I was just looking at some videos and pictures one of my friends from home had posted on facebook and I think I might have found something that actually interests me that I can contirbute to the blog!

The friend in question is an MC and does all that crazy chavvy rave/new monkey type stuff (its very popular in the north-east if you havent heard of new monkey) and he labelled some of his stuff "Makina" I'd never heard this of this genre before so I put it in youtube, and surprise surprise a lot of the videos that came up were Spanish and there were even some Catalan videos.

So next I did the obvious thing and checked Wikipedia :P apparently Makina developed in the late 90s after electronic music became popular in the 80s, synth pop, acid house etc, in the Valencia/Catalonia region. The word Makina comes from "maquina" which means machine. One of the biggest Makina record companies is based in Catalonia, called "Xque". It basically sounds like a happy hardcore dance track with someone MCing over the top of it, and it uses loops and samples just like most other genres of dance music. Ive asked a few people and it's quite popular in County Durham where I'm from, and the north-east in general, so I'd be interested to know how popular it is in Catalonia! Apparently the regional governments tried to ban it, or at least tried to stop people attending raves because of the stereotypical connection with drugs that this kind of music has.

Anyway, I just thought it was quite interesting that a kind of music that a lot of my friends listen to originated in Catalonia and they (and I) had no idea!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1kina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1kina


Emma