There are moments, listening to Sublime Frequencies compilations such as Radio Sumatra: The Indonesian FM Experience, Choubi Choubi!: Folk and Pop Sounds From Iraq, and I Remember Syria, when listeners lose their place. Instead of feeling transported to the faraway lands of their dreams, they hear this music as the mental wallpaper that it is: colorful, flat, and prone to misalignment. The sensation of being there gives way to the confusion of “Where am I?” And that’s precisely the effect label founder Alan Bishop and his collaborators are seeking to achieve.

A member of the long-lived band Sun City Girls, for whom the terms “alternative” and “independent” are more than empty record-store categories, Bishop has carved out an intriguing side career as a purveyor of nation- and region-specific anthologies that defy categorization by genre. Indeed, were Sublime Frequencies’ releases not given geographic titles, most Westerners would be hard-pressed to describe them at all. A typical release for the label, like the double album Radio India, encompasses everything from news report sound bites to saccharine pop numbers. Some stay with a particular selection for several minutes at a time. Others, such as the ear-opening Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean or Radio Morocco, consist largely of short segments, with the emphasis placed less on the bits and pieces themselves than on the cuts between them.

In a recent interview with Ryan Brown for indieworkshop.com, Bishop explains that the Sublime Frequencies catalogue represents “our private collection in full regalia.” This outwardly paradoxical formulation goes a long way toward capturing the label’s aesthetic. Its compilations often sound like a stream of consciousness, the record of a particular person’s stroll along the radio dial. But, like the interior monologues of a modern novel, this sonic landscape is too dense with interesting content to feel like a raw feed. The hand of the artist reveals itself in the arrangement of material. Although the sounds we hear may come from a private collection, they have clearly been prepared for public consumption. When Bishop speaks of “full regalia,” he doesn’t mean that the individual recordings in a compilation have been substantially altered, but that they have been selected with each other in mind. In this respect, he and his collaborators at Sublime Frequencies are like documentary filmmakers who piece together found footage. The end result is a work whose originality is purely a function of montage.

Most fans of so-called “world music” fall into one of two categories: Either they seek a non-threatening experience of the exotic, on par with a familiar meal in an ethnic restaurant, or they truly wish to be educated. Sublime Frequencies is a label for the latter. Yet unlike overtly pedagogic projects—Rough Guide’s music releases are a prime example—Sublime Frequencies releases carefully avoid invoking a teacher-student relationship. Records like Folk and Pop Songs of Sumatra: Volume 1 and Bush Taxi Mali: Field Recordings From Mali are not presented as scholarly endeavors. Even on the liner notes for the atypical Broken-Hearted Dragonflies, which captures the noises made by insects in Myanmar, Bishop goes out of his way to avoid the posture of the objective researcher. After relating a folk legend that, “when the male is finished mating, they make this crazy sound and their chests explode and they drop dead to the ground,” he confesses that he has found “no documentation of this story anywhere,” but adds that, he is “not concerned with appropriate documentation or scientific evidence. The idea is amazing.”

Indeed, the label seems happy to promote its collections as an alternative to the scholarly approach. On the liner notes for Streets of Lhasa, for example, Steve Barker compares the music on the record to the American artists Harry Smith featured in his famous anthology of folk music. “Straight offa the Tibetan Plateau, this is another kind of high lonesome sound, but unlike Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb, Kokomo Arnold and Blind Boy Fuller, these artists will remain ‘undiscovered’ by academically funded folklorists and uncategorized by the deadening brand of a matrix number. If you need to hear them again, you’re just gonna have to travel.” Given that the listener reading these notes is sure to have the CD that they accompany, Barker gives the role played by Zhang Jian, who collected the material, and Christiaan Virant and Alan Bishop, who edited it, a curious spin. To listen to this compilation, he implies, is to travel.

Bishop expands on this notion in the interview. Asked whether Sublime Frequencies releases can facilitate greater cultural understanding, he lashes out at the passivity of most consumers. “For greater cultural understanding, it will take much more than listening to a few songs. People are always looking for the easiest way to do things so that they can resume their recreational agenda. ‘Google it, read a paragraph on three websites, BINGO! I’m an expert!’” So long as listeners enjoy the comforts of home, whether that word is interpreted literally or metaphorically, they aren’t going to make substantive changes. “Experiences facilitate understanding and the discovery of truth. When the average person is driven enough to experience things themselves instead of depending on others to do it for them, then there’s a possibility of greater cultural understanding.”

What listeners really need, in other words, is not orientation but disorientation. It’s impossible not to notice that the Sublime Frequencies catalogue consists primarily of material from Asia and, more specifically, the areas where Islam has been a major cultural influence. Significantly, this is the same world Edward Said focuses on in his landmark 1978 book Orientalism, in which he distinguishes between the “brute reality” of the people who inhabit this East and European “ideas about the Orient (the East as a career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient.” This split matters because of the inequality it betrays. Orientalism derives from a “flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. . . . The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.”

Among other goals, Bishop and his collaborators clearly wish to unsettle the stereotypes that hold even well-meaning fans of world music in thrall. But that is easier said than done. Stereotypes are like crabgrass: the minute you think you’ve rooted them out, they spring back up with a vengeance. On the notes for the fascinatingly diverse Radio Sumatra, Bishop writes that “many of the station ID’s could be mistaken for American or European networks and much of the music is highly influenced by Western pop, rock, punk, metal, rap, etc. But beyond these obvious comparisons is an explosive musical kaleidoscope, still fresh, somewhat sincere and naïve, and a bit resistant to the grasp of the world’s cultural export Moguls.” Although the sounds on the record undermine assumptions of both scholarly and consumerist Orientalism, including the neat-and-tidy divide between East and West, Bishop’s words come perilously close to reproducing the worldview he wishes to dismantle.

This is one of the more obvious examples of a tension that runs throughout the Sublime Frequencies catalogue. Even the most touchy-feely collaboration between collector and collected still involves a power differential. Somebody wants something and can take the necessary steps to get it. They can fund the research, pay for any required trips, get clearances from the local authorities, and secure the rights to display or distribute what they have collected. Despite the wealth generated by oil economies in the Middle East, most collectors of consequence —everyone from private individuals to government institutions— are still from the West. And, if they collect in the East—anywhere from the Mediterranean to Indonesia—or in Africa, they do so as the bearers of a historical dominance that cannot be wished away by good intentions.

Although Bishop and his collaborators perform their collecting on a miniscule budget, without the financial and institutional backing of museums or wealthy private collectors, they still participate in an asymmetrical cultural exchange made possible by their own privilege. In the end, their conviction that it is necessary for listeners to leave home must be measured against the realization that, no matter how hard they try to lessen the impact of their travels, they will inevitably bring something from home with them on their journey. When Said remarks that the Westerner thought about the Orient, “because he could be there,” it is precisely this phenomenon he had in mind. The real strength of the Sublime Frequencies project is that it demonstrates how we end up walking in our own footsteps no matter how far we stray from the beaten path.