It’s tough to post about anything besides protests, defunding the police, psychotic police brutality, Black Lives Matter, radical injustices and the like – and you should KEEP posting about all of that until things become fixed. That might take a while – who cares! We care!

However, I’ve still been digging into plenty of music, including the new album from TootArd, a Golan Heights-born, Israel & Switzerland-based duo making synth powered dance music reminiscent of Middle Eastern disco & reggae club music from the 1980s. The new record Migrant Birds is out now via Glitterbeat, and I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve been digging into a lot of my backlog during this time, which is mostly records I’ve found in “rare groove” forums and the like, and this feels like a modern “rare world groove” record. Something that you’d find on YouTube with like under 5,000 views or in a bin you’ve never looked through at your favorite record store. That’s obviously my western bias thinking this is some sort of rare, exotic thing, but I can absolutely confirm you should listen regardless.

The melodies are fantastic, the instrumentation is top notch, and the whole thing is just fabulous. I gotta check out their debut record, but I just can’t stop listening to Migrant Birds right now. If you’re looking for some non-western dance music that might breathe some new life into your stress-fatigued corpse.