Thank You For Flying With Us Today
South African bass, Korean folk-rock, and the not-so-unlikely connections between Brazilian funk and UK garage
This month we start at the intersection of Brazil and the UK, then move down through some very different musical happenings in East and South Africa. From there we pin-ball out to the Southeast Asia’s burgeoning pop scene and then back to hear some funk from the south of Italy. Brief stop-over in Latin America and the Caribbean to check out the largely untold legacy of opera in that region, and then we’re continuing west until we’re in the East, ending the journey in South Korea and Japan. Please buckle your seatbelts and return your seatbacks to their upright positions.
For paid subscribers, the playlist this week is on YouTube rather than Spotify, to accommodate some artists that aren’t on Ek’s platform yet. I’m also halfway through Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, and it’s put me in a decidedly anti-Spotify mood. I’m not sure YouTube is significantly better, but it’s what we’ve got for now. Enjoy the full Boiler Room set at the end, and look forward to the day when all these playlists can be on Bandcamp.
The Album
DJ Anderson Do Paraiso, Queridão (Brazil): Gothic, minimalist Brazilian funk all set to soundtrack a baile for ghosts.
The Report
April Clare Welsh is back, this time in Bandcamp Daily with a great cross-cultural exploration of the ties between UK garage and baile funk. The breakout Brazilian genre has been expanding its hold on British dancefloors for some time now, with more and more artists fashioning clever fusions between it and Britain’s native UK garage. The two styles go way back, though, and Welsh walks readers through a short history lesson into Brazilian bass excursions, providing a warren’s-worth of rabbit holes complete with a couple of fun portmanteaus (“brime,” “sambass”). To summarize: UK garage first traveled to Brazil in the 90s in a sort of reverse migration along the routes that originally brought Jamaican riddims to the UK, and the two have been intertwined since Brazilian-born DJ Marky scored a British hit with a reworking of the samba-infused 70s classic “Carolina Caro Bela.” Now, contemporary labels like Speedtest are taking the fusion even further, charming clubs across the UK and winning over at least one famous ellipsis-flaunting DJ.
In another installment of “maybe phones aren’t all bad,” The Guardian’s Boris Paillard traveled to Africa to explore how musicians from Maasai and Samburu communities are using the access provided by smartphones to orchestrate a renaissance in their local music scenes. Artists in Kenya and Tanzania are seeing their streaming numbers shoot up with songs combining traditional folk music with modern production techniques, buoyed mostly by hometown audiences that appreciate seeing their culture presented in a fresh way. Despite its use of contemporary sounds, it stays close to its roots in terms of topics and presentation, with viral videos often featuring clips of singers in traditional dress showing off aspects of village life. It seems genuinely cool, a tale of a people using technology to bypass gatekeepers and rebuild their community image outside of the Western gaze (although having written these types of articles myself, I’m sure it’s more nuanced than that).
The staff at Crack Magazine talked to Shannen SP about the recent album she curated for TraTraTrax, which explores the wildly innovative world of South African bass music. “Mzansi Bass,” as the compilation is called, goes beyond standard genre buzzwords like “gqom” and “amapiano” to showcase a wide-ranging ecosystem of dance music styles as kaleidoscopically diverse as similar catch-all terms like “UK bass.” In the Crack piece, Shannen SP describes how genres in the Mzansi club scene expand and mutate at a faster pace than other places, with underground sounds popping up in taxis, restaurants, and neighborhood events long before the broader music industry is aware of them. There’s also a cross-generational component, with South Africans of all ages embracing new ideas with an alacrity that’s not as present elsewhere. Shannen SP’s love for South African music shines through every word in the article, and her guide to the artists and parties moving the scene forward is as authoritative as any I’ve seen.
Last month I highlighted a piece covering the rise of Pinoy Pop (“P-pop”) that was putting Filipino music on the map. This month, reporting in Al Jazeera widens the lens, with Erin Hale discussing how local pop groups are gaining traction not just in the Philippines but also in Thailand and Indonesia. Unlike last month’s article, Hale focuses not on these countries’ global ambitions but their regional impact, describing how local pop acts are starting to supplant Western and Korean music in these countries’ respective streaming markets. The reporting is impeccable, including a broad interview base and analytical deep dives into streaming trends (although not all the data points seem like they’d pass a statistical significance test). There’s also, helpfully, some cross-country comparisons to validate the thesis. Singapore and Malaysia, for example, don’t seem to be following this pattern — streaming in these countries is still dominated by regional acts rather than in-country ones, with Indonesian groups being particularly popular in Malaysia given the large number of Indonesian immigrants working there.
Italy has always had a special place in the history of disco ever since Georgio Moroder pioneered the style in the 70s. But while terms like “Italo disco” encompass the entire country, the southern city of Napoli has had its own regional take on funk and disco for decades. Blake Gillespie covers the past and present forms of this scene for Bandcamp Daily, discussing the influence of micro-genres like the Naples Power Movement and Vesuwave that developed a distinctly Neapolitan form of the styles that were taking over dance floors at the time. Unlike the rest of disco, Napoli’s local scenes never globalized, or even really traveled far too outside of southern Italy — its purveyors sang in Neapolitan rather than Italian. Instead, the scene developed a close-knit, almost familial feel, a vibe that’s kept alive by contemporary funk revivalists like Mystic Jungle, Nu Genea, and the Funkin’ Machine, who regularly play in each others’ bands and cultivate a distinctly Neapolitan identify both sonically and aesthetically.
The word “opera” tends to draw association with grand, stuffy venues in Europe and maybe New York in the Gilded Age, but the genre has been popular in Latin America since Spanish colonists introduced it to the continent in the 1700s. Sebastián Zubieta, music director at Americas Society, provides a tour through this history for America Quarterly, looking into the homegrown opera scene that’s thrived in Latin American and Caribbean countries for hundreds of years. Since Spanish composer Torrejón y Velasco premiered La púrpura de la rosain in Lima in 1701, opera and its Spanish variant zarzuela have maintained their popularity through decades of political instability and eventually made a counter-impact on Europe when Il Guarany, written by Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Gomes, became a massive success in Milan. That popularity has presumably continued to this day, although it’s not clear if the venues are any less stuffy.
I had an article published in Bandcamp Daily this past month about artists that are combining traditional Korean styles with contemporary genres like pop or metal. Rather than just pointing to a phenomenon and saying “this is happening”, the piece tries (hopefully successfully) to parse out some of the elements of traditional Korean music, or gugak, that allows this type of fusion to work. For pop, that includes the influence of pansori, a Korean spoken word technique that sounds a bit like hip hop and works equally well in a pop song. For metal, it includes the geomungo, a six-string zither that provides gugak with some serious low-register heft that translates well into heavier genres. Although many of the artists I feature probably wouldn’t use the “fusion” label themselves, their experiments provide a great example of how folk-pop and folk-rock combinations allow listeners to see genres they’re already familiar with in new and refreshing ways.
Jun Kim looks into a very different segment of Korea’s musical spectrum, guiding readers through the Korean and Japanese club scenes for Mixmag. According to Kim, strengthening cross-sea ties and challenging economics are pushing these two scenes to merge to into one. As currencies weaken in Japan and living costs rise in Seoul, booking acts from further afield is becoming increasingly challenging. To adjust, clubs and promoters are building connections between South Korea and Japan and packaging both as a single “Asia” tour opportunity. Meanwhile, the movement of artists between Korea and Japan is becoming increasingly fluid, powered by social media, overlapping cultural touchpoints, and the fact that residents of both scenes are often able to use English as a sort of linguistic neutral territory. And while Kim’s focus is on the neighboring East Asian nations, he notes that similar connections are being mapped into Southeast Asia as well, slowly morphing the region’s club culture into a broader pan-Asian scene.
