Yi Yi Thant & Win Win Aung | Mya Buddha, Akha To Nei Mya

Reupped, because it pains me to think of you without it, here.

[Originally posted March 2013.] Is innocence, as Graham Greene once quipped, a kind of insanity? I don't think so, but then why do I feel, whenever I listen to traditional Burmese music, like it's the most pure, but also the craziest, music I've ever heard? I mean, besides whatever Edward Said might have to say about that.

This album is so beautiful, beautiful in so many sometimes even conflicting ways, that it almost hurts me to listen to it. I feel like I'm simultaneously floating in a celestial pool of warm, dark-chocolate-and-mushroom-flavored saline AND having the insides of my bones scraped out by mallets made by stupid people preoccupied by stupid thoughts about how dumb mallets look.

Also, it makes me cry. I feel like McTeague, after hours weeping in his Polk Street Dental Office. Except there's this layer of consciousness where I can see clearly that innocence and insanity are not really bedfellows but rather hate each other just like humans. Which makes this music even more impossible, like "how can I get at this flypaper sticking in my head"?

Found a year or so ago at Thiri Video, Elmhurst, Queens, with Peter Doolan, who graciously transliterated the artists and title.