Randomness #16

It’s vacation peak season in Sweden now and we’ve got the summer heat to justify it. I’m no good with temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius (my comfort zone is somewhere closer to 20) so I actually prefer to work at this time of the year–unlike a typical Swedish home, the office has air condition + with few people in the office the amount of meetings is kept at a minimum so in theory efficiency increases. But right now I really do want vacation anyway to be able to catch up on everything.

This weekend has done absolutely nothing to help that as I spent the better part of it with a couple of great kids playing my old PS2 games–SSX Tricky, Tekken Tag, EyeToy Play, Kingdom Hearts and more. Great fun. Makes me wish I had the discipline to play video games myself without getting too caught up, alas I have learned the hard way to keep such distractions out. I imagine I will anyway become a little too obsessed with music/blogging again once I start going through my CD collection in more detail, so no need to add even more activities that will make me not want to leave the house.

Speaking of which, I might be able to finally start arranging my music collection soon. The shelves I’m gonna use for the CDs arrived some days ago and I began assembling the first together today. I had hoped to have all completed last Friday to be able to use this Sunday to start populating them, but circumstances had it differently so instead I’m hoping to get it all done during the evening tomorrow. Though more realistically it’ll probably not be all done until Friday, when I can get some help from a one of my sisters…

I realized just how much I’m looking forward to going over old music again while putting together my Korean indie dance videos top list. At first I thought that maybe I would be the only one actually enjoying such flashbacks, but after seeing the response to that post I’m happy to think that Korean indie music with a few years behind it remains relevant even today. “아저씨 미워요” was the dominating earworm for me the week that just passed so I was particularly happy to see Oh Ji Eun‘s response.

Another thing I’m looking forward to is to get into hip-hop audition show Show Me The Money 3. Doing the commentary series for the first season was a lot of fun, and though I couldn’t manage more than a few minutes of the second season I’ve seen enough on Twitter about season 3 to get curious again. Sangha is hosting a Show Me The Money 3 recap with Ranya participating in the bantering and I’ll try to join them for the episodes that follow.

 
I missed mentioning Haze Moon with Emma Stillman last week, but since they recorded for MBC’s Nanjang Live in Gwangju (문화콘서트 난장) a few days ago there will most likely be opportunity to blog about them soon anyway. As I was trying to see whether their Nanjang videos were already posted online, I instead found that Osoyoung appeared on episode 167. Her first album served as my introduction to Korean modern folk and I still hold it as one of the best in the genre. Title track “기억상실” still sounds as good as it did 13 years ago:

Although I thought I had never really gotten into Osoyoung’s second album–even though I was very excited about it when it came and actually managed to catch her in concert while she was still promoting it–I found that I was very happy also to be reminded of “그만 그 말 그만”. So much loveliness.

 
And for something different, Jambinai‘s Europe tour is over for this time. When they started talking about spending a full summer in Europe I envisioned myself following them across the continent, but as it happened I didn’t make it to see them a single time. Hopefully it won’t be long before they return and if they can drop by Sweden too very little will be able to stop me from attending. For now I’m just happy and proud that they have been doing so well, have been so well received, and, from the looks of it, have had such an awesome time. This is what I would wish for all of my favorite bands.

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