I noticed that in Romania you have two types of hipsters. It all stems from communist censorship I think- people in their twenties want to deny a heavy burden of a past by hating the mainstream and anything that has to do with the (musical) past and can’t be retro-hip; and rockers perpetuate that fuck the system adage by hating the mainstream head-banger style. Electro music fans or rawk fans, two camps that are in no way camp. You could look at rock at being more traditional form of dissent and electro is just the opposite, so scenester definitions no.2 respectively no.1 apply. On one side you have Therion or Nightwish or whatever (when did we become fucking nordic-philes?) on the other hand you got a bunch of DJs. The Rogue Wave or Mazarin we leave to the NY hipsters while we deal with extremes.

But finally… A home grown festival all of our own. Artmania Sibiu 2006 (official site). I can’t say it would be refreshing for me to see H.I.M. live, but I know some of you out there are squealing squeals of joy. The festival’s in July. Tickets are 65 RON. That’s uh what..20 euros. For a four-band mini-fest. HIM, Amorphis, SILENTIVM, Carmen Gray. Be warned: angry black-background links those are.
And remember: it is not recommended to bring infants in prams or children under 5 years old to the festival area. Or drugs of any nature, not that you would.

The Cribs have nothing to do with the festival. But I think the scenesters song touches on the earlier subject I was contemplating.

If you’d like to hurrah something, do it now so that all our 30 unique hits/day know about it. Being a scenester doesn’t mean you can’t share.

The post below is written by Mihai Seceleanu, a best friend and a musicblog.ro contributor :) 

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on earth. In Internet mythology, it’s the name of a new Web based service that can be compared to your very own radio station. All you do is tell it what kind of music you like and it lets you discover more music like it.

It’s based on the Human Genome Project – http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml – a group of musicians and music-loving technologists that got together and built the most comprehensive analysis of music ever, researching songs of over 10,000 different artists. But there are even more good news – Pandora www.pandora.com is continously evolving, by adapting itself to users’ preferences – you can always rate the songs and say what’s ok for your radio station, according to your preferences, and what isn’t. And you can just imagine how accurate Pandora will be when there’ll be 100 million users using it.

There’s no mean to go back and listen a song one more time. But you can buy it either as a separate song from iTunes or as an album from Amazon. What’s the best thing about it – there are no commercials – like on Yahoo! Radio or similar services. You just keep the browser window open and the music plays.

 

…is comming…or I am going…or something like that. The idea is that we have a date on 28th, and I will make sure I am going to be there. She brings the waves, I bring the wine.

Unfortunatelly, this year the 2 main weekend activities (snowboarding and seaside-sitting) could not be linked as I would have wanted, but 1st of May is almost here and I will make sure I will be with some sand in my shoes by then.

Yeah, some might call it mainstream or some might call it old-fashioned, but I don’t really care. I will meet about 30 nice people (best friends included), we will have some wine and finally I might get some vacation.

And as this blog is about music, I could say that sure the guy who is going to drive the car (Tutu – the legend:D) will apreciate this song played over and over again: Rosu si Negru – Ora de Mare. Maybe some of you will apreciate it too.

See ya there !

When I started listening to rock music, I dived headlong and started straight with Overkill. No mellow shampoo boys with soapy ballads, no cheezy lyrics, I went for the real deal. I can safely say I liked “Elimination” better than any other heartbreaking song. And then I liked “I hate” because of the cocky lyrics, of course. Although an older album, it was early 1991 when “The years of decay” – very inspiring title, innit? – finally grabbed me.

Couple of years after, after getting acquainted with both the mainstream and the underground musicians, after listening to the old as well to the young and emerging, after humming “So fine” (GNR of course) and losing my voice growling over “Sleepless” (by Anathema), I liked discovering tracks that were somehow against the whole trend of an album. I wonder how many of you know this song. If you like it, be warned the rest of “Serenades” is NOTHING like it, so don’t say I never warned you…

My guess is the language is Gaelic.

I come with cheer and cute voice and banjo, too much doom going on here.

One of these days people are going to run out of band names. Hop Along, Queen Ansleis is a
friendly indie gal requesting you to “bring something to shake or bang on” at her shows which is encouraging news. I linked her myspace page where you can listen to two very folky songs.

In further indie electro webcrawling we have relentlessly kitschy Yelle as one French chick singing about well what you’d expect disco divas to… ridiculous lovely raunchy lyrics.

Should anyone want mp3s let me know.

On 31st of May, Apocalyptica is comming back to Romania, at Bucharest’s “Arenele Romane”, with a nice show as part of their latest tour. The tour is meant to promote their latest album, “Amplified – A Decade Of Reinventing The Cello“. Dana is going, I might be going, what about you? Tickets available here, at 55 RON for until May 30 and 65 RON on 31st of May.

Apocalyptica have been in Romania last year, in Targu Mures, and had a nice success.

[via Dana].

 

I am not a great fan of house music (and related genres) except for some Vocal Trance now and then and some bands which I particularly like for no particular reason.

Like DJ Project for example. I don’t know if it is the music (as I said, I am not a big fan of the genre), the lyrics (they are not too smart or too inspiring), might be the attitude or the looks (yeah, the girl looks great) or all of the above in a certain mix.

What is even more surprising is that I liked quite a lot of songs from them, specially those with less house effects and more lyrics.

The sound is quite a good one, which is easy to explain if you look at Gino, one of the band members, who worked previously (about ten years ago) with bands like DJ Bobo, Fun Factory, Tom Novi and others. It is a certain maturity which you can feel in their music.

As usual, Musicblog is strongly supporting some of the best Romanian artists and is strongly recommending you to buy one of their albums. Just for you to get a feeling of DJ Project, open your radios for some time or listen to this – Soapte.

 

I haven’t personally heard The Arctic Monkeys on Romanian radio (OK I don’t listen to radio that much- I’ll vent in another post) but if there indeed are people who haven’t heard of them then read this post.
For those of you fed up with them being overhyped I’ll have to refer y’all to the same hilarious post regarding just that.

After some fourty years of music and after creating some of the best rock-bands ever, what more could you wish from your career? What more could you bring to the audience and how creative and full of spirit can you be?

Well, after listening to Ian Gillan’s latest album, Gillan’s Inn, it seems that some people are just a neverending source of musical inspiration and artistic spirit.

Gillan, the man who created a band like Deep Purple, played the voice of Jesus in the famous Jesus Christ Superstar rock opera and also had a significant contribution to Black Sabbath, recently released a new album, featuring some of the most significants rock players ever. Having together on the same album people like Joe Satriani, Jon Lord, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Steve Morse and many more, the album is a treat in itself, with the chance to listen to some of the greatest rock players of all times.

Just as an example, (on the DVD) you can chose to listen to “Smoke on the water” with a blend of Satriani, Morse or Halley, whatever you prefer :)

Gillan’s voice is also of the highest quality – I was surprised to hear him scream with the same passion after all these years :)

A strong recommandation to buy the album ! If you are not convinced yet, just view a sample.