of identity flux. Quirkiness in film and TV is presented as another way of understanding Harding’s persona—interpreting freakiness more broadly as a mode of response to a contemporary world where categories of seriousness and triviality, the authentic and the hoax, or any kind of stable identity, are increasingly confused. Harding’s work can be understood as interrogating authenticity—direct, individual, emotional expression—via laughter, the use of multiple voices and personae, also challenging Aotearoa/New Zealand culture’s historic emphasis on male musicians.

In this study, I focus on the bamboo panpipe, an indigenous instrument of ’Are’are in the Solomon Islands, as an example of a partially alternative theory of mediation. The ethnographic case describes the participation of a local band playing ’Are’are bamboo panpipes at an international music festival held in Japan. I explore the mutual mediation of alternative forms of music through the acts of performers, producers and engineers at the international music festival. The ethnography describes how the performance of indigenous music becomes possible at global music festivals through the negotiation, trial and compromise of the different actors on stage, backstage and behind the scenes. The mediation requires a broader perspective than that of the music and music industries originating in the Western world and I discuss my observations of how the musicians think and act when mediating their performance of the bamboo panpipes.