Past Scenes and Future Sights
Japan and Japan-adjacent, plus some wild sounds from the isles of Southeast Asia
This would normally be the day of the month where I feature an album from somewhere across the far-flung reaches of the globe, but I’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Going forward, I’ll be making a few structural changes to this newsletter, which are outlined below:
I’ve decided to combine the album feature and the Scene Report Report into a single newsletter, which will now be in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. The write-up for the album feature will also be shorter, maybe a sentence or two, and the album itself may or may not be pulled from the scene report round-up that follows it. This is partially meant to free up time for the next change, which is…
More longform writing! Think proper essay-style posts with more text and less frequency. This might take the form of deeper dives into artists or scenes, personal thoughts/reflections, unpublished pieces of past interviews, maybe even new interviews?(??) These will likely be every few months rather than monthly, but who knows - maybe I’ll surprise myself and write more often than that.
The custom playlist will remain, and I’ll continue working to track down the songs that best represent both the artists in the round-ups and the scenes they come from. However, after today, this playlist will be a perk for paid subscribers. If you’d like to spend a few bucks to have quicker access to the audio part of this newsletter, you’ll have an opportunity to do so. Otherwise, you’ll still be able to find all the artists in the playlist by reading the articles that follow it.
Overall, this is more of a re-arrangement than anything. There will be the same number of music recommendations as before, and roughly the same amount of writing (which hopefully won’t be a disappointment to anyone).
Anyway, now that the commercials are over, on to the show:
Album Spotlight:
Guedra Guedra, Mutant (Morocco): Dense thickets of polyrhythms, translated for the club with a pan-African flair.
Scene Report Report:
Lots of Asia in the mix this month, including above-average representation from the Philippines. Also, since the last Scene Report Report was less than a month ago, I opted to extend it to pieces published before August as well. Mostly, these are articles I posted in Substack’s somewhat cringeworthy Notes feed before I started officially doing these round-ups back in April. You can now see these all those articles in one place, and some of the choice song selections in the playlist below.
Music journalist Saeed Saeed is starting a podcast on the Middle Eastern music scene that’s sure to surface plenty of gems across its first season. You can hear him discuss both that podcast and music scene in this video interview with The National News (Saeed comes on at minute 17).
Elijah Pareño penned a piece for Rolling Stones Philippines about the successes and ongoing challenges for Filipino musicians to make it internationally.
In a different corner of Filipino culture, the Washington Post weighed in on how the homegrown budots genre has turned into a viral global sensation. If you (like me) are stymied by the Post’s paywall, you can learn more about budots’ break-out success in this Mixmag piece from last September.
The inimitable James Gui also gave budots a shout-out in this Pitchfork feature from last October, alongside a number of other deliciously insane music styles that the pan-Asian underground has surfaced over the past few years.
Remember a couple of months ago when Richard Villegas wrote a scene report for Bandcamp on Colombia’s picó sound system culture? It turns out that’s a well-traveled beat for him; he wrote an even more extensive deep dive for Mixmag last November.
Meanwhile, in Africa, Matthew Bremner was reporting on how murder rates in Lesotho are being pushed up by conflicts between accordion-wielding rap gangs.
A Japanese Times article on Japanese idol culture in China can easily come off as self-serving, but Maya Kaneko’s piece is well-reported and has some nice stats to back it up. Also, the concept of an “underground” idol culture is admittedly kind of fascinating in itself.
Scooting over to actual Japan, Patrick St. Michael goes deep in his Make Believe Mailer newsletter on what could best be described as Japanese post-pandemic internet music, which is probably both too niche and too broad to be an actual “scene” but definitely reveals some interesting insights into the country’s current cultural moment.
And speaking of well-reported articles, this August 2024 piece by Arielle Domb on West Bengal’s sound system battles stands out as one of the best examples of on-the-ground music journalism I’m aware of from the past year. No tracks from this one, but the photos contributed by Carl van der Linde makes it a multi-sensory triumph regardless.