54-71 | Six Albums

Six of their terrific albums reupped by special request on Sept 10, 2015, here.




Precise drum and bass guitar like wriggling in the darkness, like a machine 
It seems to go sunk feeling to the bottom to the bottom on and on. 

Snare is fiercely tight. Liked. 

Even so, relentless with drum and accurate+solid dry guitar, dry as a skeleton that did well.

Also air.

Air between every single thickness to the music comes through
To snap up, sound comes suddenly pops out.



Downer acceleration. 

Such as down one step down step spiral staircase 
Poisoning inevitable.

It is a love song? Code of feeling part of the loop other than those pinched
It is great tension anyway.

Songs trimmed to sound that need rather sound you do not need
With guitar chaos skinny enough to not know what you are connected to


Open hi-hat drum is good.

I have hardened as the songs firmly in a medium tempo. 

I like the place to rise a little late.

STRAIGHT OUTTA ...

Inspired by F. Gary Gray's recent N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton,  Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated the global hip hop movement, as made manifest from Cochabamba, D.F., and Santiago, to Accra, Jakarta, and Upper Hutt.

Listen to the show now in the archives!

Soap Kills | Complete Discography

 Reupped by special request on September 3, 2015, here.

How can you not love Zeid and Yasmine Hamdan -- who were both born in 1976, but who are not, as I know y'all are thinking, twins? I mean, look at them. If they're not twins, what's with their matching last name, their same year of birth and -- above all -- those groovy velvety black long-sleeved shirt-thingies they're both wearing?


Spurred on by a growing electronic pop movement in Beirut, the duo formed a band in 1997, calling themselves "Soap Kills" because, as Zeid recalls, "We thought that at the time, in the context of Beirut being ... you know, reborn, and all the war being wiped clean, we thought, wow, it's shiny and it's awful and it's soap kills. We thought it would be a nice name for a band."



Both artists went on to pursue solo careers and it's unclear whether or not they have plans to ever reunite. According to their Wikipedia page, Zeid is currently spending time in prison for political sedition (he wrote a song that includes the lyrics "general, go home," an apparent reference to president Michel Suleiman, formerly Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces) and the entire Soap Kills catalog is banned from radio and television broadcast.

THE ARAB AVANT-GARDE

Taking our cues from four recent reads -- Hisham D Aidi's Rebel Music; Sunaina Maira's Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop; Daniel J. Gilman's Cairo Pop; and Burkhalter, Dickinson & Harbert's The Arab Avant-Garde -- Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio spun 3 hours of ridiculously awesome cutting edge cuts from north Africa to the middle east. 

Thrill to the latest in oriental glam, Egyptronica, spectral microtonalities, musiqa mu'asira, extreme metal, hyperpoliticized polylinguistic hip-hop, electro chaabi and more.

Listen to the show now in the archives

LIVE FROM JERSEY CITY, IT'S ... WFMU!

WFMU's Cheyenne Hohman and a team of volunteers has just finished the heroic task of organizing more than 17,000 music files of live performances at the station ... and on Wednesday, August 26, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio listened to some of our favorite moments.

Catch blistering performances by punks from the Czech Republic and China, rappers from Ghana, Japanese and European avant-gardists, divas from Mauritania, and much, much more!

Listen to the show now in the archives

TWILIGHT OF THE DIVAS

Nearly a dozen rare, uncomped, never-before-aired grooves by Iran's Daughter, Googoosh; a set of rollicking rollercoaster riffs by Italy's greatest living belter, Mina; Lata Mangeshkar tracks that will unthread your eyebrows; and more ... a three-hour celebration of a select few of the world's greatest living female pop icons at their most pop icon-y. It's not about you ... it's all about them.

Listen to the show now in the archives

CAMBODIA | LAOS | THAILAND

Last week I made one of the single biggest CD discoveries I've ever made -- and I've been bodega diving for nearly two decades. At Thai-Cam Video in Portland, Oregon, I found, in a box that had been scootched beneath shelving and nearly hidden from the eye, more than 50 Cambodian CDs, all from the 1990s. Then add to that the dozen or so Thai and Lao recordings from the 1980s - present I plucked later that week from a couple of Lao groceries outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

Now, on Bodega Pop Live you can hear three hours of super-rare Cambodian synth pop, switched-on Morlam Lao, electronic luk thung from Thailand, and a couple of largely forgotten gems from the 1960s and 70s, most of it never before played on any English-language radio station, not even WFMU.

Listen to the show now in the archives

Ultra Chicks Vols. 1-6

Reupped by reader demand on July 27, 2015, here.

Yes, I've been neglecting the bodega. To make it up to you, how about a genuinely thrilling six volume set of French femme-pop from the 1960s? 

Hear a couple of tracks in Bodega Pop Live's WFMU / Give the Drummer Radio show, here.

RADIODIFFUSION INTERNASIONAAL

In 2005, music collector Stuart Ellis began a hunt for original, rare vinyl from Asia, Africa and the Middle East that would result in two collections (Bollywood Steel Guitar and Pakistan: Instrumental Folk & Pop Songs) and a blog, Radiodiffusion Internasionaal Index, which featured a new single every week from dozens of countries from around world. 

Ellis ceased updating Radiodiffusion in 2013, but the blog remains a favorite destination and resource for DJs, musicians and listeners around the globe.

On Wednesday, July 29, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated Ellis's work discovering, compiling and contextualizing all of this terrific music with a three-hour mix of our favorite, ear-bending tracks.

Listen to the show now in the archives!

THE SOUND OF TOMORROW

On Wednesday, July 22, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated music performed with electronic instruments. Taking our inspiration from Mark Brend's The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled into the Mainstream, we travelled across the world and through time, from 20th century pop and avant-garde experiments on the wire recorder, Moog and theremin to contemporary breakcore, mashups and workstation-driven luk thung.

Listen to the show now in the archives