A few weeks ago Piresian Beach came out with her third EP titled Fuck your mind.
Even if you’re not into this kind of stuff, it proves that what she does, she can do it well and what started roughly a year ago with her first collection of songs is now consolidated into a fresh and very productive music scene consisting of fellow musicians, professional and casual bloggers/organizers alike.
As most things in Hungary, this new stream is actually something very old in terms of time based on pop-culture standards. Still, whatever helps local listeners moving away from drum n’ bass or fusion world music is warmly welcomed. Also, what makes the scene valuable is the fact that the resulting product can be received and enjoyed for the same reasons locally and abroad alike. This is a rare and precious thing for Hungarian taste-makers and members of the westernized blog scene, who are accustomed to using sarcasm as a general approach when covering local subjects.
As a result of the above, the first post and the platform which gave the whole thing the initial push was tumblr.
Thanks to a basic feature of the micro blog site, which displays reactions in a chronological order, one can see how the first steps occurred: a member of Eger’s indie blog discovered Piresian Beach’s bandcamp site, and was able to link it to a blip.fm profile, figuring out the identity of the musician. Thanks to the complex and diversified network Hungarian microbloggers are connected, the music was picked up and carried all through the relevant areas of the local blogosphere, establishing a stable and influential group of fans.
This and the modest but very positive reception by foreign blogs encouraged a whole bunch of talented, and not-so-talented people to follow the same procedure from recording songs in the privacy of their bedroom, publishing it on bandcamp to the attempt of circulating it within the blog scene.
The first romantic attempt to collect and preserve these projects was made by the now contributor for popular online music magazine, Ádám Lang who also has his own music, Halál Judit. The concept of the blog is that once a song is finished and sent in, it gets published right away, without any filter or evaluation. It was also him, who made massive mixtapes and presented them as snapshots of the current state of the lo-fi scene. Here he could not retain the wisdom, and provided his peace of mind regarding bedroom music in general, its Hungarian scene and the ‘revolution’ it carries within. A very good point he made was that the most important aspect of the scene is not the genre itself, but the capability to produce music whenever and however one wants to, despite the lack of skills or money.
The whole story has one important point: Yes, if something good gets produced regardless the low financial/technical background the rude sheer quality or non-existent marketing or corporate support, it will get accepted and can be successful. And yes, even in Hungary.
So let’s not get stuck with praising genres and using the scene to show off how one can reborn as a trashy punk or a lo-fi wunderkind in a post-ironic way, but use this example as encouragement for creating something new and unique rather than following already explored and fulfilled patterns.