The week that just passed hasn’t really been about either music or blogging for me. Instead it has been pretty much all about Italy as I was on a road-trip in the north-western part of the country. There was a lot of really good food, though not as pasta-centric as I had anticipated, but not so much wine on my part as I had to do all of the driving myself. I also found that I actually do like Italian pizza, after having spent roughly half of my life thinking I didn’t–a consequence of my first visit to Italy at age 15 when Swedish style Hawaii pizza (ham & pineapple) was my favorite.
I came home yesterday evening to the happy news that I have a ticket to see 4minute in Stockholm end of May. The tickets were released while I was on an airplane, but a friend was kind enough to get one for me. To be honest I haven’t listened to 4minute to any greater extent (though there’s something about “Volume Up” in particular that very much appeals to me) but to have a k-pop idols come to Sweden for a showcase is in itself reason for me to go. I couldn’t even dream of something like this happening when I was still a k-pop obsessed teenager and even with the virtual explosion of k-pop everywhere today there’s something magic about it all. K-pop. Live. In Stockholm.
And now that I’m home again I’m also able to listen to music. I know I’m late to the party, but I finally got around to listening to mushru:ms. They were quite well received when they debuted and managed to generate a bit of buzz with the release of their first full-length last year, but somehow I never took the time to listen anyway. Granted I still haven’t made it past the 2012 debut EP One Point Relief, but I’d say this is Korean modern rock at its loveliest.
Opposite to the rest of the week, today has been very blog focused. I woke up to find that London Korean Links had already made a similar post to the one I had planned about the Korean indie bands coming to the UK, though I started on my own post anyway. However, I haven’t been able to complete it yet as writing about it turned out not to be as much fun as I had expected. Instead I ended up spending most of the day working with WordPress plugin The Events Calendar.
It’s got a lot of quirky little bugs that I’ll need to report and I wasted quite a lot of time trying to make it fit the theme of the site better, but I did actually get around to adding a few shows to the event list. Though there is still a ton to go. And I would like to tweak the sidebar widget some more, but at the moment have settled for what you can see now. One of my professional goals this year is to satisfy with ‘good enough’ rather than trying to make everything perfect so it makes sense I try it also outside of the office, I figured. Which is also why this site is available at all in its current, half-finished state.
Let’s see if I can get that post on all the UK tours live tomorrow instead. And Jambinai. I really need to write about Jambinai’s Europe tour as well. But until I do, just as recommended last week, check out the list of tour dates over at Korean rock is real.