John Pai

The premise of Eastern Echoes with Diana Ratsamee, the new music program at KEXP, sounds simple: a three-hour weekly journey through the vast realm of music from Asia and the Asian diaspora. As a conduit for a multicultural community, it’s more than a show, creating an impact that runs deep with global reverberations. Long overdue and largely ignored, particularly in the vernacular of the Western world of music, the Asian diaspora is all around us, ever-present in our overseas communities.

There’s a saying that everything old is new again. If we look back we can discover all that we forgot to learn from history and apply it in a new context to actually move forward again. A great lesson that seems to repeat itself over and over again throughout human history. So it is true within the world of the visual medium of documenting what we see in the world as an object that we can preserve and hold on to.