What I Listened To This Week 2025-01-10
Welcoming a new year with the last of last year's releases still in rotation
Every Friday: a weekly recap of music that got me through another seven days of this madness.
This past December, I filled in on all four episodes of KEXP’S Eastern Echoes—a weekly (Thursdays, 7pm-10pm) specialty show highlighting music from Asia and the Asian diaspora—while regular host and fellow SEA Vinyl Society DJ Diana Ratsamee spent the month in Asia. Diana knows her stuff, so I had big shoes to fill. Preparing for 12 hours worth of music to air presented an opportunity to go down many Asian and Asian diaspora music rabbit holes. Here are highlights from that journey.
Haruomi Hosono - Hosono House Revisited
The retro-futuristic warmth of Japanese 70s/80s music is to the current internet generation (2010s-present) what 70s American funk and soul was to the mid 90s-late 00s hip-hop generation. A source of samples and inspiration that lived on in record collections and new music that sounded like old music. As a result, 77-year old Haruomi Hosono, a towering figure in multiple genres and generations of Japanese music, has been getting all kinds of rightfully deserved flowers in the late stages of a legendary career.
Hosono’s 1974 solo debut Hosono House, which is arguably bigger now than at any point in it’s 50-year history, has been reissued and re-recorded many times over. Stones Throw Records adds to the lore, recently releasing Hosono House Revisited with contemporary artists on both sides of the Pacific reworking the original album’s songs. Well-intentioned cover albums run the risk of creating mutant abominations1 of originals that would’ve been better left alone. But this one avoids that trap. It’s a credit to how versatile, fluid and genre-blending Hosono was, and to how versatile, fluid and genre-blending today’s artists are.
Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie Pop & Funk from the South China Sea (1974-1978)
I have mixed feelings about vinyl reissues of out-of-print Asian (and African, Caribbean, Latin and Arab) music.
On one hand, it’s dope that previously unheralded musicians, hard-to-find records, and under-appreciated music scenes from the so-called Global South get the love and credit they deserve. The reverence for the music—and, more importantly, the people who make it—is apparent when you see what labels like Soundway have done to reintroduce this music to a new generation, and preserve the music for generations to come. Artists careers have been revived, sometimes resulting in new music. Music palettes expand along with opportunities for musicians. The more curious listeners find an entry point to learn more about the people and cultures the music comes from.
Then, the dark side. Cutthroat competition between curators who hunt obscure IP like Pokémon, repackaging cultures they’re barely connected to, de-contextualizing the work before feeding it to the de-contextualizing machine (The Internet). Sometimes, shoddy research misidentifies artists and origin stories. Too often, music journalists push the narrative of “lost” music that has been “discovered.” Kinda like how a colonizer “discovers” land… that people are already living on. Sometimes it feels like some kind of Nostalgic Exotification thing is happening with these records. Did I just coin that term?2
Putting nostalgic exotification aside (to the extent one can), it brings me relief to say that this wonderful compilation, Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk from the South China Sea (1974-1978), is a Soundway release. You can hear and feel the appreciation for the music and the people in its research and curation, which was handled by Norsicaa, who self-identifies as semi-Asian. Legendary DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson called it the best compilation of 2024, and he’s probably right. Part of me wants to believe that the centering of Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Hong Kong—while using the term “South China Sea” in the album title is subversive commentary on China’s disputes with these countries over contested maritime territory.
The lone Philippines song on the comp, Regalado’s “Pinoy Funk,” has never been available on streaming platforms until now. Prior, you had to scour the internet for a low quality digitization or land a rare 7” 45 rpm copy, which last sold on Discogs in 2021 for $400. Since the comp dropped, I’ve heard this song played at several events with Filipino DJs. But your mans (me) was the first DJ to ever play it on KEXP (twice), before the reissue.
Shoko Igarashi - Nesty GAL
Straight outta Yamagata! I don’t know much about the artist but this song was requested by a listener and I’m glad they did because it’s dope and now I’m a fan.
懷舊區 要爆的細胞 - 鄺美雲
Cally Kwong - The Glamorous Life
I brought in my mans DJ Daps1 on as a guest DJ on the December 19th Eastern Echoes episode. We traded sets, and his sets were live mixes done exclusively with Asian records from his extensive vinyl collection. One set was all Asian covers of Western pop songs. In that set was Cantopop singer Cally Kwong’s cover of Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life.” It was glamorous. Before the night was over, Daps played this other record and earned the distinct honor of being the first person to ever play a song on KEXP by legendary Hong Kong thespian Chow-Yun Fat.
Bumbu Sauce - Mojambo
I can’t remember where, exactly, I came across this Pakistani punk band and their music. Probably a Reddit thread or Discord post that linked to their Soundcloud page whilst I dug around for non-traditional music from South Asia. Bumbu Sauce’s 2011 EP, Bistee Proof, and this song in particular, “Mojambo,” immediately stood out for its sound quality, which is very different from most music, of any genre, from Pakistan, especially from this era. I dug deeper and found an explanation for this. Although they were formed in Islamabad, the band traveled to Ontario, Canada to record this EP with a producer named Nick Blagona, whose career from 1974 until his death in 2020 included producing or engineering for hundreds of artists, including the Bee Gees and Biohazard.
What Else I’m Listening To
Sooooo many. But this one might top them all:
There are zero search results when you search for “nostalgic exotification” with quotation marks, on several search engines. But I am certainly not the first to theorize about it.