The members of Marginal Consort met in art school in 1970's Japan. They create elaborate instrumental systems from household items and hardware-store treasures.

Once a year, Marginal Consort meets up to perform. They don't rehearse or talk in between these annual consorts. In 2018, they came to Los Angeles for the first time. The performance stretched from 9PM to midnight. In the midst of it, time contracted and dissolved, and nothing changed.

In Long Beach, CA, a late-blooming newlywed couple work to preserve the remnants of Cambodian music and literature left in the wake of the Khmer Rouge genocide, which they both escaped from in the early 1980's. We visited a number of Khmer communities across California to find out what holding onto a once-decimated cultural history looks like, and how the displaced diaspora has made a new home in California.

There's this instrument called the "a'reng", played by the Pako people in Vietnam and Laos. It's one of the craziest most beautiful most perplexing musical instruments on Earth. We set off for Vietnam to try and see if we could find it. We ended up in a lush mountain valley with a single hut, home to an elderly couple who are the keepers of the Pako musical tradition. Together, they dashed our hopes and expectations in the most wonderful way.

“If music isn’t entertainment, what is it?” Onyx Ashanti is a Detroit-based Afrofuturist living in a basement with only an extension cord from a nearby unit. When he's not traveling the world having sonic conversations about evolution and technology, he's using a homemade 3D printer made from recycled electronics to work on wearable kinetic modular digital synthesizers. The implicit story of music on earth is that of a shared destiny, a deeply-felt common bond that transcends space, time, and tribe, and helps to define us as a species. Onyx works in evolving rituals, from the ancient to the contemporary, forging new paths and passing down timeless practices.

Three generations of artists make up Fantasies in Crystal, although one of them is dead. Erin Schneider and her father, the Grammy-winning musician John Schneider, perform hypnotic live music to a slideshow of crystal micro-photography taken by Erin's grandfather, Robert Forrester. The father-daughter band's music is the perfect guide to the psychedelic world of crystals, a series of images, totally raw and unaltered, that are almost unbelievable in their rich, strange, surrealism.

We were invited to a fetish ceremony in the innercity of Accra, the capital of Ghana. What we found was animal sacrifice, ancestor communion, and some of the most tranced-out hypnotic drumming in the world.

"Tuvan throat-singing", or khoomei, is an ancient pastime in the steppes of Tuva, a country nestled between Mongolia and Russia. For thousands of years, herders and farmers there have taught their children to sing in the khoomei way. Huun Huur Tu, a group that formed when the Soviet Iron Curtain fell, are the undisputed worldwide masters of khoomei music. Bearing the beauty of their voices and an assortment of instruments whose names we don't know (including a pair of shakers made from bull testicles and a percussion piece made of horse hooves), they act as ambassadors to a timeless way of life, evoking the wild and natural world of Tuva with their music. We met them at Royce Hall in Los Angeles.

John Schneider won a 2015 Grammy for his album performing music composed by the midcentury genius Harry Partch, the inventor of microtonal music. Why has Schneider, a music theory professor and radio host, devoted his entire adult life to reproducing the strange instruments and music of a man he never met? We dive in deep to learn about Partch and microtonal music, and to see John performing it on his couch and onstage.

The Space Lady, aka Susan Dietrich Schneider, became a staple of the Bay Area outsider music scene through years of busking the streets out of necessity. Her ethereal, echo-­laden arrangements have won her a new generation of starry-­eyed admirers via her recent “greatest hits” compilation. Far Off Sounds hangs out in LA with Susan for a few days, filming performances on the street, onstage, and in the mountains, as we find out what circumstances brought Susan to live such a unique life.

First held in 1969 in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina, the annual National Hollerin’ Contest is a daylong celebration of Southern American cultural heritage and preservation of an archaic
means of long­distance communication. Originally a method of delivering messages to workers out in the fields, contestants project their loudest, most entertaining vocal exclamations out into the audience to be judged accordingly. The result is a confounding mix of sophisticated vocal technique and wildly free outbursts.

On any given night, you may find yourself serenaded by a living mannequin on Sunset Blvd. A Gulf War veteran, motorcycle gang member, stockbroker, chimney sweep, inventor, musician, and brilliant performer, we had to find out what brought Mister Moonbeam from his hometown in rural Alaska to a glittering storefront window in LA's Echo Park.

Under a bridge near a train station in Jakarta, Indonesia, an outdoor nightclub is the last of its kind, keeping a traditional Sundanese art­form called Jaipong alive. Jaipong, originally a village ritual associated with prostitution, is a mixture of martial arts and live music. The mostly male audience takes turns dancing with the Ronggeng (female dancers) and Sinden (singers), as the music is played with a ferocious tenacity, cycling through relentlessly repetitive hypnotic patterns. We tranced out into the early morning with the Jaipong group and spoke with the club owner to find out what keeps the club alive.

Iasos began receiving music in his head from another dimension when he was a college student in 1965. He called it 'Paradise Music', and it was unlike anything he had ever heard. These incoming signals, and his efforts to translate them into sounds for human ears, set him on his life's journey. Today, Iasos is recognized as one of the fathers of 'new age' music. We visited him in Marin County, California, where he took us on a hike, played the Pipes of Pan, and debated with us about heavy metal music.

Richard Kik chooses, breeds, maintains, and studies the fish at Detroit's historic Belle Isle Aquarium, holding this gorgeous and fragile institution essentially on his shoulders. Richard is also a prolific collector of Soviet synthesizers and other electronic instruments, and an industrial noise musician. In this episode, he discusses his love of fish, his love of synths, and gives us a special performance in the acoustically eerie stone and glass halls of the aquarium.

In 1966, Dave Bixby burned out on LSD and went temporarily out of his mind. What pulled him back was his encounter with a wandering spiritualist named Don Degraff. Together they formed a prayer group and played music. The group rapidly grew into a Christian cult, and Dave's music became its trademark.

40 years later, Dave Bixby is an unknown legend, living in the desert of Arizona, unaware that the album he recorded in the cult leader's living room is now selling like hotcakes online, and that he has a new fan base of young folkies around the world. We reached out to Dave and brought him on a midwinter tour through his home state of Michigan, where his troubled past must come to the surface and be exorcized through song.

Hailu Mergia was the leader of one of the biggest jazz funk bands in Ethiopia in the 1970′s. His band, The Walias Band, reached the pinnacle of success in Ethiopia, eventually being invited to play for the president. Their sound, a mixture of traditional Ethiopian melodies and American-inspired jazz and funk, struck a chord with Ethiopians across the spectrum. Having achieved celebrity status in his home country, Hailu wanted his band to grow. He arranged a U.S. tour for the Walias band, hoping to find international success. The tour did not match his vision of quick American success, and, met mostly with indifference in the States, the band fizzled.

Hailu decided to stay in Washington DC, where they had originally landed in the States. And there he has remained. More recently, Hailu Mergia has been driving a taxi, shuttling visitors from the airport to their hotels and houses. What most of his passengers don't know is that the friendly Ethiopian chatting with them about the weather or the Washington Monument has a full-sized electronic keyboard stashed away in his trunk, and when he's waiting for customers, he sits in the back seat and practices. He has practiced every day since he came to the United States, not necessarily out of a nostalgia for lost glory, but because his love for music is at the level of a vital need. He cannot go a day without playing.

"For eight months in 2011 I was living and working in northern Ghana as a videographer. My company gave me a house near a small farming village called Fuo, where I lived alone for most of the time. One afternoon, the day watchman knocked on my door and invited me to the village to film the chief's funeral, which was just starting. I didn't realize that a chief's funeral is basically a huge all-night party involving hundreds of people from all over the country. I went and filmed, and understood almost nothing of what I saw. I sat on the footage for a few years until we started making Far Off Sounds, at which point I arranged a Skype interview with my good friend from Ghana, Hafiz Gbabillana, so he could begin to help me understand what I had witnessed that evening in 2011. This video is a combination of the funeral footage and my Skype'd interview with Hafiz."
-Jacob

We take a two hour taxi ride during rush hour (pretty sure it's always rush hour in JKT) from South Jakarta to the Tugu area of North Jakarta - an area home to a small enclave of Portuguese descendent Christian Betawi folk - to visit with the band Keroncong Tugu. The group plays a traditional style of the genre, not giving in to popular themes of musical evolution (adding electric instruments, drum machines, etc.) to increase their marketable value. 
Our taxi driver only has a vague idea as to where the address is located, and must get out to ask for directions many times. Soon we're led to a heavily industrial part of town with a major truck route darting through a very chaotic and loud part of the city. We're met by a member of the group at the end of an alley and walk the rest of the way down the small corridor. We hear chatter and drums in the distance, a dog pokes his head into the alley (an unusual sight in the predominantly Muslim country), and a well-lit gazebo-like structure appears - the home of Keroncong Tugu.
We hang out with the group all night, talking about the Kampung's history, listening to their songs, smoking cigarettes, and snacking. The sound of the highway is close by - loud truck rumblings at all times dominate much of the sonic landscape, which due to its prevalence makes it quite easy to tune out. There's a body of water nearby which acts as a breeding ground for mosquitos, and the compound is swarming with the pesky buggers, we're talking a mosquito bite every few seconds. This makes holding the camera steady difficult! If you look closely you can see the singer of Kroncong Tugu swallow a mosquito during the performance!
Terima kasih untuk semua, Keroncong Tugu!

We boarded 70,000 Tons Of Metal, a heavy-metal cruise ship sailing from Miami to the Turks and Cacos Islands, and drifted into the middle of the deep, black sea. We met metalheads of all persuasions, got seasick, and even banged our heads a little. Come witness the strangest luxury cruise of all time.

There's a gang of guys and gals in Tampa who, frustrated at the lack of venues for their experimental sounds, took to the streets in the early 2000's to perform under bridges, in alleyways, in construction sites, and scores of other semi-public spaces. We went down to Tampa to meet these mavericks and to see how an outdoor, illegal noise show differed from a dark and stuffy one in a crowded basement or bar.

In Middlesboro, Kentucky, the Full Gospel Tabernacle has a dangerous method for showing their faith in God. They raise and handle deadly snakes with their bare hands. We travelled to Middlesboro to meet Pastor Jaime Coots and his congregation, and to hear the music they play in waves of rockabilly, rock-and-roll, blues and gospel. This incredible music forms the soundtrack to their lives and faith. We were honored to be invited to watch and listen.