I'm a sucker for music I can't understand. I attribute this to my youth listening to Brave New Waves, a program the played on CBC from midnight till 4 am. CBC in their infinite wisdom decided a program that had been playing for over twenty years was no longer worth keeping on the air and axed the show in March. That's one less reason to want to be Canadian I have to admit. I'm going to have to buy an Olde English 800 (in a brown bag natually) and pour it on the steps of the rotting corpse that is CBC. Nightstream, BNWs replacement seldom really pushes the boundaries to the same extremes and so I have turned to Power 97 for my midnight trek home from work. Monday is The Ongoing History of New Music with Allen Cross, Tuesday is Punkorama with Kristan (a little disconcerting in a blizzard, but worth it to say I heard The Locust on P97), Wednesday is The Magical World Of Rock with Danko Jones, and Thursday I'm fucked. As much as I appreciate 97s late night lineup, none of this still holds a candle to what I once knew.
So yeah, I'm a sucker for music I can't understand and after a multi-month long hiatus I present two decent efforts from two countries whose languages I do not understand. One has monkeys, the other quacking ducks. I have taken this whole hipster attitude to it's inevitable conclusion, I only listen to music that no one else wants to hear. Sorry.The first one is Promesas by the Chilean supergroup Los Mono. I call them a supergroup because that's what it says next to the video on the You Tube site. However I think it's kinda super if not only cute. It's b-boy, that's for sure and it's got a guy dancing in a hall with a morphing robo-monkey head and I'll be damned if that's not a little super. If you hurry you can still make your own version of the video and win a prize (not sure what that prize is) but hurry because the drawing is January 1st.
The next video is 2x5 by Ahli Fiqir (which means "Thinking Men"), I am so impressed that I didn't even have to double check the spelling on that one. One of my goals in life is to find a group from every country (in particular Asia, where everyone is accused of being tone deaf) that I think is pretty cool. Ahli Fiqir is from Singapore and it fits the bill quite well. Hell, the chorus is "quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack" and I think that is a duck call and not something that Singaporean ganstas say.
5 comments:
I <3 music I can't understand! People who limit themselves to Enlish (or known languages) only really don't know what they're missing out on. How do you go about finding new music? That Singaporean song = very catchy.
Sounds like they've tweaked the format of 97.5 FM. It used to drive me nuts when they would play it at the warehouse. Have you thought of getting sattelite radio?
@Lisa: Likeminded online community is good for finding different stuff. I go to antville.com from time to time. Brave New Waves was a big inspiration especially Brent Bambury era. To a slight extent I can sympathize with CBC, the show had been lurching along ever since he left.
@Mark: Yeah, the late night set on 97 is MUCH better nowadays. And yeah, I am considering a portable XM radio. They are much smaller than they used to be.
XM is pretty good - we have it in our little Honda Civic. I'll second that opinion - Brave New Wave wasn't the same when Brent Bambury left. I think it was really personality driven - I don't think anyone could ever really fill his shoes.
Actually "Los Mono" is a "kind of" supergroup... as far as I know, many people involved were in some way responsible of many Chilean musical scene on early 90's... and also kind of famous. I'm glad to know people in my homeland are making something more than "promises" about music... besides, somebody else notice...
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