KING GONG – “The Lisu” (Discrepant 2026), Cyclic Defrost

Born in France, Laurent Jeanneau became a nomadic DIY ethno-musicologist as a young man in the 1990s. He earned a reputation for documenting music made by people of the Zomia region which stretches across the highlands of Southeast Asia and Northeast India, encompassing parts of Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China and India. The 100 million inhabitants of this region represent numerous minority language and ethnic groups. According to James C. Scott in his renown book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010), over thousands of years these groups adopted organisational, social and cultural practices to avoid being governed or dominated by surrounding empires and states. Now their culture is at risk due to the appropriation of land for plantations, dams or other “developments” and under pressure to conform to commercial sensibilities. Read at Cyclic Defrost.