For this week’s Music in Review issue, I wrote about what I’m fairly certain was the most exciting sound to emerge from the District this year: Moombahton, DJ Dave Nada‘s crossbreeding of Dutch house music and reggaeton. According to Moombahton’s creation myth, Nada discovered the microgenre by accident while spinning in a P.G. County basement; now he’s playing it at packed parties the world over. He moved to L.A. this fall to work more with the influential producer Switch, mostly on the strength of the material of his duo Nadastrom. But there was something remarkable about how Moombahton caught on—-within a month of Nada’s first posting of Moombahton tracks, producers (including some very notable ones) on at least two continents were working in the genre. Even in a year in which D.C.’s high-minded DJ scene came into its own, the District couldn’t have possibly kept Moombahton to itself. Read the article here.

Once you’ve done that, here’s some further reading: One thing that struck me is the incredible amount of Moombahton literature that’s already out there. Locally, the blog True Genius Requires Insanity has basically become a Moombahton bible; a recent post on new Moombahton tracks by D.C. DJs is really worth your time. TGRI’s Marcus K. Dowling also wrote a fantastic three-part primer on Moombahton for another local blog, The Couch Sessions: 1, 2, 3.

Telescoping backward, M.I.T. musicologist Wayne Marshall wrote an essential essay on Moombahton and its development via the Web for The National. Moombahton, he says, is part of something new: “a reclamation and redefinition of global street music for the internet age that we might call world music 2.0,” he writes. Marshall has also been writing about Moombahton for most of the year on his blog wayne&wax.

Somewhat incredibly, there’s already a Moombahton Wikipedia page, created by one of Moombahton’s early blogger champions. It’s on the fannish side.

And there’s a ton more: Fader, XLR8R, and Rolling Stone have written about Moombahton; so have countless blogs, like Discobelle and Generation Bass.

Nada estimates 100 or more DJs are experimenting with the genre. A search for “Moombahton” on Soundcloud is terrifying.

I’m going back to my vacation now. Here’s the EP that started it all.

Dave Nada – Moombahton by T&ARecords

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.