Tim Staypuft knows what’s what. For a couple years now he’s been touting Skweee! Skweee’s this crazy, kind of simple but kind of infectious strange combination of dancehall, R&B, 8bit music and instrumental pop that basically only comes from Finland, Sweden, and now Norway. The big labels to know are Flogsta Danshall and Harmonia, but recently Oslo has gotten into the act as well with the Dodpop label and put out my two favorite releases so far, entirely Norweigan artists. Apparently 003 and 004 are on the way, can’t wait! Skweee’s weird stuff, but it’s all worth checking out, and I’ve definitely been bitten by the skweee bug! Basically it’s homebase is here, at Nation of Skweee. The added bonus about the whole genre is that it has great art (see below)

Just recently, the awesome Ramp Recordings has put out a whole comp of the stuff called Skweee Tooth that’s an excellent primer on the whole scene. And I wrote an article about it for XLR8R, which is finally up. Check it out!

Currently I’m listening to something that has nothing to do with Skweee … it’s Mux Mool! Check him out!

Currently Listening to J Squared, an Aussie currently living in Tokyo. Found out about him through the Yes Yes Y’all blog which is definitely where I get a lot of my beat gems from. Check em out!

Just thought I’d post a few pics from Surya Dub, just trying to keep folks in the loop. It was an amazing night. The positives were many. Both Sander/Eprom’s set and Mala’s set were truly great in totally separate ways. Eprom is really taking this melding of dubstep and glitch to another level, and doing so with such crazy synths that it goes off almost into prog territory for a minute, but always comes crashing back so hard that it just makes it perfect party music. The west coast is really creating its own version of “Dubstep”, loosely defined, at the moment, and no one is doing it better than Eprom.

Mala’s set was dark dark dark. I felt almost like I was listening to industrial or metal music, even through most of the common musical tropes from those genres weren’t there. It was just dub after dub of very slow bass-heavy stuff… a few remixes I did recognize of older tracks but mostly just new stuff. I’d assume it was almost entirely dubs from himself and Loefah, but there might have been a few other folks in there as well. Mostly very 1/2 time, but occasionally it would kick up into energetic full swung rhythms. It was truly an unforgettable and unique musical experience, so much so that it actually knocked me on my ass for about 1/2 an hour and all I could do was listen.

The less the positive thing, and something we don’t always let on, is that once again we lost money on the show… Surya only barely breaks even most times, sometimes it loses money, and only twice have we gone into the black (and even then we just use that money to pay back debts)… Maneesh and I tried to dissect what went wrong, why 350 people isn’t enough in Club Six, and frankly we’re not sure what else we could have done. It’s just hard hard hard to do a show in this town if you don’t have a built in audience of hundreds for your event and if you are reliant totally on door sales.

Don’t take this as griping too much, it was a great show and I wouldn’t have changed anything, but man, throwing events in this town is harder than ever. Still though, very proud of what we made!

Photos up, thanks as always to Kelly!