Introduction

Welcome to the quarter tone zone! This is the blog that I've been looking for for quite some time, and never could find - so I decided I'd start it. My first encounter with quarter tonal pop music must have been back in the early 1970s, when my parents gave me a Demis Roussos tape after they came back from a holiday in Greece. Today My friend the wind sounds a wee bit cheesy, but it hooked me on synthesizers tuned to an Arab scale. Since then, I haven't looked back.

Over the 30-some years that have passed since my first exposure to "oriental" music, my horizon has expanded quite a bit. My next watershed experience was Spain's Eurovision 1983 entry: Remedios Amaya's ¿Quién maneja mi barca? It may have bombed with zero points, something that made poor Remedios go into musical hibernation for years (see Tim Moore's great book Nul Points for more), but in my opinion, her flamenco lament has just improved with time:



Then in my late teens I "discovered" Arabic pop music - both the Middle Eastern variety and Algerian raï راي, then (because Arabic music was so difficult to get hold of in Oslo back in the early 1990s) I fell for Turkish arabesk. Studying Arabic in Cairo in the mid-1990s made it considerably easier to get hold of Arabic pop, and I still have hundreds of Egyptian tapes stashed away somewhere. This was when I started to be able to differentiate between different Arabic pop music styles. In 1997 I worked in Hebron on the West Bank, and in addition to buying yet more Arabic cds, I ventured into Israeli mizraḥi מזרחי pop. Excursions into more Spanish flamenco pop followed, picking up the odd Iranian cd every now and then, before finally realising that Balkan quarter tones are more than Greek pop and Les mystères des voix bulgares: Narodno music from former Yugoslavia, Bulgarian čalga чалга and the genre with the greatest name in pop music history - turbofolk!

And now the time has finally come to share the happy tidings: Enjoy!