El Fabuloso!
Celer, Dina Ögon, Grupo Celeste, Barry Can’t Swim, WaqWaq Kingdom, New Undomondo Discover Weekly, Witchmania, RIP Silent Servant & The Soft Moon
Hey, hope you are finally settled in the year 2024 of our lord. Time is accelerating again and look we are already in February. I’m battling with some addictive and compulsive traits of mine - first and foremost the internet addiction - and here are some music that have been helpful, to get by.
On lighter news, for some reason I’ve started writing in italic, because it looks better?
And also stopped embeding youtube videos into the mails, you can check the links for more videos etc. I don’t know, I’m tired.
IN HEAVY ROTATION
♩CELER (DRONE, AMBIENT) Celer was instrumental in getting me into the beautiful sub-genre of drone years ago with their 2008 album Nacreous Clouds. Here's a 2024 reissue of Gems, which is very suitable for an early morning walk if you can manage it.
♩DINA ÖGON (SWEDISH INDIE POP): My favourite indie outfit has their 3rd album out and I’ve already been listening to it too much. Swedish artists Anna Ahnlund, Daniel Ögren and Co. are the finest in business now, with an unmistakable jazzy sound and cozy little hooks here and there. I don’t know how they make it seem so easy, but they do!
♩GRUPO CELESTE (PERU, CHICHA, CUMBIA): Reissued last year by the Discos Fantasticos label, this 1974 album has everything you’d expect from the Psychedelic sub genre of Cumbia called Chicha.
♩BARRY CAN’T SWIM (UK, HOUSE, ELECTRONIC) I don’t know how this fella creeped into the Primavera Lineup -where I first saw his name- without me noticing him before, but now that I’ve seen him, he seems to be everywhere! Seems I’m getting older and not catching trends as quick or I’m getting burnt out of the main stage house/electronic music - a la Four Tet, Bicep, Fred Again - that now seems to be in tune with the festival goers.
♩HOOKED ON THE LYRICS:
Smoke weed, eat haribo X unconsciously, feel guilty.
WaqWaq Kingdom, Japanese duo making cooky digital “tribal bass" are weird. Modern day haiku/tiktok/bass.
♩UNDOMONDO DISCOVER WEEKLY: I’ve titled 2024’s first playlist after “Life is a horizontal fall”. It is such a poetic definition of life from the title of a tune by ambient artist Canaan Balsam. This is relatively shorter feat. 15 songs and 60 mins. New material from Dina Ögon, Jordan Rakei, Black Grape (Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder), Joel Ross, Yussef Dayes and some 2023 stuff from Fulgeance, Sudanese keyboardis wizard Jantra, Labelle, Irish folkers Lankum (can’t get over them), Fantastic Twins and Ricardo Villalobos’ reimagining of A Mountain of One. Bit electronic, bit jazzy, bit ambient - as always.
♩UNDOMONDO BEST OF 2023: Archived here if you wanna go back to it. 172 handpicked songs from 20+ genres.
♩WITCHMANIA: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Legendary 1970s Zamrock band Witch:
The genre of music isn’t easy to pin down—it’s garage rock, it’s blues, it’s funk, it’s psych. WITCH even goes full-on disco in the group’s final two LPs in the 1980s. The diverse sound of WITCH, alongside contemporaries like the Oscillations, Ngozi Family, and Amanaz, has come to be known simply as Zamrock, a style indebted to both foreign rock music and the musical traditions of the seventy-two ethnic groups in the country.
“We didn’t even know we were playing Zamrock,” says Chanda in the alley after the show, shortly after hugging a fan who claimed to listen to WITCH every day. “The genre came much, much later. We just played pop and rock, with a fusion of traditional rhythms and melodies.”
♩READ: How Spotify helped turn Afrobeats into a global phenomenon
MIX: ♩Golden World - a superb collection of uplifting Ethiopian instrumentals from the tone poem cassette archive & beyond
♩READ: Why is Music Journalism Collapsing
PLAYLIST: A tribute to Francois K. by Faith Fanzine
LIVES LIVED: In a tragic turn of events, Silent Servant, his partner Simone Ling and The Soft Moon all passed away together, last month of a suspected “accidentel fentanyl overdose”. The Fentanyl epidemic in America continues to take lives, with counterfeit drugs tainted with Fentanyl kill unknowing people. Respects poured in from all over the world, after these terrible news. Very sorry to see such talented peoples lives cut short. :(