Category: Music

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Kuwaiti rapper Emcee Element released a new music video over the weekend called ‘Cream’. If you’re interested, you can download his full album for free from his website [Here]

Fatima Al Qadiri is a multi-talented Kuwaiti artist and musician whom I’ve posted about a number of times before. Her latest project, the underground dance supergroup Future Brown were featured in The Guardian a couple of days back which is pretty cool and then last night they performed in Hackney, London as well. Check out the article as well as one of her tracks [Here]

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Mr.Fari is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican musician whom I’ve featured on the blog before with his music video “WebCam Girl“. He’s now being given an amazing chance to win a months stay at a hotel recording studio in Ireland (who knew such a thing existed) where he would be able to professionally record all his work in the same studio where artists like Muse and Michael Jackson have previously recorded.

Out of over 100 artists in the GCC, Mr.Fari was chosen to be amongst the five finalist to represent Kuwait in The GAP Recording Room competition where he faces other artists from Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. The video above is one of the songs he’s entered into the competition and to help him win you just need to visit the competition website and share his profile. So help him win by sharing his profile at this [Link]

Spotify is my favorite digital music service and whenever I post about it on the blog people always ask me how I manage to get it working. Geek in Kuwait has put together easy step by step instructions to follow to get Spotify and Netflix working in Kuwait. So if you’re interested in getting those two services working, follow this [Link]

Note: I use StrongVPN to bypass blocked websites. Also with Spotify unlike Pandora, once you sign up you no longer need to use a VPN to use it.

Early on in the month I posted my favorite tracks of the year and after a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to choose my top 10 albums of the year which I’ve listed below. I use the word struggle because there were quite a few good albums this year but in the end, the albums below were the ones that meant the most to me. I’ve also taken the liberty to arrange them in order of my favorite the Jon Hopkins – Immunity album being my most favorite. It’s just a ridiculously good album and one that I spent a lot of time listening to. Check out my top 10 albums below, I’ve even gone ahead and pulled out a track from each album so you could listen to it.

1- Jon Hopkins – Immunity

2- White Lies – Big TV

3- Moderat – II

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Here’s a cool new music video and it’s not a rap video! Amin Farid Abdal is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican with a background in music performance and production. His latest music video is for a track called ‘WebCam Girl’ and it’s off his upcoming album ‘Neon Darkness’. Check out the video above and then check out his SoundCloud page for the rest of the tracks [Here]

‘Samsara’ the album is now available to purchase online. ‘Samsara’ the concert was held last month at GUST and was a big success. The ‘Samsara’ album features the following seven tracks:

1- “Yallah” – featuring Neelima Dominic
2- “Hawa” – featuring Coco & Faisal ‘Face’ Marei
3- “Blu” – featuring Noora Kasem
4- “Fistula Carmen” – featuring Noora Kasem
5- “Misty Dreams” – featuring Noora Kasem
6- “Jujube” – featuring Coco & Army of One
7- “Borboleta” – featuring Daffy & Coco

You can purchase the album from iTunes or Amazon MP3. If you have Spotify you can also stream the album in the app or below:

BigMo – “Stuck Between” from N. S. Wynn on Vimeo.

I’m not really into rap but BigMo is probably my favorite Kuwaiti rapper. This new video is off his debut album called “Both Sides of the Sand” and it’s about being stuck between two worlds.

I promise, no more rap videos for awhile.

Earlier today I was planning on putting together a list of my favorite tracks from this year and then Spotify came along and created a year in review website where I was able to get a summary of my Spotify listening habits for 2013. That’s what you see up on top but I also took the liberty to list the top 10 songs from my Spotify account below along with links to the songs so you could check them out if you’re interested.

Get Lucky – Daft Punk
Amor Fati – Washed Out
Red Light District – Midi Matilda
California – Delta Spirit
Shake, Shake, Shake – Bronze Radio Return
Islands – The XX
Take a Walk – Passion Pit
Sweater Weather – The Neighbourhood
Big TV – White Lies
Show Me – Team Me

More conveniently, you check out the full playlist on Soundcloud with all the songs above except for ‘Islands’ which wasn’t available [Here]

Now even though the list above is what I listened to the most this year I wouldn’t necessarily count them as my personal favorites of the year. That’s why I’ve also gone the extra mile to list my hand picked favorites of 2013 below. This list is not in any particular order although the first song ‘Line of Fire’ which I’ve also embedded is definitely my favorite song of the year. These tracks also didn’t necessarily come out this year:

Lovely Bloodflow – Baths
Scala – Agoria
Big Jet Plane (Animal Trainer Remix) – Jan Blomqvist
Bitter Moon – Zulu Winter
Open Eye Signal – Jon Hopkins
Another Love (Zwette Edit) – Tom Odell
See Right Through – Tensnake featuring Fiora
All The Days – HAERTS
Second Best – Echoes
When the Music’s Loud – Colette
Cross – Air Tycoon
Touch the Universe – Memphidos

Again, more conveniently you can check out the full playlist on Soundcloud with all the songs above except for ‘Cross’ which wasn’t available [Here]

If you want, share your top songs of the year with everyone in the comments below, preferably with links to make it easier to listen to.

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Brix is another Kuwaiti rapper and up until a few minutes ago I had never heard of him until a reader shared the link with me. I’m curious to why a lot of local rappers seem to be able to produce music videos while other kind of music genres aren’t making them. I know there are a lot of local bands so why aren’t they producing any videos?

You can follow Brix on Instagram @brix_q8

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Kuwaiti rapper Arabique has released a music video for his track ‘Warning’. The track is off his album Lucid Dream which you can download for free (legally) from [Here]

You can also follow Arabique on [Facebook] or [Twitter]

Out of curiosity, Big D or Arabique, who do you prefer?

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The Lumineers were the last concert I had planned for the week and I got to see them perform live last night here in London. The doors were going to open at 6:30PM so I was hoping to arrive to the venue at around 4:30 but ended up arriving at around 5:30PM. There were two long lines when we got there and we decided to stand in one of them but then I noticed a third line that was fairly empty, at first I thought it was a priority line or for people without tickets but we asked one of the organizers and he told us it was a third line they had just opened. So we ended up moving over to the newly opened line and headed right up to the front. When the doors finally opened we headed straight to the stage area and it was still empty since we were the first group to get there so we ended up standing second row center stage.

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The venue the concert was being held at was a palace located on top of a hill surrounded by acres and acres of park land. From the main entrance into the main concert hall we had to pass through 2 large palace wings, the first had the security and ticket check while the second wing had an indoor market, they had picnic tables in the middle surrounded by different food stalls all around. The actual concert hall I guess was originally a huge ballroom and easily fit us all even though we were over 10,000 fans last night according to the organizers.

Before The Lumineers came on, a band called Thao & The Get Down Stay Down opened up for them. I hadn’t heard of the band before but the lead singer had a lot of charisma and was pretty cool to watch. They played for less than an hour before The Lumineers finally came on.

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I have no clue how we ended up second row to The Lumineers but it was incredible since it made the concert a much more personal experience. They’re super talented obviously with each band member playing on multiple instruments throughout the night. At one point even the drummer and pianist swapped places with each playing the other persons instruments. They pretty much played all their popular songs from their album in addition to ‘Gale Song’ which is off the new Hunger Games movie soundtrack as well as my personal favorite, ‘This must be the place’ which is a cover for the Talking Heads (watch it above).

It was a great night and I’d highly recommend watching them live if you ever get the chance to.

Last night I got to see the legend Bob Dylan perform live at the Royal Albert Hall here in London. I think the last time he performed there was back in 1966 which is 47 years ago. The hall is beautiful with a ground level seating area surrounded by higher stalls and then balconies that are located on top of that (here’s a video). Getting tickets for this performance wasn’t easy, even though there were people selling tickets online there weren’t that many for sale and the prices were just insane. I managed to find pretty good tickets last week, first row of the stalls and center stage so I did pretty good. Just to give you an idea on expensive tickets were going for, tickets for the ground floor seating area were selling between 400 to 800 British Pounds on the online ticket marketplaces.

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We weren’t allowed to take photos or videos during the event but I managed to get a few shots and shoot the video above of Bob Dylan performing “All along the watchtower”. It was the last song and people were standing up and shooting video so they couldn’t stop all of us. Sadly he didn’t play some of his classics like “Mr Tambourine Man”, “Hurricane”, “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Blowing in the Wind”. He also didn’t talk to us! I think he just said good evening at one point during the performance and that was it. But he did perform for 2 hours which was great although time flew by so quickly that I could have easily sat through another 2 hours all over again. That was Bob Dylan live, unreal.

Big D is back with ANOTHER music video, his second this month. This is his latest video and according to his email he’s taking a Christmas/New Years break so my guess is this will also be his last new video for awhile. [YouTube]

If you’re a local musician and you release a new music video, let me know about it.

If you missed the Samsara music event this past Saturday like I did, you can now watch some snippets from the show above. [YouTube]