The Haebangchon festival, now in its sixth year, put a neigbborhod on the map for thousands of expats and Koreans, gave hundreds of performers an audience and began what is now a thriving, raucous scene for expat-made music.
HBC Fest, as it has come to be known, has been a massive success. Performers get their audiences, a huge amount of money is spent at the festival that benefits most businesses in the area, and expats get a place to hear mostly good, and some “interesting,” performers.
The HBC Fest has seen it all: rock, punk, hip-hop, folk music, poetry, Shakespearean drama, comedy, even a large balding man painted head to toe in green and smashing watermelons over his head.
The festival now regularly attracts musical acts from cities all over Korea. More and more local businesses are vying to join as venues, and organizer Lance Reegan-Diehl has had to turn musical acts away, as he can’t accommodate the large number of willing participants.
Sounds From The Explosion is …Whatever That Means’ first full-length album. The 13 high-quality, fast-moving tracks were recorded in Seoul during a six-month period through June of 2011.
The band, which came together during the wedding party for guitarist Jeff Moses and Trash, the group’s bassist, have gigged regularly since 2010 and the product of all this hard work can be felt in the tenacity and vitality that the tracks present. This album is very tightly put together and doesn’t let its foot off the gas for the entire duration.
Magna Fall’s The Japan EP is a defiant rocked-up funky mix, layered with so much of every kind of influence that it’s like a big fresco of rock music. There’s not much waiting around for these seven tracks to kick in after the synth-guitar-haegum intro spreads a false sense of calm. “Warp Five Boogie” opens steadily and then establishes a self-assured sound for the remainder of this hard paced and diverse first EP from the Bucheon-based three piece.
Allow me to introduce Seth Martin, a banjo and guitar-playing folk musician from Washington. Not of the old-clothes-and-indescribable-music folk variety, he can technically be defined as contemporary.
“We had to change our name from Bastards of Bupyeong because no one knew where Bupyeong was,” Kevin Heintz, the lead singer of the up and coming Magna Fall, told the standing room only crowd in the basement of Phillies during the HBC Fest last May. “I don’t know how good your Latin is,” he continued, “but magna means great and fall means, well, fall.”
