Shanghai Qiutian, Black Flag (China): A skillfully mapped tour through the best parts of the math rock/post-rock/emo nexus.

The Report

In Bandcamp, Nick Demasi takes on the Bay Area dance music scene, which is largely a tale of two cities: Oakland and San Francisco. Broadly speaking, artists live in the former, where rent is cheaper, and perform in the latter, where the number of venues that can accommodate underground raves are more numerous. This cross-bridge grind is tough on artists, made more difficult with tech-driven gentrification and recent government crackdowns on DIY music spaces following the Ghost Ship fire in 2016. But the Bay Area rave scene is still alive and kicking, building on its history of throwing psychedelia-themed “renegade” parties in the ‘90s. Today’s Bay Area DJs complement that legacy with a healthy dose of sounds imported from Baltimore, Chicago, and the UK, reminding the world that Northern California is more than just a playground for AI-obsessed techies.

Also in Bandcamp, Maria Barrios trains her lens on Argentina’s hardcore scene, penning an abridged My Band Could Be Your Life for the southern Latin American country. The history hits many of the same milestones as the Azerrad book: 80s-era punk mania moved into more complex hardcore and straight edge sounds in the 90s, with many bands taking an acute counter-cultural stance not just in their music and fashion but also in their lyrics and political positions. And there was much to counter in Argentina at this time. The country was slowly lifting itself out of a repressive military regime through the 70s and continued to battle a litany of challenges — war, debt, inflation — through the 80s. Punks and hardcore enthusiasts in particular weathered persecution by police and other conservative elements during this period, but they built an influential and resilient alt rock scene regardless.

Few people in the US could name a genre of music from Haiti, but across East Africa, the Haitian genre konpa has been spreading like wildfire. Paula Adhis wrote about this phenomenon for OkayAfrica, describing how, when the Haitian star Paska arrived in Kenya to turn the locals on to konpa (which can also be written as “kompa”), he discovered they already knew it. Characterized by “smooth mid-tempo grooves, warm melodies, syncopated guitars, and bright keyboards,” the genre has strong crossover appeal for any audiences familiar with African genres like Bongo Flava or Afrobeats (and, frankly, might be indistinguishable from both those genres to many people outside Africa). The popularity has also inspired cross-pollination with local styles. In Kenya, these konpa fusions are being referred to as “Swahili Konpa” or “Konpa Flava”, and the genre has also developed strongholds in Rwanda and Tanzania.

Anna Grubauer is in DJ Mag writing about new bridges being built between Berlin’s club and jazz scenes, which have historically been mostly separated in the German city. Jazz in Berlin has long been an intellectual affair, with sit-down concerts and an academic bent. Recently, however, different groups and collectives are importing Berlin’s formidable fluency in dance music into improv jazz and other styles of live performance, reclaiming a groove-oriented approach to the genre that’s more fitting for club environments where jazz has rarely been played. This in turn has injected Berlin’s club culture with a new energy that diverges from its traditional black-clad techno worship. Much of this seems like an extension of a trend I highlighted here last months, of Berlin’s club environment opening up and becoming more “fun.” With some clubs now scheduling afro-themed jam sessions in between DJ sets, it definitely seems Berlin’s club scene is seeing some shake-ups.

I was today years old when I found out that The Quietus has an international section, featuring the esteemed music publication’s “favorite music, country by country.” Looking at its publication history, this seems to take the form of a monthly country-specific deep dive in a feature somewhat unintuitively called “Inner Ear.” For June, Jakub Knera looked into Latvia’s experimental music scene. Built on top of a strong classical music tradition and Baltic inclination towards sonic introspection, Latvian musicians operate not just across genres but across disciplines, with concerts often incorporating elements of film and performance art in addition the music itself. Alongside Knera’s piece, The Quietus also published a bonus “review” of Shanghai’s underground music scene, with author Jonas Klein developing an extended laundry-themed metaphor to describe the city’s constantly shifting artistic community. Considering how recently the entirety of Shanghai was shut down for a brutally excessive Covid quarantine, it’s good to see its live music circuit is still going strong.

I rarely expect to find compelling music coverage in China Daily. The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece is more apt to run puff pieces describing how Chinese musicians are building bridges with international audiences while upholding traditional Communist values. But this month’s piece by Wang Xin on China’s hip hop scene is genuinely pretty interesting, describing the way that many Chinese rappers are incorporating their local dialects into their lyrics. It still reads as a highly sanitized article with some suspiciously perplexing editorial decisions (such as not mentioning Lan Lao’s well-known stage name “SKAISYOURGOD,” or referring to 8 Mile as simply a movie about “the exploits of a young rapper in Detroit”), but the narrative tour through the geographic origins of China’s rapidly growing rap community makes it worth a read.

In Grazia, Mariam Roy contributed a piece on the expanding world of Indian R&B. According to Roy, what was once a niche genre in India has become an established pillar of that country’s music scene, with local and diasporic artists infusing traditional R&B production with culturally-specific topics and references. Roy avoids the mistake of treating India like a monolith, instead providing context on which places within the country different artists hail from and how that impacts the languages and references that they use. There’s some tasteful blending of classical Indian musical forms with Western tropes, but one of the largest points of intersection is not how the music is made but what it’s doing. In line with R&B’s legacy as a medium to process heartbreak and longing, Indian R&B has, according to Roy, become no less than a “soundtrack of collective emotional damage.”

Back in Bandcamp Daily, Mike Steyels has an article on musicians blending electronic music with traditional Thai sounds. A relatively new phenomenon in Thailand, it goes well beyond throwing a couple of Thai instruments into an EDM track. Thailand has a stunning range of homegrown folk styles from different parts of the country, which a disconnected network of producers are colliding with Western imports like UK bass and Jamaican dub in fun and unique ways. These include updates on 3cha, a local Thai house genre, and phi chawa, which typically soundtracks sporting events like muy thai. Although Thailand has been caught up in the wave of club closures that’s swept across the rest of Asia recently, the creativity in the country’s electronic music community hasn’t slowed down at all.

Hanna Ellington published a piece in IQ Magazine about the rise of Pinoy Pop, the newest Asian pop export coming direct from the Philippines. So-called “P-Pop” follows a number of the same tracks carved out by K-pop, including parasocial fan relations cultivated via singing competition shows. But the Philippines has a few advantages for globalizing its homegrown pop scene, including an above-average number of English speakers and a disproportionately young population that’s very plugged into their phones. The extremely online nature of Filipino music listeners means that singers’ careers are even more geared towards viral online moments than elsewhere. Combined with a global pandemic that briefly walled the Philippines off from foreign acts, allowing local talent to grow, there’s a strong bench of potential pop stars in the Philippines well-versed in the mechanisms of 21st-century stardom. With Filipino girl group BINI recently performing at Coachella and boy band SB19 slated to play at Lollapalooza, we may be on the cusp of a Pinoy wave here in the West.

The Playlist

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The Album

Pumpegris, Fritids (Norway): Oslo-based trad fusion for those who like their Celt-adjacent indie folk with a bit of punk spirit and a dash of Mabe Fratti for good measure.

The Report

Richard Villegas is back in Bandcamp with a characteristically sweeping tour through the niches and nuances of Latin roots music. His premise is that folk sounds from South and Central America are reaching new levels of global prominence, citing well-known examples like Los Thuthanaka and DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS and then showing how the phenomenon is being taken up by musicians from seemingly every country in the southwestern hemisphere. Prioritizing breadth over depth, Villegas doesn’t focus too closely on any one particular scene, instead packing the article with enough genre and artist references to keep readers tripping through rabbit holes for months.

James Gui also makes a return to Bandcamp this month with an article about Nagoya’s electronic music scene. Sandwiched between Tokyo to the east and Kyoto/Osaka to the west, the Japanese city is apparently so commonly passed over by touring artists that “Nagoya skipping” has become an actual term. As someone who grew up near Philadelphia, I have a soft spot for cities that drew the geographic short straw relative to their more famous neighbors, so I applaud Gui for giving Nagoya its place in the sun. The Nagoya-specific compilation released by UK label Wisdom Teeth — which seems to have inspired the article — is also quite good, branching out past stock club sounds into ambient and left-field house that showcases the range of a city that clearly has plenty to offer.

I most often hear the term “trad music” used in reference to folk sounds from the Irish and Scottish isles, but Hayden Merrick covered the trad music scene in Norway this month. Centered around folk-only club nights at Oslo’s Blodklubb venue and propelled by labels like ta:lik and Supertraditional Records, trad music in Norway has become a scene in the proper sense, blossoming into a community of musicians that just like hanging out and making music together. The IRL nature of the scene is cast as a foil to the inhuman cultural flattening being propagated by tech and AI, so it’s fitting that its artists are also championing the earliest of analog instruments in their music. There’s overlap with Irish trad sounds (e.g. lots of fiddles) but also a sense of experimentation befitting a scene that’s actively working to build something new.

Michal Wieczorek wrote about contemporary classical music out of Poland, exploring the way that many of its practitioners are inspired by the country’s rich natural landscapes. From the lush heights of the Tatra Mountains to the introspective tides off Poland’s Baltic coast, classically-trained musicians are turning their surroundings to muses, creating compositions that are as vast and majestic as the vistas they pull from. Wieczorek focuses much of his attention on the Tricity metropolitan area, a collection of cities bordering the aforementioned coast that produced Hania Rani and other scene luminaries. Both Polish scenery and music are frankly underrated, so good on Wieczorek for shedding light on both of them in a single article.

In our final Bandcamp piece, Devon Leger covers Belgium’s folk revival scene, pulling in some truly fun facts along the way. Historically characterized by fiddles and accordions, much of traditional Belgian music was lost in the 19th century when many Belgians moved to the cities and musical tastes shifted to larger brass bands making use of the saxophone, which itself was created in Belgium by the inventor Adolphe Sax. In the 1960s, Belgian folk revivalists pieced together pre-sax Belgian music from ancient manuscripts and Medieval paintings of the original instruments. Today, the tradition survives through the work of both folk purists and more experimental fusionists, who often blend Belgian folk with styles and instruments brought by immigrants from Italy, Turkey, and Morocco that came to work in Belgium’s coal mines during the Industrial Revolution.

Something’s up in India. First there are all these news pieces popping up about a new bhajan clubbing trend where Gen-Z dancers rapturize to DJ-backed Hindu devotionals. Now this month, there are two articles — one by Rishika Singh in Travel + Leisure and another by Shweta Sunny in Grazia — digging into a renewed interest in local sounds and smaller venues across India’s massive cities. Regional styles, candlelit shows, and non-English lyrics are on the rise, liberating musicians from Bollywood’s hegemonic cultural shadow while providing fans with a more intimate concert experience. Whatever form it takes, it seems clear that Indian audiences are looking for a stronger sense of connection to the music they’re traveling to see, and India’s music scene is happily restructuring to help them find it.

I’ve never waited in line to get into Berghain, and perhaps we’re heading to a world where no one ever will again. According to Solomon PM’s article in Dazed, Berlin’s rave scene is slowly turning away from the city’s dour legacy as a frigidly hip techno paradise and embracing sounds that are — well, fun. At the forefront is Toy Tonics, a house label that’s defined itself in opposition to classic German club stereotypes, championing upbeat grooves and a counter-countercultural punk aesthetic that they liken to Andy Warhol (cuz why not?). I’ve read enough disgruntled essays about the pop-forward silliness that permeated post-Covid club culture to know that this isn’t a debate I want to wade into (again), but it’s good to know that if I ever make it to Berlin, I might actually be able to go dancing.

Amuna Wagner is back on the Sudanese rap beat for OkayAfrica, this time contemplating whether the scene can stay rooted despite its recent explosion in popularity. She traces the regional genre’s history through its beginnings in street battles across Khartoum in the early 2000s to the development of more political (and politically banned) groups in the mid-2000s. Around 2017, Sudanese rappers started trialing higher-production tracks that set the scene up for its current commercial success — and potentially its downfall. Many of the questions that Wagner poses about maintaining authenticity in the face of fame are issues that many other rap scenes have had to confront, but the questions get sharper when the artists and their fans are dealing with coups, wars, and famines in the background.

The Playlist

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The Album

Transparent Classroom and Parallel Girls, (You Also Like This Song) You Can’t Be A Bad Person (China)

The debut album by Changsha alternative idol group Transparent Classroom and Parallel Girls is an eclectic and omnivorous take on the pop idol format. The band refuses to sit still, pin-balling from punk to funk to pop to post-rock with each passing track. Most of their experiments work, and as a whole, the (strangely-named) album is charming in its unpredictability, keeping its audience hooked on wondering just what the band will try next.

I shared a single of theirs in a different newsletter a while back, but I found the album itself so interesting that it ended up inspiring an entire article. I have a soft spot for records that keep you guessing, where you’re excited to start each new song if only to find out where the band is headed. I’m still not sure exactly where China’s alt-idol scene is headed, but I can only hope (You Also Like This Song) You Can’t Be A Bad Person is a sign of the direction it decides to take.

The Report

Asia

In Resident Advisor, Vivian Yeung pens something of a eulogy for the Vietnamese club Savage, which was so foundational to Hanoi’s underground club scene that its history is basically the history of the scene itself. After running Savage for a decade, its owner Ouissam Mokretar was forced to close Savage after its last show this past New Years Eve when his landlords, under pressure from the local government to redevelop the site, could not extend his lease. Yeung connects Savage’s fate to a broader wave of club closures across Vietnam as well as China and Thailand, a trend driven by gentrification, government pressure, economic fallout from Covid-19, and reduced interest in clubbing by younger generations. Despite this depressing set-up, the piece ends on a brighter note, emphasizing that clubs like Savage have nurtured an extended community of ravers that’s still creating space for queer and multicultural nightlife across East and Southeast Asia.

Speaking of East Asia, I recently discovered there’s an entire Substack dedicated to post-punk in China. This is a scene I’ve loved for a while, and a part of me was almost sad I hadn’t thought of the idea myself. But is frankly doing a better job at it than I ever could, telling the history of China’s post-punk scene through the story of its most famous post-punk band, the inimitable P.K.14. Verlaine’s exegesis paints a vivid picture of the 1990s Nanjing avant garde, charting P.K.14 singer Yang Haisong’s route from a hyper-literate folk enthusiast to the frontman of China’s first post-punk(ish) outfit. And while the site is called “Chinese Postpunk Anthology,” Verlaine also wrote an impressively comprehensive (and entertainingly snarky) guide to the broader world of Chinese indie rock that’s worth a read.

I also had the chance to write about music in China this month, contributing a piece to The Guardian on China’s alternative idol scene. While Japan and Korea have grown into pop culture juggernaut’s, China’s pop idol sector has been hollowed out by state controls that have cancelled domestic idol training shows and all but banned K-pop artists from performing there. In this vacuum, a new class of performers and musicians have established a DIY “alt-idol” scene that’s grown rapidly over the past few years. Without as clear a path to global stardom, these Chinese groups are more willing to experiment than Korea’s corporate pop titans, creating a more stylistically diverse community sustained by artistic passion and a ton of hard work. Oh, and it also has a playlist.

Africa

Also in The Guardian, Chibuzo Emmanuel is fretting about the state of Afrobeats. If you feel like you haven’t heard any African voices in major radio hits recently, you’re not imagining it. The genre’s popularity has waned since it peaked around 2021—even major African artists are having a hard time figuring out what works in today’s post-amapiano malaise. The article focuses more on the business side of Afrobeats, interviewing several industry insiders about their views on where the genre’s moving. Some go as far as to call Afrobeats a pandemic bubble, one that has burst now that listeners no longer need its upbeat grooves to pull them through quarantines and shutdowns. But others say that Afrobeats is just “recharging” and that a new wave of artists recently risen from Nigeria’s underground are well-positioned to bring it back.

In a more personal piece, Akram Herrak writes about his experience growing up in Morocco’s metal scene for Hearing Things. Not long before Herrak’s teenage years, metal fans were fighting for the right to exist against a state that was actively jailing both performers and audience members. But the metalheads prevailed, and by the time Herrak was coming of age, the country had developed a small but fervent metal scene that’s still thriving today. The sounds are heavy—as Herrak jokes, “an audience that gets to experience two or three shows a year doesn’t want progressive intricacies”—but the community is warm. One of the artists Herrak interviews says that he sees the same 200-300 people at Moroccan meal shows no matter the city or band, which is frankly one of the best descriptions of a true music scene that I’ve ever heard.

The Americas

In Bandcamp Daily, Mike Steyels steps us through the spectrum of rave music in Mexico and Latin America as a whole, at one point providing a decade-by-decade rundown of the different electronic subgenres the region has spawned. Latin artists have been combining traditional styles with modern dance music for half a century at this point, a diversity that’s far too complex to be described by blanket terms like “Latin house.” And while more Eurocentric house and techno may have still been dominant for much of this period, regional sounds are finally finding their place in the sun. “It’s taken more seriously, and there’s much more if it,” says Tomás Davo, founder of the influential Mexican label/collective N.A.A.F.I.

Off Mexico’s eastern coast, NME dispatched Kyann-Sinn Williams to Jamaica for Carnival. The iconic celebration took on an extra level of significance this year as Jamaica works to rebuild after Hurricane Melissa flattened buildings and farms across the island’s south coast last October. In its aftermath, Jamaica’s storied music scene has played a more important role than ever, with artists stubbornly continuing to put on festivals that storm damage has turned into logistical nightmares. As reggae star and Lost In Time festival owner Proteje noted, in times like these, just showing up with a rhythm and mic is enough to lift the spirits of an entire country.

Millan Verma explores another legendary stronghold for Black music, writing about Atlanta’s contemporary rap scene for Pigeons & Planes. The city’s hip hop exports have been relatively muted over the past few years as Atlanta has convulsed under an ominous cloud of drill and rage rap. But Verma claims “the tentpoles of rage and drill are collapsing,” toppled by a new generation of Atlanta MCs who are embracing more eclectic influences and a collaborative ethos that has been missing from the scene for a minute. Most have yet to make it big, and Verma actively questions whether it’s even possible for rappers to “make it big” in a culture that’s rapidly swinging back to country and pop. But whatever happens, Atlanta’s new class of rappers are making great music and apparently having fun doing it.

The Playlist

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The Album

Grupo Celeste, …El Fabuloso! (Peru): Spiky, brightly-colored rhythms twisting past vocals that carry a trans-lingual sense of longing.

The Reports

1. Felipe Maia explores the future of baile funk for Dazed, speaking with seven scene insiders about what’s next for a genre that, despite its global success, is facing a new wave of repression within Brazil itself.

2. Martine Douglas is our expert guide through the Pacific Northwest’s winding underground rap scene in this Bandcamp Daily feature.

3. Also in Bandcamp Daily, Michal Wieczorek pens a history of Peruvian chicha, charting the genre’s course from Amazonian cumbia to the cultural juggernaut it is today (with some obligatory struggles against government hostility along the way).

4. Tom Lea and Chal Ravens dedicated an entire podcast episode to Baltimore’s club music scene which, in the grand scheme of America’s urban dance music, certainly hasn’t gotten much attention. In classic No Tags style, the actual interviews begin after an entertaining half-hour intro.

5. Is Lisbon’s club scene undercovered? Doesn’t matter - April Clare Welsh’s in-depth report on her resident city for DJ Mag breaks new ground, describing the economic and political forces that are making the scene increasingly inaccessible for already marginalized communities.

6. Mixmag contributor Jun Kim comes out with a longform piece on how more and more Korean DJs are getting their start through university clubs called dongari, creating a new path onto the DJ circuit that’s somewhat unique to South Korea.

7. Daniel Dylan Wray takes on another history for the Guardian, this one diving into the forgotten legacy of Black soundsystem culture in Wales.

8. I’ll admit I have not spent much time thinking about the role of the accordion in the music of Southwest Louisiana, but Devon Leger’s fascinating Bandcamp piece on the Cajun and Creole artists that built this tradition has convinced me to pay attention.

9. Rolling Stone Magazine’s MENA branch published a couple of interesting end-February pieces I’ll sneak in here, one on the producers building Egypt’s hip hop scene (Engy Hashem) and another in conversation with a few artists representing North Africa’s “new wave” (Dounia El Barhdadi). Slightly more recently, OkayAfrica’s Amuna Wagner ponders if Bad Bunny’s ability to achieve worldwide fame without shying away from political topics could be a blueprint for North African artists as well.

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The Album

Kohra, akhõ (India)

Some of the most satisfying paths for discovering new music are also the most circuitous. This album rec came, in a roundabout way, from the the Travel & Leisure article. That piece named exactly zero artists, but it turns out the author is also a musician who built a career blending the harp with electronic music. It’s surprisingly hard to find her music online (even on her own website), but she does have a link to a collaboration with the Indian DJ and producer Kohra, who featured her on the opening track to his pandemic-era album akhõ.

I listened to that intro and ended up playing through the entire album, which led me down a different internet hole. Kohra, I learned, is Madhav Shorey, the founder of Qilla Records, a label nd deep house collective also based in India. His stage name means “fog” in Urdu, and akhõ is named after a Gujarati mystic poet from the seventeenth century. Both namesakes fit the record’s patient forays into introspective, mist-shrouded house, which Shorey tints with just enough acid to warp the edges. It’s not an album that rushes you through, which is also fitting. The best things are often those that take the longest to find.

The Reports

1. Sham Hanieh spoke with six Palestinian electronic musicians for DJ Mag, discussing their struggle to keep up their practice amidst the destruction of their homeland as well as their push-back against the victim narrative so often applied to artists from Gaza and the West Bank.

2. Jake Newby dedicated his most recent newsletter to China’s emo scene, which is so hot right now that people are starting to throw the word “revival” around.

3. There’s been some chatter recently about DC and SF being monocultures, which is a false but understandable impression given the outsized influence that politics and tech have on each city’s respective vibes. In Bandcamp Daily, Henry Ivy set the record straight for the Capitol, diving deep into the Washington, DC dance music scene that clearly hasn’t been getting sufficient attention. (Bandcamp has previously provided similar counterpoints for the Bay Area here and here)

4. In one of two blockbuster histories published this month, Madison Moore writes about the shrinking number of queer Black clubs for Resident Advisor, citing a litany of damaging forces from racism to gentrification to the toxic masculinity embedded in 90s-era hip hop. (fun fact - the article extensively quotes the DC-based DJ Juana, who was also featured in the above-mentioned Bandcamp Daily piece).

5. In the second history, Tracy Kawalik gives Chicago footwork the classic Mixmag longform treatment, penning what must be the definitive history of how it moved from the American Midwest to dancefloors across the globe.

6. Nick Eustis is collaborating with the Substack Is It Propaganda? on 3-part series digging into the history of rock music in the Soviet Union. Leading off with lines like “smuggling contraband philosophy in three-chord progressions,” the whole series is sure to be a banger.

7. Christian music is getting an update, with artists like Big Freedia and even Kendrick Lamar showing that music can address religious themes without sounding preachy. This month, the Lebanese news outlet Naharnet looked further afield to explore how styles like trap and Afrobeats are being embraced by Christian artists to push the genre (?) forward.

8. I was on the fence about whether to include this piece in Travel & Leisure about electronic music venues across Asia, since it doesn’t actually reference any artists. But ultimately, the spaces where ravers gather is as important to the culture as the music they listen to, and Nirupama Belliappa’s article is so clearly written from a place of respect and experience that it balances out its somewhat touristy slant.

In other news, I recently published a piece for Bandcamp Daily about the record label Perpetual Doom, a quirky alt-country outfit weaponizing irony from my hometown of New Hope, PA. Not a scene report but definitely under-covered.

The Playlist

Paid subscribers have access to a custom playlist featuring one song from each of the articles above.

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The Album:

ZOUJ, Sabah Al Kheir Men زووج (Mixtape)

Somewhat of an unconventional album pick this week, since it is 1) not an album, and 2) not necessarily the work of a single artist, as each track has a different vocalist. The unifying figure is ZOUJ, aka Adam Abdelkader Lenox, a Germany-based producer with roots in Morocco, France, and the U.S. The songs on his Sabah Al Keir Men mixtape are the product of collaborations across the Middle East and Europe, including several artists that popped up in past articles featured here (e.g. Rita L’Oujdia, Elias). His songs showed up again this week in OkayAfrica’s coverage of Way-Way, a hyperpop-leaning take on traditional Algerian music that, like ZOUJ, I’m hoping to see more of in the future.

The Reports:

1. Jamal Khader, a prolific expert on country music across the world, is in Bandcamp Daily discussing how Zambian artists were adapting American roots music to local traditions long before Zamrock arrived on the scene.

2. Alex Deller at The Guardian uses several recent reissues of 80s-era Japanese punk as an opportunity to look back at hardcore’s history in one of the most conformist societies in the world.

3. Richard Villegas has taken on yet another dedicated column on trends in Latin music, this time for Mezcla. His first piece looks at the growing tendency for Hispanic artists to mix folk music styles and other hometown influences into their albums, with Bad Bunny’s now Grammy-winning DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS held up as one of the most visible examples of this shift.

4. Meanwhile, Oscar Adame Galeano is in Dazed discussing the traditionally-oriented and oft-sensored corridos tumbados, using ten tracks to plot the Mexican genre’s rise to global success in a walk-through that’s grounded in both academic theory and an intimate knowledge of the Mexican experience.

5. Alte may be mainstream now, may Nelson C.J. argues in OkayAfrica that the (somewhat loosely-defined) Nigerian underground is still providing the country’s music scene with fresh ideas.

6. Nelson C.J. in OkayAfrica again, this time with Tšeliso Monaheng in a different type of article in which the two writers look at the local African genres they expect will make an impact in 2026 (hint: there are probably more than you think).

7. Amelia Dhuga of Condé Nast Traveler walks us through the history of jazz in Lebanon and how the scene has continued to sustain itself through decades of war and conflict. (paywall)

8. Anyone who primarily associates Brazil with bossa nova or baile funk might be missing the bigger picture. Mac Margolis reveals in National Geographic that the country-adjacent sertanejo style has become the nation’s biggest genre in a ranch-to-radio cross-over that many in the U.S. may find familiar.

The Playlist:

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Scroll below for the full article list, and for paying subscribers, scroll to the very bottom for a custom playlist with one song pulled from each article.

The Album:

ADG7, Such Is Life (South Korea):

Before Black Country, New Road was showing hipsters that klezmer could be cool, a different 6+ person band was updating traditional music styles for a modern audience. That band was ADG7, a self-proclaimed “shamanic funk” group whose stellar 2020 sophomore album Such is Life approaches North Korean folk with a pop-shaped flair that will keep you on your toes and on your feet.

The Reports:

1. Mainstream K-pop tends to emphasize the “pop” more than the “K,” but Hwang Dong-Hee’s piece in The Korea Harold highlights a collection of bands that are adapting traditional Korean music styles into new, experimental pop structures.

2. Speaking of K-pop, Choi Min-Ji shares in Korea JoongAng Daily how that particular mega-genre captures so much of Korea’s listenership that indie acts are now focusing on international markets, where music fans have a more omnivorous stylistic palette.

3. Shiba Melissa Mazaza is back in Mixmag with part two of her three-part series on 3-Step, this time exploring how the African house genre is uniting musicians across the continent.

4. In Hyperallergic, Carolina A. Miranda writes about the Chilean label Hueso Records and, by extension, the punk and indie artists who subverted the right-wing dictatorships that controlled large swaths of Latin America in the 80s.

5. El País sent Carlos S. Maldonado to explore the musical dynasties of the La Independencia neighborhood, aka Mexico’s “Little Colombia” aka the birthplace of cumbia rebejada. And for those with an El País subscription and Spanish language skills (or Google Translate), Andrés Ortiz also wrote up a deep dive on the music of Colombia’s Pacific coast.

6. In ABC Asia, Karthiga Rajendran shines a spotlight on the rather pop-oriented Tamil indie scene, which has been given a helpful boost by the Chennai-based soundtrack-focused label Think Music.

7. Jacques Denis is in Pan African Music with a fervent, somewhat head-spinning report on the contemporary Congolese music scene. I wrote a similar piece for Bandcamp a while back and am psyched to see more coverage of this exciting corner of the music world making its way into English-language media.

8. Anna Cafolla contributes an exceptionally well-developed report on Ireland’s fast-rising indie scene to The Guardian’s music coverage, diving into race, welfare policy, and the generational trauma left over from The Troubles.

The Playlist:

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As always, scroll down to find an album highlight, a round-up of scene reports from this month, and (for paid subscribers) a custom playlist with one song pulled from each scene report.

The Album:

Francisca Valenzuela, Buen Soldado (Chile): Light but sharp-hooked piano-driven pop from Chilean indie’s Cambrian days.

The Reports:

1. In 2024, mass protests in Kenya ended with 60 people dead, most at the hands of the state. In his monthly Music In Africa column, Rolling Stone’s Mankapr Conteh writes about how this tragedy catalyzed a new wave of protest rap across the East African country.

2. In the first installment of Mixmag’s three-part series on contemporary evolutions in African house music, Shiba Melissa Mazaza pens a blockbuster of an essay on the history and cultural tension behind the 3-Step sub-genre that’s become a dominant force on club floors across the continent.

3. Henry Cooper also contributed a piece to Mixmag on Cambodia’s hard-won success at building an electronic music scene after the country’s cultural communities were hollowed out by the Khmer Rouge.

4. I’m somewhat late to this, but it seems that Richard Villegas has a new column in the Southwest Review about music scenes across Latin America, told with his signature mix of regional context, personal storytelling, and rapid-fire hyperlinks. Looks like he’s published four so far, with the latest diving into Chilé’s fabled indie pop scene.

5. Defending his unofficial title as one of the most prolific music writers around, Richard Villegas also wrote a piece for Bandcamp exploring the influence of shoegaze, post-punk, and other melancholic sounds in sunny Central America.

6. Another Bandcamp regular, James Gui, looks at Japans’ minyo revival and asks whether the resurgence of Japanese folk music is really as recent a phenomenon as people think.

7. Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky put together a stunning photo series for NPR on the various manifestations of cumbia across the Spanish-speaking world, with separate dispatches from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Ecuador, and even Los Angeles. Bonus points if you can find the customer playlist they tease in their header article (I haven’t been able to track it down).

8. Grammy.com tapped Stephanie Mendez for a well-sourced piece on heavy metal’s history in Latin America and that genre’s co-development with the region’s very real struggles against government oppression and military takeovers.

9. In the latest example of compilation coverage turning into a mini scene report, Katie Bain is in Billboard wrote about the diasporic Iranian musical community in 80s-era Los Angeles, which was recently resurfaced by the folks at Discotchari in their compilation album Tehrangeles Vice. (If you want to go even deeper, Bandcamp also wrote about the compilation in one of their Album of the Day features).

The Playlist:

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Album Spotlight:

Wampi, El Rey de la Habana (Cuba): Reparto royalty delivers for Latin music fans who like reggaeton but love variety.

Scene Report Report:

This section features a round-up of articles on regional music scenes from the last month (give or take a week), as well as a curated playlist with one song from each of those scenes. The playlist is now a paid add-on for those interested in getting straight into the music. Songs are arranged in the same order as the articles, so it’s easy to go from a song you like to the corresponding scene that the artist came from.

If that convenience sounds worthwhile, you’re welcome to subscribe. Substack literally won’t let me charge less than $5/month, but it does allow me to set a pretty large discount on the annual plan, so the monthly rate is quite a bit lower if you’re willing to pay for the year. For paid subscribers, your playlist is available at the bottom of the page.

1. Following up on last month’s MENA-heavy coverage, Esquire weighed in on how that area’s pop scene is poised to take over the world.

2. What the Hindustan Times calls an Indian “indie” scene seems like it could be better described as non-Bollywood pop music, but whatever you want to call it, Christalle Fernandes claims it’s currently thriving.

3. Meanwhile in Mali, the outlook is less rosy. Rachel Chason reports for the Washington Post on how the country’s globally fêted music scene is struggling to survive since Islamic militants took power in 2020.

4. New York contains multitudes, and Vrinda Jagota reports for Bandcamp on how the city is now home to a flourishing community of South Asian musicians that are reinventing Sufic music in the Big Apple.

5. Bandcamp again, this time with April Clare Welsh covering the anti-colonial roots of funaná in Cape Verde, appropriately timed for the 50th anniversary of the African archipelago’s independence from Portugal.

6. It’s Hispanic Appreciation Month, and Rolling Stone is celebrating with a new series of features on Latin music, including ground-level reporting by Ana González Vilá on Cuba’s homegrown reparto genre that’s making waves within and beyond the island.

7. Andrew Rodríguez also mentions reparto in his AP article on Cuba’s music scene, going into detail on how a new class of young musicians are starting to revitalize the island after many of the older generations’ artists were lost to emigration.

8. DJ Mag is back with some stellar reporting, with Martin Guttridge-Hewitt writing about Armenia’s club scene through the story of the Cyber Folk, a local DJ school that’s democratizing electronic music production and churning out some great artists in the process.

9. Turns out Spotify has a newsroom, and it recently looked into the well-traveled crossover points between Latin America and West Africa’s respective pop scenes. The article is a bit light on original reporting and editorial oversight, but it does benefit from access to Spotify’s substantial user streaming datasets. Whether reggaeton and Afrobeats “blended seamlessly” or “seamlessly blend,” it’s clear from the data that the connection between the two scenes is strong.

BONUS: Not a scene report, but I recently had the chance to cover an impressive debut by a the Irish krautrock band pôt-pot for Bandcamp’s Album Of The Day feature. Give it a read if that’s your thing.

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1. I’ve decided to combine the album feature and the Scene Report Report into a single …

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