BWZ  Interview: Jesse Reuben Wilson
		As Gabriel's Real World lays directly north of London in the rural area of Box, ARC Music lays directly to the south of London in a rural area of its own. In an interview conducted via phone and email, I was lucky to catch up with Jesse Reuben Wilson, Director of Media for ARC Music. I asked him for an overview of world music as it relates to ARC, and about their company's logo, "The Name For Top Quality World Music & Folklore". "With the evolution of music and technology in the 20th Century many natural genres of music have been lost to a degree," Wilson explains. "The term world music has been throwing light on a vast area of cultural heritage which is in fact the source point for many of today's contemporary styles and a revival of sorts is showing up in music, culture, fashion, and art because of world music and the world is becoming more global and multi-cultural, which is a wonderful thing. Our role at ARC Music is to preserve the ethnic music of the world's different cultures. There is so much to be heard outside the realm of 20th century popular music and it should be heard as an education into the history and culture of Earth. Moreover, it should be heard as a passionate, living, soulful and spiritual entity of its own. This "listening expansion" brings about a greater understanding of life and opens the door to many new experiences." ARC endorses a drug-free policy. They state "Our goal--Aesthetic music in a drug-free culture". Many people would say drug or drink go hand in hand with music. What led to endorsing a drug-free policy? Certainly a backlash of casual drug use can be seen in today's culture. Drugs are not as harmless as previously thought. Wilson explains: "Drugs are rife in all society today and they are numbing the minds of many generations. Drugs are mostly connected with music and are taken whilst listening to music. This behavior is real to the degree that some forms of music are designed with drugs in mind and vice-versa. Club culture is, to be brutal, drug culture. Drugs are creating a numbed generation, thus creating a numbed society which ultimately could lower the survival of society. World music is providing a new extension in 20th century music, it is reaffirming the beauty in natural sound and natural life. It is an education and release from the narrow mindedness of 20th century pop and club culture. And to top it all off, it's wonderful music." I agree with his statements about drugs, but can't help thinking that without drugs, would there be Sgt. Pepper's or Dark Side of the Moon? I ask about the commercialization of world music? Is it being exploited or left pure? And if it is left "pure", is isolation such a good idea? Doesn't every culture need to show and express itself? "It's starting to look [as if commercialization is taking place]. World music is becoming much more widely known and is generally talked about as the biggest growth area in the record world today. Along with that is going to be a lot of people jumping on the band wagon. It's already been seen with the North American Indian/electronic fusions and your (the United States') popular music panpipe collections. This explosion always happens with each new tidal wave. It's very interesting watching and being involved with the growth." But then doesn't ARC's growth contribute to the commercialization of world music? "Our plans are to continue what we are doing. We've always been aware of the potential of the market and it has always been our intention to expand, but we always have been and always will be concerned with quality and putting out music that people will cherish timelessly. "ARC's releases just continue to get better and better in terms of quality, variety and value...We now release 30-40 new titles a year, with eleven going out each summer. We don't agree with the summer slump! We are putting a lot more attention on the CD booklets as the releases come out, giving as much in depth information about the artists, music, instruments, etc. as we can. Our new release booklets now contain texts in English, German, French and Spanish. We also have a project underway to redo a number of earlier releases to make sure all our titles have these translations. Our intentions are to cover music from each area of the world. Also it is found by survey that some areas of music are particularly liked by fans of ARC Music so we continue to enhance those areas, such as Belly Dance, Tango, etc. So overall there is a wide variety of flavours coming out from our label." So why has world music become so popular? Not too long ago, one couldn't give the music (or concert) away. Shows were canceled. People didn't embrace it. But now... "The pop market really has spawned the rise in interest in world music. From my observation people generally have been through the mill with the pop scene. Rock raised its head to the wonder of the world in the late fifties and has steamrolled on for the last four decades. Through this there has been a number of evolutions and changes and then I've noticed recently that so much pop music today is returning to roots that are only 10-30 years old, for example, the sixties revival with guitar bands, the seventies revival, and now an eighties revival. Retro rock isn't expanding the field of popular music at all. This "void" is where world music comes in. People are looking for something new, something different, something fresh and world music fits all those categories. I also think world music had the attachment of 'folk music' tagged on it a lot more in years gone by and folk seemed to be incredibly un-hip. However that tag has fallen off a bit and the term world music has taken a stronger hold. From our statistics the buyers of our records are most commonly between 20-50 years old. This tough marketing spot puts us in a challenging position on how to sell records. Most record stores don't cater too much for this age range, but other selling grounds do. One of our most successful activities is in the Music & Book Club market. We sell our CDs to Bertelsmann in Germany, Britannia in the UK, etc., and our CDs sell extremely well there. The reason for this success is because the age band that I mentioned are the age band that purchase from these clubs the most. The market of music has been opened to a much wider public via these book clubs and it is the public that wants this type of music, not really pop. So this is a big contributor to the rise in world music. People have gone through the electronic turn-mill and experienced a lot amazing developments in that area, but the need for a change appears to have arrived and the want for natural, acoustic music has risen again. The beauty of it is that all these forms can fused and are being fused. "So in summary, the want for something new and the increased market availability has created the boom in world music. Also as with every new wave it starts with a few people having an interest and then this gets a little wider and everyone is getting this vibe that something big is going down, so this creates further interest and then this creates even more interest and on and on... this is a very interesting phenomena and it can be documented with each and every rise in a musical wave in history." ARC sells music from every country or region on the earth, including Africa, Brazil, Celtic Folk, Christmas music, Classical Guitar, Indian, Irish, Israel and Middle Eastern music, New Age/Fantasy, North African, rock and pop, Russian, Scotland, and music from Spain. Contact information on ARC is also available in the UK and USA: ARC Music Productions International Limited P.O. Box 111 East Grinstead West Sussex RH19 4FZ - UK or: ARC Music America P.O. Box 2453 Clearwater, Florida 34617-2453 USA TEL - 813 447-3755 / FAX - 813 447-3820 Services North and South America Music Extra! World Music We Recommend
		Disclaimer .  © Copyright 1995, Better World Publishing All rights reserved. Better WorldSM and BWZ are Service Marks of Better World Publishing ....   Questions and comments?"