There are different kinds of weirdness in music. There's Weirdness Serving a Higher Purpose (setting the mood, building a character, getting the point across etc.), and there's Weirdness For Its Own Sake. Though we tend to take the phrase "it's just weird for the weirdness' sake" as negative criticism, there's actually nothing wrong with that. It can be fun, it can be interesting, it can be unsettling, it can be alienating etc., and what's more, it can be more than one of those seeming opposites at the same time.
But there's also a third kind: Weirdness Out of Necessity. Just listen to some kind of Turkish Psychedelic Rock or Peruvian Garage Surf kind of compilations, and you will know this. Most cases the biggest charm comes from the infusion of local idioms with the Anglo-Saxon genre. But there's also a palpable sense of weirdness coming from the limited means musicians had at hand: cheaper instruments, worse studios, the lack of a professional, institutionalized background.
You will hear it in the background static, in the strange synth and guitar tones, the mistakes. And make no mistake: this is not just weird for "western ears", we don't hold this music to alien standards, or look down on it (as in "hey, nice try, it is funny that you do that in your exotic country!"): the musicians themselves wanted to make a local equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon original.
Two of Soundway Records' great new releases this year are partly great because they mix the two latter kinds of weird. Fumaca Preta: S/T and Meridian Brothers: Salvadora Robot both employ really strange synth sounds, odd song structures and improbable genre-crossings just for the fun of it (and they are fun!). And I also sense a proud and playful taking up of their country's heritage of Weirdness Out of Necessity. Indeed, necessities, inequalities still exist, but both to lesser extent (cheap instruments and no studio time can yield much "better" results), and in new forms (e.g. inequalities of online attention). So affirming this heritage, being proud of something that was not a cause for pride, but rather an unintended creative consequence of a disadvantage - that has political implications as well. But first and foremost: a peculiar form of fun.
