From Japan Across the World: The World Roots Music Library

The catalog of The World Roots Music Library is a goldmine to find samples: obscure worldwide sounds likely never sampled or touched before. From the prayers of Ikitsuki Island to Paraguay harp-playing: material that is so rare and unheard of, that its sonic nature has the quality to spark new ideas or push productions into other directions.

With almost 900 tracks soon being added to Tracklib, many different worlds are opening up. Think of the old folk of Taiwan Aborigines, or the Japanese songs of the Onna-odori ('women's dance'), originally performed by male actors who took female roles to symbolize prosperity and wealth.

Then, on the other side of the world, there's the Mariachi of Agave with its traditional trumpet and melancholy vocals, combining Americana with regional Mexican music and hints of 60s Italian pop music. Individual musicians are also championed in the catalog. Take, for example, the Bolivian charango player Alejandro Camara, gamelan music by Indonesian puppeteer and shadowplay master Ki Kesdik Kasdolamono, or music by Manilal Nag, one of the few sitar players from Japan.

With so much to explore, digging into The World Roots Music Library is not just about adding life to productions, but also about resurrecting old musical treasures that might have gone forgotten otherwise. King Records is as much about releasing music as it is about preserving musical heritage.

Words by the late great Ryuichi Sakamoto (of Yellow Magic Orchestra):

"According to recent DNA analysis, it appears that humanity first migrated out of East Africa around 60,000 years ago in a very small group. I often imagine what kind of songs these early people sang and what kind of music they enjoyed. I also find myself wondering whether any traces of their music—those people being our shared ancestors—might still remain somewhere in the world.

Even in just the few decades of my own life, I've seen music around the world undergo dramatic change. Compared to that, 60,000 years is an almost unimaginably long span of time.
Some might say that any trace from such a distant past couldn't possibly remain. In any case, there's no way to prove it. But I choose to continue exercising the right to enjoy imagining it.

Over those 60,000 years, as the human population grew and spread across the planet, language and culture diversified to an astonishing degree—and so did music, blossoming in rich variety across the globe. Truly a riot of a hundred flowers in full bloom. Among these are surely musical traditions that have been carefully passed down and developed over many generations. Precisely because music is made of nothing more than vibrations in the air—intangible and without physical form—people have safeguarded it with exceptional care and sincerity.

However, the development of mass media and the rapid pace of globalization in the 20th century have caused this diversity to decline at an alarming rate—not only in music, but in language and traditional cultures as well.

It's said that several thousand languages have disappeared in just the past hundred years. What about music? There may be countless songs and musical traditions that have vanished without ever being discovered or documented by researchers.

We cannot afford to lose any more of the world's diverse music. In fact, just as languages like Ainu and Gaelic—once on the brink of extinction—are now experiencing a revival, I sincerely hope that these musical traditions, too, will be preserved and handed down as a shared heritage of humankind for generations to come."