Yesterday, I could have/should have done some more objectively productive things. Well, I did clean my room a tiny bit (with much more to go on that), and I did do some food shopping (more on that in a minute). But for almost the whole day, I was on the Internet, following one lead after another to a bunch of good music sites. With the exception of a couple of times when I got up to dance around my bedroom, I hardly ever took my hand off the trackball.
The first lead was connected to – who else? – M.I.A. As it turns out Palms Out has a great list of the sources of M.I.A.’s samples, mostly on Kala, but a little on Arular as well. The nicest surprise there was the main sample used on “Bird Flu,” “Thiruvizhannu Vandha” by R.P. Patnaik (which, by the way, is spelled quite differently on Kala, but I’m using the spelling that I’ve seen everywhere else). I was delighted by this song and by my discovery of the way that M.I.A. used a good chunk of it to create the best part of “Bird Flu.” And I liked the Patnaik song so much all on its own, that I had to search out this guy’s stuff little more. That’s how I found this great Tamil Songs site. I liked his stuff there, but what I liked even better was the page for the famous Indian film score composer, A.R. Rahman. I was particularly taken with some of the soundtrack to the relatively new film, Guru. Judging by some descriptions, I have no desire to see the movie (even if it did get good reviews), but the soundtrack is a different story…
At this point, I decided it would be a good time to do my Indian food shopping. As some readers might know, I presently live at the eastern edge of Woodside, ten blocks from Jackson Heights. So, it’s easy for me to take a walk to one of several supermarkets where I can get lots of canned and packaged Indian food to have at my leisure in my apartment. (Originally, I was also frequenting the restaurants a lot, but that became a bit time-consuming and costly.) Sometimes, I worry that I’m going to gain some more weight eating all this Indian food, but I console myself with the fact that I am walking off some calories dragging the heavy shopping bags all the way back to Woodside.
Along the way, I passed the half dozen or so Indian CD stores on 74th Street between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue, and I thought of going into one and looking for some of the stuff I had just heard. But I admit, I was stopped once again by thoughts about time and money…and wanting to avoid the crowds. So I went back home to resume my music nerd trackball potatohood (while eating potato samosas, of course).
Evenutally, I changed the theme quite a bit as I stumbled on a great post about some new Belgian jumpstyle music, over at Wayne & Wax. As described by the conversation that follows it, this jumpstyle is kind of like latter-day gabba music (i.e., really hardcore techno) influenced by Eastern European folk music(!). That’s very interesting, and the music is good. But I especially like watching the music videos!
I love the fancy footwork that these guys are doing. I also enjoy the unique way in which the dancing is presented. This isn’t dancing in a club, and there are no scenes that anybody’s going to find sexy (unless somebody watching happens to be attracted to those goofy European guys), and there is no attempt at mind-altering psychedelia or any of that kind of stuff. The videos just show one or two guys dancing like crazy in some driveway or some no-frills room in some nondescript house. And I got so inspired by watching this…that’s when I got up and danced around my room. Though not quite like these guys… If I did that in my present condition, I probably would get a heart attack. But I still managed to dance enough, especially when I followed Wayne’s lead to DJ /Rupture’s recommendation of the DJ Donnasummer; Jump Set (strange spacing and punctuation theirs, btw). That one actually sounded less unusual, more like regular old hardcore. But it is very good stuff (and nice to see the return of the old hardcore, sort of…).
The rest of my day involved going back to some more familiar stuff – the dancehall and reggae mixes that I’ve mentioned (and linked to) before. And, before I knew it, it was very late at night.