There’s an ace article in the Guardian today by the mighty John Harris which manages to satisfyingly and simultaneously demolish the flatulent Live Earth, announced this week, and provide a jumping off point for some of the world’s more ’samizdat’ music:

All told, the activity Neil Young characterised as rocking in the free world is now pretty much devoid of political meaning, and why anyone would think Anglo-American popular music was the province of dangerous and radical minds rather escapes me. Elsewhere, however, hitting an instrument and singing your pain is still among the most brave and important things you can do…

A quick Google turns up the tunes. Iran’s Hypernova specialise in spiky alternative numbers. Their song ‘Consequence’, which you can download from their Myspace page, has a guitar riff that any number of the tight-trousered chancers currently plodding around the UK ‘indie’ scene would kill for. Hypernova seem to be achieving some level of success away from Iran.

127, also from Iran, of who Harris says ‘they’d managed to put on four gigs in the past four years, and nobody was ever allowed to dance’ also have a Myspace page and are also a bit good. Their ‘Perfect Esfehan Blues‘ shuffles along under the weight of about a million different influences and still sounds ace. Their YouTube page is here - their website is frustratingly busted right now..

Belarus’ Chyrvonym pa Belamu’s ‘Nie Žadaju’ (fifth one down) samples Falco’s ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ but isn’t as naff as that might imply. If wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack to ‘The Shield‘, played over an episode’s typically elegaically violent denouement, maybe. His status as an artist in Belarus is uncertain. Not being an ‘official’ state-sanctioned musician can carry a penalty.

Turkey’s Deli face jail for having the temerity to criticise the country’s university entrance exam. Eighteen months, for God’s sake. You can hear the tune, OSYM, on YouTube, although the spud leaping around to it detracts somewhat.

(The Freemuse website is a dispiritingly thorough record of just how much trouble just picking up a guitar can get you into in a depressingly large part of the world. We might think we live in an Orwellian nightmare in the UK but I imagine returning from a fortnight in, say, Turkmenistan, would be like coming home to one of Caligula’s parties.)

*The name of 127’s first EP. It means ‘underground tapes’.