Let's Get Right Into It
Argentinian punk, South Asian soul, and the latest conquests by P-pop and konpa
The Album
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.
