Saved from the global flood of pop

When varieties of music become endangered species, the fieldworkers of the National Sound Archive go to their rescue. Now their efforts are out on CD for the first time.

With the planet on the way out - a wasteland by 2075, said the UN last month - it seems pointless to lament the fate of what we loosely term "world music". Yet what's happening in that sphere is like the battle over Turkey's Birecik dam, but magnified a thousand times. A homogenised electronic flood is poised to engulf music's ancient civilisations: armies of musicologists are massing to salvage what they can.

With the planet on the way out - a wasteland by 2075, said the UN last month - it seems pointless to lament the fate of what we loosely term "world music". Yet what's happening in that sphere is like the battle over Turkey's Birecik dam, but magnified a thousand times. A homogenised electronic flood is poised to engulf music's ancient civilisations: armies of musicologists are massing to salvage what they can.

And the audience for their spoils is growing at an exponential rate. Radio 3 has repositioned itself to cater for their tastes, and classical record companies are desperately trying to cash in, but they don't really know how to do it. For them, world music is just another form of crossover - a quick buzz for listeners, and a quick fix for the balance sheets, to be junked when the next fix comes along. Serious world-music labels, on the other hand, are booming as never before.

This month sees the birth of a series with unique potential, and no less unique provenance. Inside the British Library is the National Sound Archive, and inside that is the International Music Collection, which is a lot more fun than its title implies. With a million discs and 200,000 tapes, this mega-archive comprises dozens of smaller collections donated over the past 100 years. Its first two CDs - of Zanzibari bands and Baluchi flautists and fiddlers - have just been commercially released under the aegis of the Topic label.

This venerable imprint was chosen by the NSA's South African curator Janet Fargion, because it has never defaulted on its original promise. Set up in 1939 to "give a voice to the people", it has built up a unique backlist of folk recordings from Britain, the Balkans, and Central Asia. "This sort of material is usually much better handled by record companies abroad," says Fargion. "But I wanted to keep ours in Britain. Our aim is simply to bring out into the open the riches housed in our archive."

She herself is an Africanist, and the Zanzibari CD reflects what she found on a field trip there in 1989. "I'd come across some archive recordings of women's songs from Mombasa, and I was intrigued to know how music with such clear Arabic and Indian influences could have got so far south." She set off for Mombasa via Zanzibar, which was where her researches initially pointed her, and found herself spending the next 14 months on that island. "Ask any African what they associate Zanzibar with, and first they'll say cloves, then they'll say slaves, and then - in the same breath - they'll say taraab."

This celebratory musical style is the real voice of Zanzibar: what astonished Fargion was its variety, plus the fact that though women performers weren't publicly rated, they were its innovators. She learnt the language, got accepted, and recorded weddings, concerts, and recitations from the Koran which would normally have been off-limits to Westerners. Her CD is exhilarating, with bags of atmosphere - including a woman noisily changing a note for coins to put in the hand of a singer.

Three years ago Fargion went back, and found that, in the space of a few years, much had changed, notably as a result of the electronic drum machine now used by taraab orchestras. Because this allows the music to be taken faster, says Fargion, the subtler traditional ornamentations are no longer possible. But she refuses to condemn the new style as a corruption: "It's merely changed. It's evolving, as all music does. But that's why documenting it is so important. Every recording is a snapshot at a particular moment in time. We need as many snapshots as possible."

Music of Makran, the NSA's second CD, offers snapshots made by musicologist Anderson Bakewell of music in the remote coastal region between Iran and Pakistan; songs of great charm used by fishermen to bring rain, or drive out evil spirits.

The NSA's next two records are extraordinary. Music of the Sea Gypsies is exactly that: what musicologist Tom Vater found when he visited a music-making family on an island in the Andaman Sea. Everyone sings, from tots to grandparents, accompanied by thumps on a plastic barrel: like a home-video, this CD records a sweetly intimate occasion.

Collecting the material for Papua New Guinea: Songs of Ritual, Healing, and Feasting, former BBC producer John Thornley faced the danger of marauding bands of separatists. Weighed down with batteries, and armed with nothing more lethal than the local pidgin, Thornley collected 20 hours of riveting stuff during a 1987 field trip, which the BBC expressed no interest in on his return. That this is now available to anyone at the British Library, seems nicely appropriate: the best kind of gift to the nation. And as Fargion points out, such gifts can work two ways. She is going to make dozens of tapes of her CD, to take back for the musicians she recorded. "And they can do with them what they will. If they want to dub them off and sell the results in Zanzibar, that's fine by me. But it will mean that they too have a record of their culture at a particular time."

The current upsurge in interest means these records may sell well in Britain, but for Topic boss Tony Engle that is not the point. "The question is not how much a record will sell this year, but how much over 10 or 20 years," he says. "I've obviously got to break even, but basically, if I want to do a record, I'll do it."

A slow burn, requiring patience, but patience can sometimes be rewarded. You want the definitive collection of Victorian industrial folk songs from the north of England? Get The Iron Muse - released nearly 40 years ago on Topic, and never deleted.