DJ ME, DJ YOU. “There are two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Fran Lebowitz wrote. “Good music is music that I want to hear. Bad music is music that I don’t want to hear.” The art of DJing might very well be defined as playing good music in front of people who didn’t know that it was something that they wanted (or, if you want to be dramatic, needed) to hear. Of course you can quibble with my definition, especially since I have absolutely no authority on the matter, having only played at being a DJ for a couple of hours so far, at the We Are Triangle pop-up shop in Cubao X last Saturday.
It was a fun experience, inflicting my tastes on the dinnertime Cubao X crowd. While they did not swarm as one towards me and hoist me on their shoulders to proclaim me their new DJ God, at least no one tried to stab me. And I got to play personal favorites like Phantogram’s As Far As I Can See, First Rate People’s Girls’ Night, and Electricity by the Pet Shop Boys, at volume levels far above what my landlord would allow. I enjoyed the other DJ sets too: Quark Henares played a slew of indie-rock anthems, as well as shots of “yacht rock” and (yes!) David Bowie’s Modern Love. Married couple Nice Buenaventura and Owel Alvero’s sets were great, though I admit it disturbed me how few songs on their playlists were familiar to me. It just means there’s more good music out there for me to look up. (They are also two of the few DJs who can manage to look cute dancing around while spinning their stuff.) I wouldn’t mind doing it again, though next time I would like to get paid billions of dollars. But that’s what I say about everything I do, including humming tunelessly and constructing little men out of tinfoil.
THE YEAR OF THE EP. According to the ever-useful Wikipedia (give Jimmy Wales some money, people, so I can stop seeing his face every time I look something up), an EP — short for “extended play” — is “a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP.” Going over the local music releases for 2010, I was surprised at the amount of EPs that were unleashed. It makes sense, though: considering the ever-shrinking rewards-to-efforts ratio of the traditional album format, the EP has become a great alternative. It provides a good-sized chunk of musical meat for the listener to sink his or her teeth into, without requiring the months or years of sacrifice and preparation (and conceptual cohesiveness) on the artist’s part that a full-on album does.
Notable EP releases include the self-titled “Jeebus,” from a band that has been “venting unfathomable instrumetal anger since 2006!!!” apparently, and who “FINALLY JUST RELEASED THEIR FIRST EP AFTER YEARS OF LAZY-ASS LAZING AROUND!!!!” (I’m just quoting their Facebook. Normally I would use MORE EXCLAMATION POINTS). “Instrumetal” wasn’t a typo, by the way — if it has been corrected, then you know whoever edited this column today did not read it very carefully — it’s a combination of “instrumental” and “metal.” You can check this interesting musical proposition out painlessly, as they have offered their EP for free download at jeebus-philippines.bandcamp.com (another trend: more and more bands offering entire EPs and even albums at no cost, the better to spread the word about their stuff).
Speaking of bands that will assault your eardrums in an awesome way, the legendary Throw released an EP this year too, and you can tell what it’s like just from the title: “‘Wag Kalimutan Ang Ingay.” It delivers six blasts of speaker-busting, politically charged fury. I first heard it in my friend Erwin’s car, and it immediately made me feel like tossing my entire body back and forth (luckily I was wearing a seatbelt). I just re-listened to the entire EP while writing this, by the way; the songs are so focused and fast that the whole thing clocks in at under 10 minutes total. Amazing stuff.
“Electroacoustic/ melodramatic” indie superband Vigo came out with a three-song EP (“Bang!”), and it would be well worth tracking down even if it weren’t free. The songs are based on “part inversions of kundiman, the Filipino equivalent of chanson, and part modern-day pop balladry,” as their MySpace says (www.myspace.com/vigokundiman). Dynamic duo Reese & Vica launched an EP called “Crossing Neverland,” which Candy magazine characterized as “whimsically wonderful.”
And then of course there’s the Lilystars crowd: The Gentle Isolation’s “It Started With An April Shower,” “One Dreamy Indeterminate Hum” by Your Imaginary Friends, and Lilystars label ‘big brothers’ The Camerawalls’ recently-released “Bread and Circuses.” These EPs are recommended for fans of the strummy and melodic, as well as those who get dreamy for the New Wave ‘80s — though of course I will add that the songs aren’t just about the nostalgia, that they are more than the sum of their influences, spiky-haired or otherwise.