condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Gatefold sleeve. Bookle included.

The Museum für Völkerkunde in West Berlin ran one of the best ethnographic LP series of the seventies and eighties, edited by Artur Simon with a scholar's booklet in every sleeve, and this volume is devoted to the Pontic Greeks: the community expelled from the Black Sea coast of Turkey in 1923 and resettled in Macedonia, who kept a musical culture based on the kemençe, the bottle-shaped three-string fiddle bowed with a furious, buzzing double-stop technique unlike anything else in Greece.

Pontic music is fast, modal, relentless, built for circle dances that go on for hours, and the museum recordings catch it in village context rather than in a studio. Berlin pressing with full documentation. Among the least recorded regional musics in Europe, and among the most intense.