As we ring in the Rodential Lunar New Year, my friend Stuart celebrates a personal milestone--two years of posting obscure global oldies at his site Radiodiffusion Internasionaal. If you haven't been downloading his digitized found sounds, you've missed out on over 100 weeks' worth of 60s pop singles from Central, South, East and Southeast Asia.

This week the site features two tracks by the Stylers, an instrumental band from Singapore who dealt in "non-stop dancing music." Stuart asked me to lay down a little background on this rather obscure genre, as I'm a bit of an aficionado. Here's what I came up with:

Non-stop instrumental dancing records go at least as for back as the 1950s orchestral work of Germany's James Last. Non-stop ballroom has had a lasting influence in East and Southeast Asia. (In the mid-1990s, I purchased a wonderful cassette in the Philippines called "Non-Stop Cha Cha Extravaganza," for example.) However, it is the Asian version of the "A Go-Go" pop medley sound that has captured the imaginations of Western record collectors in recent years. Influenced by instrumental rock groups from the US and UK, the 60s teen scenes of Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore produced numerous dancing albums. These albums often retained the ballroom sensibility of listing the intended dance styles next to the track titles (A Go-Go, Blues, Fox Trot, Cha Cha, etc.), but relied on a rock line-up of bass, drums, guitar and organ. As for the songs performed, Western pop hits, regional pop hits and even traditional folk melodies were all fair game.

By the 1970s, surviving instrumental bands like The Stylers seem to have gotten more ambitious, incorporating into their albums film themes, sound effects, "hi-fi" production values, and musical elements of the emerging disco sound. By this point, non-stop instrumental albums were less a teen dance phenomenon than they were fodder for the high-end stereo equipment of Asian audiophiles.

To hear the music and get more information on the Stylers and Asian A Go-Go (including many informative links), go to this week's post. You only have until Sunday morning...