boston progress radio

I just wrote a long, drawn-out anecdote about a mildly-confusing moment in 2005 when the Native Guns were in Boston, and Bambu happened to meet a local performer named Bambuu on the street. Then I reread what I wrote and realized that by trying to write the story out, I had removed all the humor. So just imagine that this first paragraph is a recounting of that day, and that you’re giggling about it right now.

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Tags: Video.

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But some people can play it a lot better. Another week has passed and we’ve got more music from new artists. I know that BPR is pretty hip hop centric, so this week, I’ve tried to get music that isn’t of that genre.

We’ve got a couple of new tracks from Dawn Xiana Moon. She’s originally from Singapore where she developed her skills and talents as a classical musician. Shortly after coming to the United State for her college studies, she picked up the guitar and began to write her own music. She describes her own music as “melodic folk pop.” We’ve put up three tracks from her and soon, we might even have a chat interview.

Also new on the station is music from a New York City band called Misha. We’ve actually been playing tracks from their new album Teardrop Sweetheart which dropped on June 19. The best way to describe their music is indie electronica. Some of their tracks are pretty catchy, other tracks are just, well, different… It is definitely not hip hop though.

To balance out the experimental pop, I’ve dropped in some tracks from Miss Vintage, an indie rock band from Philly. They just released their debut album, Runways. I think their lead singer, Jason Min, sounds like a deeper voiced Thom Yorke. You indie rock heads go listen for yourself and tell me what you think.

We’ve also got some new music from the 6-piece SoCal band Thomas’ Apartment who just released their second album, Synchrony. They are currently touring up and down Northern and Southern California showcasing their “hard-driving riffs, euphoric melodies, and serious lyrical depth.”

That’s this week’s new music. Hopefully, we will continually bring new and exciting music from talented independent Asian American artists from our computer to yours.

Tags: News, Online Radio.

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As an unapologetic hip hop nerd and dilligent troller of mp3 blogs, I have recently noticed that CHOPS has had a hand in a lot of noteworthy remixes – mostly unofficial – for artists like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and Pharrell.

It’s all coming full circle. Using this online forum to write about CHOPS is vaguely reminiscent of my first meaningful interactions with online communication when I was in college. I am aware the Internet existed well before 1999, but no regular people knew how to use it until about then. Some younger heads may have trouble believing this, but when I was finishing up my freshman year in college in 1997, we were still figuring out how to use e-mail. In 1997, I did not own a CD or DVD player, and I certainly did not know that by 1999 you would be able to listen to CDs, watch DVDs, and surf the Internet all on the same machine. Up until that point, computers were just typewriters that didn’t require Wite-Out. (If you’re interested, you can ask me about the day I saw wireless Internet for the first time in 2002 – talk about an experience…)

But as a 20 year-old fan of hip hop, aspiring writer, and burgeoning API activist in 1999, I was exploring this newfangled Internet for some confluence of all three interests, and I somehow found the Mountain Brothers, a Chinese American trio of emcees representing Philly. Read more

Tags: Appreciation, Commentary, Video.

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