Instagram reels have proved to be an interesting and unexpected channel for discovering new music.
Last year I did a dance shoot with my friend Jieying. She edited together some of the footage and shared it, set to Blueprint Supreme (大展鸿图) by Chinese rapper Skai Isyourgod.
If you're on Instagram, you can see the dance video here. The music video for Blueprint Supreme is pretty cool too. The song was going viral in China right around this time, but Jieying's reel was my introduction to it.
Another, much older Chinese song – Ye Lai Xiang by Yoshiko Yamaguchi – was also an Instagram discovery, but I can no longer find the reel in question.
My next example is not a discovery but a rediscovery. Like most Bengali kids, I grew up listening to Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, but it's only after watching a reel about Kolkata at night that I truly came to love Olir Kotha Shune (অলির কথা শুনে) – a heartbreakingly lovely evocation of lovers drifting apart. "The bokul flower laughts to hear the bumblebee's song / How come you no longer laugh at the things I say?"
In my last few examples, the songs in question were just background music. But there are some Instagram posts which specifically recommend certain music, and one such post – by a record store in Copenhagen, of all places – is how I discovered Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh. This Guardian interview from 2011, four years before Singh's death, is a fun read.
