Closing time

The fact that this blog has stopped functioning as such will come as no surprise to anyone, seeing as to things like, well, the fact that there have been no posts in over a year. I had immense fun writing here for three-and-a-bit years (over 300 posts!) and some of the things I've posted here are still among the finest I've written, I think, from hits like the tikitech post and the succinct A Milli analysis to relatively unknown stuff like the longest post I ever wrote and the internal sex tourism post, or why not that sidchip post that got a great artist comment? And probably tons of stuff I've forgotten, as well as piles of really bad stuff.

Anyway. Reason I'm posting this right now (and not, say, a year ago which would have made sense) is that I've sort of begun working on a new blog. Nothing like as ambitious as this blog, clearly, but a simple tumblog:

(Link removed, see below)

See, the main thing I've really come to miss from blogging here is not long, complex reasoning, it's the little posts. Digging through a hundred Youtube videos to find that bhutanese countryside hipster electro track or whatever. I'm sure there are people doing it better than me out there, but I think there's a definite value in this sort of relocated context wrenching, stretching out relinkings that open up, while always wary of the post-colonial (male) tourist gaze this sort of thing inevitably invited. How that's going to happen exactly in a format of tiny captions is unclear as yet, but perhaps the ways forward inherent in Youtube as a platform (the contactability of artists, not least) will be enough. Do please call me out if I fail, though.

I will assiduously avoid reposting stuff from sources linked to Eurocentric club culture, because there are too many people doing that already.

Come by and say hello if you want!

Edit (2015-12-07):  Yet another three years later, the Thumblog is itself long gone. Instead, my writing appears elsewhere, and my only personal blogging platform is one about Christmas records: Records.Christmas.

Rebolation

Another dance I have missed! It's the Brazilian extension of the Melbourne shuffle. Originally it seems to have been danced to hardstyle, but in a lot of more recent videos it's electro house instead:



So far, so electro flogger, but the whole thing does take an interesting turn after it was "commodified" (hi marxists!) through a cash-in hit that blew up big time at this year's Salvador carnival:



Ahh, Bahia, always able to make something different through its own imitative copying. There seem to be dozens of cover versions already on Youtube, of course.

Balkan not Beats

I'm not sure how many of you've got Spotify, but if you do it might interest you to hear this playlist I put together of distinctly non-Balkan Beatsy Balkan music, from every interesting country except Albania/Kosovo whose Spotify presence is disturbingly non-existent. Lots of great material is not on Spotify of course, but I think I still managed to bring together a fair deal.

Balkan not Beats (Spotify playlist)

Blogging return planned soon, on a semi-regular basis.

40 feminist tracks

The reason this is my first blog post in nearly a month is that I'm busy campaigning and running for office (I'm #6 on both the Stockholm city council and Stockholm regional council lists) for the Feminist Initiative here in Sweden.

Well, to get all my Swedish readers out voting (come on, vote!) this Sunday, and to keep the steam up ahead of the election campaign, here's 40 well known and less well known tracks I like that have the spirit of feminism in them. Strong, self-confident women all the way, no meek hetero love, no diss tracks towards other females. Order: completely random.

Where Korean pop could have gone

This is pretty fantastic.

I was sent this by Mag, my (hopefully frequent!) new correspondent from France, who's got a wicked taste in music. It's a Korean hip-hop song from 1992, and it's radically different from anything else in the country released since - a kind of weird melding of minimalist deep house à la Blaze to straight-up breakdancing electro and a touch of eurodance, nothing like all other hip-hop at the time. And that background vocalist! Amazing stuff. Mag writes:

I haven't really delved, but I think South Korea is one of the least interesting places on earth at the moment for popular music : it tries sooo hard to imitate western pop music, and the end result is often quite embarrassing. South Korea has failed so far to develop styles of its own : I really don't like what is refferred to as K-pop! Bland, monocultural, devoid of a sense of humour, devoid of happiness.

So far I only found ONE Korean song that I like, it's a hip hop song from 1992, so I'll share it with you. A Korean friend who was trying desperately to introduce me to Korean pop showed it to me among hundreds of shite videos and I instantly fell in love with Seo Taeji and the Boys. But the rest of their musical production doesn't live up to that weird and promising debut single.

Here's the video:

Massive Tekno Halay Mixtape

Found this fantastic 25-minute tekno halay mixtape on this hard-to-navigate Kurdish forum. It's a bit badly mixed and mastered, but it's got that perfect halay/techno balance that I love. Full on with decks, an MC/announcer, a drum machine and those fantastic Korg keyboard faux bagpipe sounds. I would so party to this!

Engin Müzik - Unkown Mixtape 2010 (listed as "bagpipe") (Mediafire)

Techno Halay FTW!

Man, this is some fantastic stuff. I barely know anything about it - it's certainly mistagged a lot - but I'm assuming it's Kurdish. I've certainly heard some music that interestingly touches on electronic dance music in the region before, but this is full on - full on proper techno with touches of trance and tech house, as well as full on proper halay. And it's fantastic!

I'll be researching this more in the next few days, be assured, but before I go to bed here's a video - look at all these cool people dancing to the stuff at the wedding:



And here's a very short MP3:

Sudem Müzik - Yabanci Müzik (Mediafire)