The Top 100: Activities of the Top 100 Archive and Studio

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Activities of the Top 100 Archive and Studio

There are two children's game songs included on the LP The Eskimos of Hudson Bay and Alaska. [Folkways, 1955, recorded by Laura Boulton] One is called Girl's Game and the illustration for it I did about a year ago at the beginning of the Top 100 2020 nicknamed The COVID series. Girl's Game is number 5 on the list. Here's the illustration for the second one found that is fifth from the bottom of that list now that the COVID series nears it's completion: Children's Game. The recording is of two six year old girls holding hands while echoing each others lines, rhythms, breathing and panting. Soon they will be able to perform a proper katajjaq. The image I used this time is not a photo by Boulton but a contemporary image owned by Alamy Stock Photos.

A few days prior to the drawing of the Inuit Children I did a portrait the Uzbek Afghani singer Mijan who's Afghan Old Song is at number 94. The song was recorded in 1965 and functions as a stand in for the Uzbek song by this singer that was recorded in 1967 and found on Musiques Clasiques et populaires d'Afghanistan. [Musee de l'homme, Paris, 1976, recorded by Bernard Dupagne] The two songs are nearly identical. Mijan was 20 in 1967 and after a performance at Radio Kabul some years later she became a well known singer, now renamed Sabza Gul. I recorded a video showing the process of making this drawing. The full drawing took about two hours to complete, one of the quicker ones from the COVID series (most drawings were stretched out over several days.) The video is less than half an hour.

Simultaneous to producing the two drawings above I also continued work on the next series: The Top 100 2021, the double portrait series. On the heels of a double portrait illustrating a recording found on the Russian made Voyage en URRS series comes yet another one from the same collection. As I did with the previous one I had to stretch the perimeters of who I could pick. The recorder is not listed and the singer elusive. I stated just two weeks ago that I have not been able to find an image of any of the many musicians from the collection that have been in a Top 100. But now I just may have identified D. Kosterdine, whose Morceau de Khe has been a long favorite of mine. I'm not totally sure but I think that Delsjumjaku Demnimeevic Kosterkin, who appears on the cover, and inside on the CD, of Siberié 1: Chants chamaniques et narratifs de l'Arctique Siberién, is the same person as the aforementioned D. Kosterdine. Both are Nganasan shamans. There is at least a decade between the recordings made by Henri Lecomte and the Russian recordings but Lecomte encountered a older shaman so that doesn't rule out that the two are one and the same individual. Lecomte then is paired with Kosterkine in this painting. Lecomte took the photo that became the cover of Siberié 1 that I used.