"Nino Nardini and Roger Roger - Jungle Obsession" album cover
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
Nino Nardini, a French pioneer of production music and naïve electronics, collaborated with fellow French composer and conductor Roger Roger (known for writing songs for Edith Piaf and composing the soundtracks for many radio shows, films, and TV shows) to release an ‘exotica’ album together. It was 1971, and by that time, the style made famous by artists such as Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, glorifying the lost paradise of the jungle, was already being seen as harmonious utopian retro. However, in Malaysia itself, the period of NEP was beginning along with industrial development, and a composition by the same name could be seen as a bucolic requiem to the native mangrove jungle.