♫♪  MNLF - “Whistling”

The MNLF is not an artist so much as it is an acronym standing for Moro National Liberation Front — a secessionist political organization in the Philippines. “Whistling” is not a song title so much as it is a description of what you hear when you press play below — one MNLF member’s “instrument” of choice for a field recording documented by David Blair Stiffler in 1988.

It is fitting that the MNLF’s slightly ominous, if also gloriously captivating, “Whistling” should close out the forthcoming Music From the Mountain Provinces compilation, as it was an MNLF breakaway faction called the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (yes, MILF) that kidnapped recordist David Blair Stiffler and his wife, Elpidia, and held them for ransom on the southern island of Mindanao for two weeks, presumably not long after their recordings of “cultural groups living lives of extreme isolation in the mountainous Philippine regions of Nueva Ecija, Aurora, and Luzon” were made.

News of the Stifflers’ release remains archived by the Associated Press. However, as fate would have it, the recordings themselves have been shelved ever since the Stifflers returned home with them almost 26 years ago. The songs were originally intended to be cataloged by Moses Asch’s Folkway Records, for which Stiffler had previously recorded eight LPs, but after Asch died in 1986, the label’s business papers and files were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and for one reason or another, Smithsonian Folkways never picked up the Philippine field recordings, so they’ve remained in a kind of archivist limbo, captured on tape and held hostage by circumstance … until now, that is.

On July 1, 2014, Numerophone, “The Numero Group’s vinyl-only legacy imprint,” will spring Music From the Mountain Provinces on the public, freeing it from decades of obscurity. Pre-orders for the LP and MP3 releases are available here, along with 30-second clips of the album’s 12 tracks. Please take a moment to enjoy the last of those, in its entirety, below.

• MNLF: http://mnlfnet.com
• Numerophone: http://numerogroup.com/labels/numerophone

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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