Everyone is familiar with the idea of hearing a new artist for the first time and instantly falling in love. Almost as though you’ve been waiting to hear something like it for your whole life up to that point and now it has finally arrived at your doorstep. It will invariably then lead to the artist deep dive, that has been made all the easier in recent times with the rise of Spotify and Apple Music, where you put the artist on shuffle and relax for hours. It remains one of my favourite things to do still, and always leaves you feeling some inexplicable fulfilment.

But it’s not very often that it’s a new genre altogether that captures you. Often, quite simply, because it is usual that you will already have encounter the majority of genres more than once anyway. But sometimes a song hits the mark to such an extent that you need to find out if there is more like it out there, even if it is to be by different artists. Hence it came to be that the song Lost In The Rhythm by English producer Jamie Berry (featuring the vocals of Octavia Rose) came to shape my listening habits over the last two months.

As a lapsed trumpet player, I have always had a strong affinity to trumpets in songs and indeed any kind of brass band tends to be right up my street. But there was something extra about this particular track that seemed to resonate with me. The prominence of the old style swing brass mixed in with an electronic sound that I found myself listening to at the time just seemed to fit.

Turns out it was a newer genre that had emerged in recent years, called Electro Swing.

It lead to a serious deep dive into the genre that would last for months on end. The mix of the old-time feel and the brass elements is an incredibly exciting mic and is another example of performers and creatives not being afraid to push the boundaries of what would traditionally been the different genres of music.

New genres like Electro Swing also allow for fun reinventions of old tracks. My favourite example of this so far, again comes from the wonderful Dave Wave when he decided to reconstruct the popular Halloween song, Spooky Scary Skeletons, as an electro swing song. The results are stunning.

Here is an Electro Swing playlist that I’ve been putting together in the last while if you want to sample some of what the genre has to offer…

MK