Goldee: Master of the soft vocal polyrhythm

I think I may have found a new favourite contemporary vocalist, just last week. I as listening to the album L'Anné du Zouk 2010 in the background at work when one track just totally leapt out at me and floored me. Let me present you Haw by Goldee:

Goldee - Haw (Mediafire)


So what's the deal, you ask? The production is stale and sounds several years old, and even lacks that bassiness that makes zouklove wonderful. But the vocalist!

She's not got great range or great dynamic expressiveness, I'll grant you. But she does one thing immensely, immensely well - she takes fast-moving, rhythmically precise singing to another level entirely by making it sound perfectly effortless and simple. Soft as a simple voice, yet extremely complex in the perfect precision with which she places her notes. And she does it fucking polyrhythmically!

Take the chorus, for instance. Set against the classic, diatonic rhythm of 3+3+2, with its emphasis on the first, fourth and seventh beats in a eight-divided bar, she sings a melody with subtle but clear emphasis on the second and sixth beats of the bar! Now, not only is this a twice-removed syncopation against the meter, but it also syncopates/interlocks/change-rhythms/whatever against the main, already syncopated rhythm! The result is bloody fantastic, she completely runs counter to the main rhythm and makes it sound effortless as fuck. Magic.

Bonus: Another dude that can sound like Autotune with just his natural voice.

Bakary - Femme de la Nuit (Mediafire)

More Bhutanese music videos

It's been a couple of years since I last really seriously looked into the music scene of Bhutan, whose Sebastien Tellier-meets-Miami Bass drum machine-driven pop still makes it one of my favourite Asian countries. I've done a few half-hearted searches for scraps, but then today through some absurd, self-glitching youtube-mp3-leeching site I found a bunch of new search words that have turned up more excellent material.

So here you go, a bunch more Bhutanese tracks, hopefully whetting your appetites for even bigger amounts.

Jejemon, jejcaps, jejebet

While browsing for something completely different this afternoon, I came across yet another awesome borderline permutation of the worldwide skinnyjeans style/social position matrix, which I inevitably spotted inevitably through an anti-video. The jejemons of the Phillipines are perhaps not as musically interesting as some of the other groups in the matrix, but their linguistic inventiveness (they've even got their own alphabet, sorry jejebet, and a weird mixed Tagalog-English sociolect) and their fun fashion totally makes up for it. Although the Indonesian Department of Education doesn't seem to think so.

And of course the name, involving a Spanish-Tagalog-English-Japanese linguistic clash, is pretty awesome in itself. These videos show some of the more mainstream, high-end jejemons, all wearing "jejecaps" and a variety of fun, colourful street clothing.





Note the distinct lack of actual Skinny Jeans in the second video. One web store defines jejemon wear as:

Jejecap - the jejecaps are rainbow colored caps. Bright/colorful t-shirt or tops (fit) Belt with much bigger buckle than the usual Metal chain, necklace and bracelet Colorful wristband Skinny Jeans (preferrably shiny/glossy and dark) Rubber shoes (at least 2-colored)

Which I guess is alright, but one fashion style I've really been much more intrigued by (which I can barely find any picture evidence of) is the kind worn by the boy second from the left in the bottom row of this picture:

And all of the guys in this picture, ignore the vile sentiment expressed in the caption:

It's Tupac-meets-football-socks, and the closest I've seen any skinny-jeansers come to actual leggings, which is surely the next step.

Now please bring on the "self-branding means they're all capitalist stooges" critiques.

Yet another Vuvuzela track - and an awesome Facebook group

Everyone and their grandmother has posted tracks featuring Vuvuzelas as part of the sound palette during this world cup, so this is very much a late challenge and barely escapes a yellow through it actually being a South African track, which I believe none of the others are. It's also got a really nice chorus of "Vuvu-zeeeeela, vuvu-zela" which is a bonus, and was apparently an official Bafana Bafana supporter's anthem.

Dj Cleo - Shapa Bafana Shapa (Mediafire)
What's perhaps more interesting, though, is that I got the track through a fantastic facebook group for South African house! This is precisely the sort of thing the all-pervasive nature of Facebook should facilitate, at least in theory, and if anyone has more good MP3-exchanging groups from less-well-known countries give me a shout out.

Tikitech while I was away

The animals never stop coming in faux-African music, do they? Here's a bunch from the last month or so. Bonus (for DJ UMB): none of them are taken directly off Gen Bass.

I could probably fill a whole page with just material that associates the current World Cup with safari animals (instead of, you know, creatures that actually play football) but that veers outside the mission of this series a little bit. Here, though, is a World Cup cash-in compilation released by a Berlin label that fits riiiiight in there:


[Compilation on Faluma Africa. Via Soca Revolution Sound System]

Note that the compo contains one (1) African artist. Who's white. Note also the prominent hummingbird; hummingbirds are endemic to the Americas.

This next one is a bit borderline, 'cause the African-fakeness is not worn on the sleeve. Still, that is one mighty big African animal, and Baobinga is of course certainly in the global ghettotech blogging game.


[Event poster, Luz Control. Via Bass music]

And finally, here's an Austrian tribal-house street album cover featuring monkeys. And a ship, you say? Yeah, that's not a colonialist symbol at all.


[Album cover, Tipanic. Via Ghetto Bazaar]

These things really seem to come to the forefront in Summer. I'm sure July will offer its share of tikitech visual delight.