No Room For Squares Session 45: Kink Gong – Myth [神话] (2023 Bié Records)

Kink Gong’s Myth is a hypnotic and disorienting journey through the fringes of traditional music and electronic deconstruction. Laurent Jeanneau continues his exploration of Southeast Asian field recordings, warping and weaving them into something entirely new—part archival document, part sonic hallucination. Unlike some of his earlier works that lean more on raw ethnographic recordings, Myth embraces a deeply textural and surreal approach. Familiar sounds—plucked strings, chanted vocals, and ritualistic percussions—are stretched, layered, and manipulated into haunting, dreamlike compositions. The album feels like it exists in a liminal space, where ancient sounds meet the ghosts of future electronic landscapes.

Laurent Jeanneau, a nomadic musician and DIY ethnographer, established his recording archive and composition project, Kink Gong, in 1999. His journey began in 1991 when he left his homeland of France to travel solo from Kenya to Nigeria. Over the years, he has made numerous trips across Southeast Asia—including Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, and Thailand—documenting the traditional music of ethnic minorities whose cultures are at risk due to modernization. Jeanneau incorporates these recordings into his own electroacoustic experiments, blending them with other field recordings.