The Thai Lorde

Seoul song

 

And offbeat, and pleasantly understated, song (and video) from K-pop royalty Lee Hyori.

Gay sound

It’s going to be a fun, sweaty Summer.

Sza – Drew Barrymore

The return of a Northern star

 

The ravishing, spectral beauty of Susanne Sundfor’s “Memorial”. What a song and what a talent! And below, the first track from her forthcoming new album “Music for People in Trouble”, titled “Undercover”.

You Know I’m No Good

You’re no good

One of the big names of young Brazilian music, Mallu Magalhães, is back with a lovely, summery and surprisingly traditional-sounding bossa nova number, Você Não Presta (You’re no good). The song also prompted me to go back to one of my old favourites of hers, Velha e Louca, below:

Back for the bops

Thai singer Palmy is set to return with a new single being teased online…from the snippet in the clip above it doesn’t seem quite as catchy as her last album, but lets wait and see.

What an experience

Glamour queen

Tokyo 70s 80s

 

Listening to records with friends over the weekend, the subject of Kenji Sawada came up. The fresh-faced and well-scrubbed teen idol morphed in the mid–70s into something much more transgressive, a louche Roxy Music-esque man-vamp in the mould of David Bowie, becoming an enduring Japanese music and fashion icon.

 

He also starred in two notable movies, the Man Who Stole the Sun, a psychedelic romp about a rogue chemistry teacher who builds his own atomic bomb, and an iconic turn in the sumptuous Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

Sawada also appeared in the advertising campaign for PARCO department store, often paired with J-supermodel of the moment and fellow face of the early eighties, Sayoko Yamiguchi. What a time!

  

Yamiguchi also flirted with Western rockers like Steely Dan – on the cover of one of their albums, above – and the rolling Stones.

Summer songs

 

Spring has well and truly broken with a Summer on its way. On the way home from work I hear birds playing and fighting in the trees, darting out of shrubs flying after each other in hot pursuit, while magpie chicks in dowdy foliage scratch in the grass. In the morning I am woken by a symphony of bird calls, and the long-missing night heron is back in the Wong Chuk Hang canal.

On the streets of Mong Kok this long weekend, pecs were bared in tank tops and people ambled amid the pungent smell of stinky tofu in bared legs and arms, sweating and happy in the sun.

And what better soundtrack to all of this than samba? Rapper Criolo has released a new samba record, available to download for free in its entirety at his website, the sound of a new Summer.

Summer songs

Aline Frazao : Ao Vivo

Sai Yoshiko: sound of the seventies

Cult 1974 album from the then-twenty year old Japanese “acid folk” singer.

Excuse me…

…I just have to explode.

Aguas de Marco

Its March, and the humidity is back: the Waters of March indeed. While playing this song for my boyfriend I discovered, for the first time, the English lyrics – a masterpiece of stream of consciousness poetry in themselves, even without the jaunty tune:

A stick, a stone,
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of a stump,
It’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass,
It is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death,
It’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms,
A fox in the brush,
A knot in the wood,
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind,
A cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump,
It is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free,
It’s the end of the slope,
It’s a beam, it’s a void,
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope

And the river bank talks
of the waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain,
The joy in your heart

The foot, the ground,
The flesh and the bone,
The beat of the road,
A slingshot’s stone

A fish, a flash,
A silvery glow,
A fight, a bet,
The range of a bow

The bed of the well,
The end of the line,
The dismay…

 

 

New sensation

He has got the voice of an angel, the looks of a K-pop idol and an octave range to bother Mariah Carey: Kazakh singer Dimash Kudaibergenov is the breakout star of this season of China’s hugely popular singing contest “I Am A Singer.” The series has cannily adjusted the usual X Factor format to pit professional, established singers from across the Chinese speaking world against each other, bringing with them their various fan-bases and offering the singers the chance to hit the RMB jackpot on the Mainland. So there are Taiwanese rockers, HK balladeers and the hitherto unknown-outside-of-Central-Asia Dimash who wowed the world’s biggest country with his inaugural performance of a song by Russian singer Vitas (above) and instantly established himself as the one to beat. I’ll be cheering for him.

I’ll be the next installment… ;)

Johnny Hooker

Recife’s Johnny Hooker has taken Brazil by storm with his re-imagining of the gender-bending 70s and early 80s rock years. In one interview he called David Bowie the Father, Madonna the Mother and Caetano Veloso the Holy Spirit, his personal trinity, although the glam trappings of Ney Matogrosso and Cazuza are also easy to detect.

Jihae, “The Model”