Asians in Europe
when Spotify recommendations go right. Also, subscribe to check out my Substack Chat
Just one update this time:
After my last post, one of my readers pledged to support this Substack if I turned on paid subscriptions. A few responses to this:
Thank you!
For the foreseeable future, I don’t plan on having paid content, as I don’t expect to be able to devote the time and effort to make it worthwhile for people1.
The reader expressed interest in having more of a community of my readers. This is something that I agree would be nice, so I turned on the Substack Chat feature. I started a song share thread in there—I’m hoping this can be one where people can just drop songs they really like. Any subscriber can start a thread, so we’ll see what people want to talk about.
Substack wants me to suggest getting the Substack app for using the chat, but it’s not necessary. You do need to subscribe to this newsletter to participate in the associated chat.
Last time, I talked about how Spotify sometimes recommends me spammy music that’s probably AI-generated. This time, I’ll talk about a good recent experience with their recommendations.
Before I get to that, I have a tip on getting the best out of these recommendation systems. I find that most people just do not react to enough songs to get great recommendations. Consider:
There are millions of songs by millions of artists on Spotify.
Your likes and dislikes are complex and unique2.
In order for the recommender to give you things that you’re more likely to enjoy, and even surprise you at times, it needs a lot of data about which songs you like and which songs you don’t. So instead of waiting for songs you absolutely love, press that + button for songs that make you think “ok, I kind of liked that and want to hear more like it”, at least until you start getting great recommendations3.
One thing that started happening once Spotify’s recommendations got really good for me was that it would drop me into a music scene that I wasn’t very familiar with. Many of these were fairly obvious, like when I kept getting music from Montreal. Some were less obvious, like when I got a lot of music from Goiânia, Brazil4.
Recently, I realized that there was a pattern to some of the music I was getting, months after the trend started. I was getting music made by East Asian immigrants in Europe. The pattern wasn’t obvious at all because these were people in different European countries, with different origins within East Asia.
Here’s some of my favorites.
Yong-Gwanglo Part One by Ki!
This album from the Korean-Danish musician Ki! is remarkable for the different styles of music he manages to nail. “Yong-Gwanglo (용광로)” means “melting pot” in Korean5, so that checks out. After the synth-heavy intro track “Off World” that leans into the Asian pentatonic scale, we get Ethio-jazz (“Jimma”), Afrobeat (“Elko”), a Thelonious Monk composition complete with a hum-along (“Pannonica”), something out of a spaghetti Western soundtrack (“Nassomato”)…you get the picture.
Letter To Yu by Bolis Pupul
Belgium-based Bolis Pupul’s album is a tribute to his mother who was from Hong Kong. It also sounds like a tribute to the city itself. The music is alternately glittery and nostalgic, sometimes both at the same time. Strong Yellow Magic Orchestra vibes.
Nandakke? by Aili
Aili Maruyama is the Japanese-Belgian singer for Aili. The title track “Nandakke?” is a song about forgetting a word for something in one of your languages, a universal experience for multilinguals.
Her Japanese is not quite native level—linguists would call her a heritage speaker. The private nature of her language and the origin of her slight Kansai accent are revealed in “Takoyaki”, where a voice recording of her dad explains how to make takoyaki, an Osaka specialty.
There’s something interesting here about her deciding to sing comical songs like these two, old fashioned lyrics set to electropop (“Babychan”, “Yubikiri”), and more experimental songs (“Gari Gari”, “Oyasumi”) in a language that most of her audience likely doesn’t understand.
Honorable mentions
Notes on Listening by Suki Sou (old-school electronica from a Burmese/Japanese/Chinese musician who is from Macao and based in the UK)
nothing or something to die for by mui zyu (whimsical indie pop from a Hong Kong/UK artist)
What I’m listening to now
Kishi Bashi’s6 latest album Kantos ends with "Tokyo Love Story (Love Story Wa Totsuzen Ni)". This is a cover of a 90’s Japanese megahit by Kazumasa Oda, with Kishi Bashi adding some English lyrics. This sent me into a deep dive of Oda’s music, including the music of Off Course, the band that launched his career.
Oda is still active at age 77, and I’m guessing it’s hard to find someone who listens to a lot of J-pop who isn’t familiar with at least some of Oda’s songs. Growing up in Japan, I’d definitely heard a few. What really left an impression for me, though, was when I listened to a compilation album of “New Music”—that’s what the Japanese used to call Western-style pop songs played by Japanese people—that my mom brought over from Japan when we moved to the US. Some of the best songs in there were Off Course songs.
So I knew some of their hits, but one thing that streaming services made so much easier than before is going through someone’s discography. You get a better sense for where those hits came from, and you find some overlooked gems, and sometimes it’s just a time suck. In the case of Off Course, I found that when they started out in the early 70s, they didn’t fully realize that Oda’s voice was their biggest weapon7.
Since most of my readers have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a couple of songs that really show off that voice: one, “Sayonara”, is a 70s rock anthem that is amazing for karaoke if you can pull it off, and the other, “Wain No Nioi“ (“The Scent of Wine”), the tenderest of ballads.
After going through much of Off Course’s music, my favorite album is We are from 1980.
One highlight is the 7th track, “せつなくて(Setsunakute)” (something like “Because I’m Sad”). Yes, it’s just a simple soft rock song that might remind you of the Bee Gees, but the technical execution is impeccable. The understated bass gets better and better as I put this on repeat. And a fun twist: the main singer on this song is not Oda, but the guitarist Kazuhiko Matsuo, who wrote the song. What that gives us is the glorious backing chorus that includes Oda.
The next track, “Yes-No”, is another of their big hits. After the instantly recognizable keyboard intro, there is a key change, before Oda starts singing. Why mess with the momentum that you built up in the intro? In the first lines of the lyrics, the singer asks his love interest what she just said, because he’d been looking at her absent-mindedly. So the key change is him waking up from his daydream. Now that’s how you do pop music.
If anyone just wants to pay me anyway, I would not object. Let me know.
At least, most of us believe this about ourselves.
This is also how you end up with 40,000+ songs in your Spotify library.
Carne Doce is my favorite band from Goiânia—“Temporal” was one of my favorite songs from 2020. Boogarins and Bruna Mendez are also great.
Literally, it means furnace for melting iron.
Julie is a Kishi Bashi superfan, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him more often than any other artist. He does have a great talent for doing something different every time and making it work.
Oda’s solo work usually focuses on his voice too much for my taste. I want a good band playing good music, to support that voice.