Sometimes the cool and interesting things that my colleagues do at work spill over and I get some of the benefits. As a result, I was in Budapest last week for the European project that Paul Long & Jez Collins run out of our research office.
It’s about innovation in popular music heritage and its impact on vocational training – which basically means a bunch of stuff about celebrating the musical history of a place (as Liverpool does with the Beatles, Chicago does with Blues music, etc.), and then understanding how people do that in really interesting and surprising ways, figuring out how they get (or make) jobs in that, and then translating that into what we teach people who want to do those sorts of jobs.
The project connects with different types of educators, music industry people and students in a number of different countries – from Bulgaria to Ireland, Finland to the Germany, UK to the Netherlands. All of them interested, for one reason or another, in: 1) popular music heritage; 2) innovation; 3) vocational training for the media and music industries.
I was looking for a Hungarian band to feature as Bandcamp du jour since I’m in Budapest, but there weren’t that many to choose from. Hardly any Hungarian bands use the service.
At first, it seems a bit too simple to take seriously. No You No Me kicks in with a distorted, but entirely rudimentary, almost naïve strum, featuring a chord progression you’ve heard a million times – but by the time they get to the first chorus, it all makes sense. This is, as they claim, both ‘Shoe-Wop’ and ‘Twee-Gaze’. Shoegaze meets 50s pop.
I really like it.
It’s a four-track EP, it’s free and you should get it. And I’ll make a point of telling the musicians that come to the Zipkomm conference tomorrow that they should get on Bandcamp too.
I was taken to a concert by Quimby this evening. I hadn’t heard of them – though that’s hardly that surprising. However, they’re huge in Hungary. The concert hall was packed.
They’re good musicians, great performers, and there’s also a real sort of Eastern European clowning thing that goes on between songs. They’re real entertainers. The audience finds them hilarious – though as most of the gags were in Hungarian, I only managed to find the trumpeter reading the absurdly large newspaper bit funny.
It’s a bit cabaret, sort of punk, proggy in places and with other ingredients in the mix too. Hard to describe. Gogol Bordello and early Genesis run away to join the circus together, sort of thing.
Anyway, we went and chatted with them backstage afterwards, and they gave us whisky. That was the point of this story. Nice guys.
I'm an author of books about technology, culture, music and radio. I'm also an award-winning broadcaster and filmmaker, a public speaker and lecturer, record producer and festival director. I am closely following developments in emerging technologies and the cultures and ethics surrounding them, and my projects typically focus on issues of justice, inclusion, and sustainability.
Most of my work involves surrounding myself with incredibly smart and talented people who would have no other reason to ever be in the same room as each other. That's when amazing things happen.
I tend to talk a lot about music (often jazz-adjacent and particularly on vinyl, but also playlists and mixtapes). I'm enthusiastic about food and cooking, the intersection of art and science, new technologies, vintage technologies, education, social progress, silence, innovation, narrative, data commons, culture, sound art and the spoken word. This blog will continue to reflect those diverse and shifting enthusiasms. I may also digress.
I'm from Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have Scottish ancestry, I've spent a decade in the south of Birmingham UK, and another in a forest in the north of Sweden.
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