A week into my new, month-long self-improvement experiment with early evenings, sort of early mornings, very little overtime and almost daily exercise I’m satisfied enough to think it’ll be a good idea to continue for another week. All of a sudden I have a lot more time for “my things” meaning that blogging and putting things in order in the apartment (I’m finally at the point where I can start opening my CD boxes!) have become feasible as regular activities. Although I have found that if I swim too much I’ll be too tired to do anything at all when I come home, I expect that to change if I just keep doing it a while longer.
Musically the week started out very well by Spotify alerting me that Idiotape‘s new album Tours had become available. I have a lot to say about it–mostly good things–so I’m thinking I should review it as soon as I’ve finished the more time critical posts I have planned. For now suffice it to say that I’ve found a new favorite Idiotape track in “Latepool“. The music video for “With The Flow” pre-dates the album, but is worth a watch if you didn’t see it already.
Additionally I’ve spent a lot of the week listening to and reflecting over tearliner. He held his 10th anniversary concert yesterday and if I’d had the money to fly over to Korea just for a weekend I would’ve totally done so. Instead I remained in Sweden, but I still wanted to do something. One evening while walking home I realized that of course I should make a small interview on the theme. Tearliner was immediately on board and it wasn’t even 2h between when I asked if he’d be interested in an interview till when I had the answers in my inbox–the fastest interview I’ve ever done, and Sangha did a great job translating it right away, too. He came off more than a bit pessimistic, but I plan on countering that with my next tearliner themed post.
The week that comes I see myself listening a lot to Danpyunsun and the Sailors. First full-length album 동물 (Animal) will be released this Monday, August 25th, and the audio for “노란방 (Yellow Room)” was posted on YouTube a few days ago. It’s one of the 3 songs the band performed for Naver’s Onstage a few months ago and I expect the songs I haven’t heard yet to be the same caliber of awesome.
In other news, that I’ve already touched upon on Twitter and Facebook Goonam will be heading over to the US to play a couple of dates together with Khmer pop act Dengue Fever, and also do a joint show in Seoul. I’ve added both US dates to Indieful ROK’s event calendar. And for the vinyl aficionados it may be of interest that Yi Sung Yol‘s 3rd album Why We Fail got a vinyl release on August 21st, and Lee Juck‘s 2nd album 2적 will get a vinyl release on October 15th.
And finally something blog related: Those of you that are more comfortable reading Swedish than English are now able to enjoy select Indieful ROK posts in translation over at Hallyu.se. This should be a weekly feature and the first post, about the Hello Rookies of August came live today. Unfortunately I have not been able to put in any time towards translations myself, but I’m nevertheless happy to see the word on Korean indie music spread also in my mother tongue.