Oh god, the Arabic Rap comp is the Bodega Pop comp yet - it still could a bit of a trimming, more just because it's unwieldy at 90 minutes than a lack of quality, though the mostly English Arabian Knightz song is a bit of bummer, or at least its guitar solo is, but everything else is class, and there's real variety, too.
 
The problem with binging on a genre, or group of genres, especially if you know little about their history, is how hard it becomes to describe the albums: this Chaloemphon Malakham album is a perfect example - it's Thai, and it's good, and there's synth? But beyond that I got nothing.

Now here's something I can describe! Ndeye Marie Ndiaye Gawlo's Beeta Fella has synth and both drum machines and traditional percussion and what I hear as gospel influence - the vocals are really impassioned and the songs are catchy as heck! But but but it does dip over into overproduction and too-much-going-on on a few tracks - but pretty much every time the tempo picks up, you're in for a treat.

So Ahouzar Phone Presents Abdelâziz Ahouzar... the sad thing about this album is that the best comparison my brain can muster is to that Mahmoud Awad that become a meme a few years ago, the one that was supposed to be from like 2076 or summat but was basically just a bunch of Arabic pop songs sent through the fx wringer in Audacity? I actually loved that album and I'd say I've been on a search for the music that inspired it ever since, but, nah, I've been listening to tech thrash. Anyway, this comes the closest of any other thing I've heard to sounding like it. To give another hyper-Western super-ignorant example, imagine if I said to combine Nass El Ghiwane and Abdel Halim Hafez. Sound good, right? But imagine that you're perverse enough to think "yeah, that's okay, but what that hybrid really needs is autotune." Boom, this album was born. It's Western, it's very non-Western, it's traditional, it's futuristic, it's pop music but three out of five tracks are ten minutes long and only one is under eight. It's weird, in other words. The album has audience applause scattered throughout, but it's hard to believe it's actually live, because it seems hard to believe this music could actually exist like this in meatspace: it really does sound like music of the future, being piped through speakers in a satellite lightyears away from us. Spread this around, and the vaporwave kids'll replace their appropriated Japanese characters with Tamazight.

The Num Phuthai album I have is apparently entitled Tam Nan Phin Amata, Vol. 5; Bang Fai Saen (Phanom Phrai) Phuthai Ralai Lan (phew!) and, uh, it's basically a guitar solo? There's rhythm in the background, but you basically get two twenty-plus-minute slabs of a dude just playing the same melodies on his guitar over and over - is it Thai minimalism? Is it some sort of religious ritual trance music? According to my source, it's music for, uh, rocket-judging contests? That would explain the firework noises.

I was tricked into hearing Stan Getz' Focus by an avant-garde jazz tag on RYM, but, as inaccurate as that label is, it wasn't a totally lost cause. Just as the word that that Melodia album conjured up was "professional," the keyword for Focus is "tasteful." But wait, that's not an insult! Third stream experiments are rarely as inspired as this, even if the arrangements aren't exactly Penderecki, or even classical at all. Visions of Stan Kenton's City of Glass danced in my head, but they were mere phantoms, as I haven't heard that album in years, and I remember it being much stranger than this. I know that the thought of the guy that did "Girl from Ipanema" covering a Disney song over pizzicato strings and floppy jazz drumming might not sound super appealing, but "I'm Late, I'm Late" really is great fun for all eight minutes. And with "Her," those vague Kenton visions were replaced with dreams of dream sequences from MGM musicals - it's very evocative, long-walk-in-the-rain-in-the-big-city-after-your-girlfriend-leaves-you-and-also-you're-wearing-a-trenchcoat-for-some-reason music, not exactly revelatory in a post-Ornette world, but miles better than anything "dark jazz." The rest continues in similar fashion, with only slightly diminished returns, mostly because of faint overtones of the first Moody Blues album, something not helped by the presence of a song called "A Summer Afternoon." I never expected to enjoy Stan Getz with Strings, but, hey, I ain't complaining.

Oh no something is wrong! I'm listening to a soukous album and not enjoying it! Soukous Machine by Tchico Thicaya & Kilimandjaro just feels off somehow. Maybe the problem is with me? I don't know, but I don't think I can finish this right now, or rate it. Maybe I've listened to too much music today?

Whenever I need to cleanse my brain or make it stop for a while, it's always a safe bet that some Peter Cusack will do the trick. It's not music, but it's more primal than that - it's a celebration of the very concept of sound, a panegyric to hearing. Sounds from Dangerous Places is a harrowing listen because it highlights the perils that rampant industrialization and pollution has not on semi-abstract concepts like "the environment" but on actual human beings - not that one need be so anthropocentric, but the sheer toll that these things take on people is often overlooked and even without speaking the language, listening to a Ukrainian woman from a radioactive town sing "Oh My Beloved Village" is heart-wrenching. Perhaps because of this, I can only album listen to the album in 5-7 song chunks.   

Oh also I revisited that soukous album, and, yeah, it just sucks. :3

Going from one supposedly surefire hit genre to another, Cumbias Solo Cumbias Vol. 2 actually is a hit! And what a hit it is! I'm especially fond of A. Lenes' "Dos Puntas" but every track owns and if there was any remaining trace of Selena's "Techno Cumbia" in my mouth or mind, it's now been thoroughly flushed out.

Well, Soul Jazz has won me over to their side again - virtually none of the criticisms I had of the first three Dynamite comps applies to their Studio One Groups. It even did the impossible by including a Mob Barley and the Whalers track that I actually enjoyed!