Lisbon pics, thinks, and a track

Many more pics in the Flickr photostream.

Portugal is an interesting and complex country and I didn't get anywhere near penetrating it, I felt, so no real travel report forthcoming this time. I'll share some stray impressions and pics though.

Street Sounds

Car audio blaring: Reggaeton. Kizomba. Free jazz. Car audio demonstration at the Praca de Espanha market: Hip-hop. Street vendor's music: Funana, reigning supreme. Bollywood a distant second. A guy in the appartment opposite my hostel: Minimal techno.

"Street" Art

I've travelled Europe from Dublin to Moscow and Lofoten to Naples, and I've never seen a country with as much grafitti as Portugal. Huge legal walls eveywhere, "street art galleries", exclusive hipster-minimal stores selling spray cans... and shitloads of illegal tags, paintings, defaced advertising, what have you. The more central and prestigious, the more grafitti, very sporadically cleaned off - as opposed to the pristinely kept street surfaces, cleaned off daily by huge crews. The picture above, incidentally, is from a seaside resort, but could just as well have been both the suburbs and the heart of Lisbon.

Actual, You Know, Streets

In Damaia, an African-dominated suburb next to Buraca of Son Systema fame (I resisted going there just for the photo op), I shopped for records at the HQ of label Sons D'Africa and the comparison with the hip and prestigious Bairro Alto was telling. Large swathes of Damaia are - like touristy Alfama in the city centre a thousand years earlier - permanentized slum, former shacks with added pavement, electricity, mortar and postboxes, retaining a labyrintine layout and touches of organic colony-building. Precisely the same values that makes Alfama and Bairro Alto attractive are here the hallmark of slum... Shaded courtyards, narrow picturesque alleys, tight neighbourhoods.

Honestly, which is the shabbier-looking of these two alleyways?





Favela Chik

If you felt I was being to uncritical of life in squatter settlements in the last comment, at least I didn't have a drink at this place:



And a teaser track...

I've got shitloads of music, including videos once I figure out how to upload them, and that deserves posts of its own. As a teaser, though, here's some music from a country I've never considered before: Guinnea Bissau. It's a strangely beautiful track that seems to bring together African and Portugese sensibilities in a fascinating Créol way, but don't worry, there'll be plenty more modern Kizomba, Kuduro and Funana coming up shortly.

Dupla di Forombal - Badjuda di Caió (MediaFire)

Bulgaria Travel Report

Three days into my charter tourist life I had to escape. By contrast, the mid-size port city of Burgas seemed a small heaven.

To be fair, the corresponding hell wasn't our resort of Novi Nessebar, but the amoebic mass encroaching on it from the north. Sunny Beach, Bulgaria's biggest tourist destination, is a particularly awful result of the post-communist era, combining tumorous growth and rotting decay in one package of commercial monstrosity. The frequent comparisons to some kind of ghetto aren't too far off, and it's far from being a counterghetto - a portion of the working class of another country is shipped off to an almost hermetically sealed area, where they're ruthlessly exploited by the locals. The tourists hate their hosts, and the hosts hate the tourists.

So at first I thought my compulsion to escape to the city was a class issue - I've grown up doing city trips with my parents - but I'm thinking maybe it's mostly a rural vs urban thing. As a big-city boy, a lot of my street-smartness (hipness, if you will) is built on being able to read my environment, being able to tell by semiotic signs where to go, where to shop and where to eat. Bereft of choice, like in the tourist zone, I feel awful. By contrast the rural people I travelled with had no qualms about eating at the one, expensive restaurant and shopping at the first store they come across - that's what their village life is like, too. (Their wisdom, of course, lies elsewhere.)

Once I'd gone and come back, I actually ended up finding the cool places in Nessebar, too - they were just disguised as tourist traps, or hidden far from the beach. In general, I ended up enjoying myself a lot, the food was great, the sea was beautiful and Bulgaria an interesting country.

There was one thing that really shocked me though, and that was the role of the Roma. In both Sweden and Hungary, they're grossly discriminated against and treated extremely badly, but Bulgaria with Europe's largest romani population takes it to a whole other level. The segregation is utterly complete, with the Roma forming an untouchable caste doing only the most menial jobs - street sweeping, unskilled manual labour, begging - and eating at separate restaurants, living in separate areas, never interacting with the rest of the population. In the entire time I didn't meet a single shop keeper of romani origin.

Which makes it all the more interesting that the roma have so big a part in Bulgarian music. In what seems to be yet another perverse countercultural marginalisation thing, the bulgarians have completely adopted (a mainstream version of) romani pop music as their favoured musical style.



This "new" kind of Roma-influenced "pop folk", which dominates the airwaves, stands in abject image contrast to the often equally pop-oriented "traditional folk" which has an almost equal presence in the media as far as I could tell. It's totally a projection of whores versus madonnas, with the two contrasting styles often presented side-by-side to similar audiences but with very different ideals.

This article makes a valiant (and fact-filled!) attempt at understanding what makes pop folk tick, but I'm not sure the ideas of Said really apply here. Instead, I think the Turkish influence felt in much of the music is a result of the strong pull of Istanbul as the major music capital of the region, that all eyes turn towards. Rather than dominating over an ancient, depleted giant by exotifying it, pop folk producers are simply copying the most commercially successful sounds in the region - after all, Burgas is a lot closer to Istanbul than to Sofiya!

And let's not forget the enormous presence of yet another big ethnic group in the complex puzzle of Bulgarian demographics, the Turks. In particular, the genre of Kyuchek discussed extensively in the article was described to me by a man at the Turkish market in Varna as "Turkish music", and a lot of the gypsy and Turkish cultural ideals seems to overlap, as in the music of romani superstar Erik. Kyuchek, by the way, is a very interesting genre and my favourite discovery of the trip, I'll definitely be returning to it.

And then, of course, there's the hip hop, which on one edge cuts into the pop folk and on the other forms a totally vibrant genre on its own, very present not least in Varna, where the "R&B" empire of Misho Shamara has both stores, night clubs and record labels. But plenty more about that soon, when I post a mixtape of some of the music I bought.

PS. Can someone better versed in central European politics decipher this peculiar grafitti I spotted? Who except the Hungarians (who would write Vajdaság) would want a free Vojvodina, who crossed it out, why, and what does the symbol with the four Cs mean?

Back from Bulgaria

Flickr photo set

Travel report and mixtape of chalga, popfolk, kyuchek and hip-hop coming in the next few days.

Hungary Pictures + MP3s

Sabina is finally back with my camera after a summer of travelling around Europe, so at last I'm able to upload my pictures from this year's Hungary trip. Split between the village where my parents' summer house is and frequent trips to Budapest, it was a short but pleasant diversion and I came back with nice memories, a bunch of pictures, two CDs and a dozen vinyl records.

Flickr Hungary photoset


With no MP3 player or radio along the soundtrack to our journey was the music coming from sources around us. An old accordion-player at a neighbour's house playing what sounded like strangely Mediterranean tunes. The house where The Doors was always played late at night. From the house attached to the doctor's office: hip-hop sampling M People's excellent version of Don't Look any Futher by Dennis Edwards. In Budapest: trendy but boring local acts like Yonderboi. At the weekly village market, surprising Manele.

But most of all, blasting out of cars everywhere: Bódi Guszti. Not only was his music heard all over the village and in deepest, most cosmopolitan Budapest, but it was what was immediately recommended to me by both the CD stalls at the market when I asked for interesting local pop music. So I gave in.


The music is best described, I guess, as gypsy disco - it's fairly broad european pop music with a distinct bent towards roma culture (with portions of songs in romani) and tacked on beats somewhere in the field between disco and trance/house/techno. Bodi Guszti is an artist, band leader, producer, impresario and label owner, and I've got two of his group-effort "Roma Sztárparádé" collections from which the following files are taken. Three are from the biggest hit album, Roma Sztárparádé 2, while the last is from the more techno-oriented and considerably less hit-filled Sztárparádé 3.

Bódi Guszti - Bulizz velünk (Zshare): Straightforward party tune (title means: "party with us") and probably the tune with the most recognisable "gypsy" flavour.

Notár Mary - Itt a piros hol a piros (Zshare): Mary is the young star (20 at the time of recording) of the Bódi family's stable. The title ("here's the red where's the red") refers to the classic street hustler game of "find the red card", similar to cup and ball. Here it's used as a metaphor for the singer's seductive powers, and it's interesting that the street hustler role which roma traditionally adopt is used as a positive marker.

Sárközy - Neked adom mindenem (Zshare): No, not the president of France, though maybe a relative. This one has a nice melody, a long romani section and a straightforward love message (title: "I give my everything to you").

Bódi Csaby - Ne Szeress (Zshare): This strangely soca-flavoured track by Guszti's son is highly moralistic, asking his beloved not to love him as she has cheated on him ("Don't love me/you gave someone else your heart finally/your soul/your body"). "Don't love me" is a great title I think.

I'm trying to put together a set up to digitalise tracks off vinyl, and once I've got that going I'm going to upload a whole bunch of eighties tracks from Hungary that are probably more interesting than that lot. But I still think there's a certain quality to the Bódi Guszti stuff beyond the cheesy melodies and beats...