Do It Again

As promised, I'm back with another series of podcasts. This is the very first series of Maltese music podcasts. While Archibald and others bemoan the state of live shows from visiting artists in Malta, the local scene continues to produce interesting works. Many of these works go almost unnoticed by the mainstream or enjoy a very limited underground cult status for many years.

Most, if not all, radio stations in Malta fail to see how interesting Maltese music can be and instead play the most run-of-the-mill pop trash, if/when they play any Maltese music at all. My new podcasting series attempts to address this by bringing anyone who cares to listen a weekly look at some of the most interesting music from and/or by Maltese musicians. The series is called Mużika Mod Ieħor, which can either be translated as A Different Kind of Music or as Music by Other Means.

The first show opens with the music of a band I consider to be the most exciting thing on the current local gig scene. The boys in Xtruppaw have a special vibe around them and they make me feel the same sort of warmth I felt for bands like The Rifffs and The Subverts many years ago. Their raw music coupled with Maltese lyrics is very energizing and leaves me wanting more. Thankfully, they have a great website too. If you've never heard Xtruppaw and like unpretentious Maltese rock then you'll love Xtruppaw. They are simply fantastic.

Although my plan for this series is to present as much of the music from Malta that's already on the Web, I will also include stuff from my personal CD and/or tape collection. One such CD appears on this first podcast. It's Jason Fabri's lavishly produced From Where I Live by the Jason Paul Band, featuring Jes Psaila on guitar and Bernard Scerri on acoustic bass. To my knowlege, this CD from 2002 remains the only one ever released on Chubby Records.

Just a few days ago Ira Losco launched her second CD, Accident Prone, sponsored by Vodafone. No, I have not included a track from that in this podcast. I bring up Ira's CD because her new band has Adam Bonello on guitar. Adam played with The Characters for a while in the 90s and then moved down under. Most recently he lived and worked in New Zealand where, among other things, he produce and co-wrote a top 10 hit called Wonderful. You can hear that on this podcast.

Websites by Maltese musicians are plentiful. Just have a look at the large number of sites linked from the aboutmalta.com music section. Among the ones I was very happy to discover is that from Vince Fabri. Vince has become a household name since he started appearing weekly on Xarabank. His work on that TV programme is perhaps one of the better things about it. Still, no enough people know about the beautiful songs he wrote around 1990 with the poetry of Oliver Friggieri entitled Mal-Fanal Hemm Ħarstek Tixgħel. This podcasts comes to a close with the first track from that album, Poeta, featuring the voice of Phyllis Anne Brincat and the best use of a harmonica (played by Paul Camilleri) I've ever heard on a Maltese recording.

The plan is to have the next podcast in this series appear sometime next weekend. If all goes well, I'll continue to produce these podcasts regularly into the foreseeable future. Any musicians who have a website that's not listed on aboutmalta.com should submit their site by using the online form because that will enable us all to discover music from Malta by other means than the traditional media, which seem uninterested in championing the best of Maltese music beyond the obvious.

The RSS feed for the podcast is available here or you can simply click here to subscribe directly with iTunes.