mudd up!

in addition the 2nd day of Musique Action tonite, a last-minute Rupture solo DJ set will go down in Chartes (Orleans) tomorrow, and I’ll rejoin The Ex + Getatchew Saturday in Kortrijk, Belgium.

Outside our hotel there’s a Turkish restaurant where they’re listening to music on the room speakers & simultaneously blasting saz pieces from laptop’s YouTube link.

Expect more polyrhythm/cacaophony as our attention spans shatter along digital fault-lines.

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havent had time to listen, but: new Boy Better Know mixtape, as blogged by Prancehall, who also knows.

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the cumbia bug is infectious! Time to release more spores:

? - Ponchito de Colores

I’ve got multiple versions of this song, here’s the weirdest one– whoop whoop, plus someone quacks the bassline. I don’t know much about it (all my versions are badly labeled), but a semi-educated guess is Ecuatorian Andean. At this moment, a stronger blogger could resist the urge for ‘cute alpaca foto’…

…as it’s downright SUMMERY in France, time for a romantic cumbia sonidera from the kung-fu-influenced Mexican-Peruvian Grupo Ginnsu outta NUEVA YORK, with tremelo on the guitar. (Ginnsu’s website is noisy but kinda crazy.)

Grupo Ginnsu - Cumbia de los Patos

(”Ducks’ cumbia”? am i missing something?)

a piece I wrote on Toumani Diabete is in the current issue of Freize, a magazine whose cover looks like this:

click on the foto for a readable version:

i had this fantastic new Darkstar tune as hi-rez, so i opted to crunch it down to 100kbps but WOW, this duo (?) does the melancholic-dubstep thing exquisitely. Mining a rich vein:

Darkstar - Round Ours

buyable here, here, etc.

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there’s a great comp of hiplife out: Black Stars: Ghana’s hiplife generation

amazing stuff on here - highlife ragga hybrid bizness with enough sweet sung choruses to keep even the most demanding Akon fan happy. My favorite track was remixed by a white German dude who calls himself Red:

Tony Harmony ft. Triple M - My Body (Selectah Red RMX)

History is made at Night. blog around the identitity politics “of dancing and musicking”

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The Ex & Gétatchèw Mèkurya FREE, at Lincoln Center this August. What!?!? WFMU greased these wheels.

“The Ex are among the most freeform and inspiring musicians and people we’ve had the fortune to experience live and on record. To hear them in full steamroller twin-guitar attack joined by the 73-year old Lion of Ethiopian saxophone is going to be a musical experience we’re all gonna remember.”

next weekend The Ex will be playing songs with a less-illustrious collaborator - me. They’ve been invited to curate the Musique Action festival and have a weekend of improv & unlikely unions planned.

“The 7,8,9th of May, The Ex will curate three special nights, on the 25th anniversary of the amazing Musique Action Festival in Vendeouvre, Nancy, France. The first two nights are The Ex and guests, in different combinations. Guests will be: dj/rupture from New York, the Australian bassplayer Clayton Thomas, saxophonist John Butcher, drummer Han Bennink, trombonist Wolter Wierbos and Ethiopian masinqo-player Afework Negussie. On the 9th will be The Ex & Getatchew Mekuria & Guests. Getatchew Mekuria specially flies over from Ethiopia for this concert.”

on the 10th, Ex + Getechew & Rupture (solo this time) play nearby town of Kotrijk

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Andy Ex & I have a duo CD coming late summer or early fall. The title: Patches. it’s all mastered & sounds pretty good - live excerpts from concerts we gave in Europe over the past 2 years.

Greg on Sublime Frequencies, Diplo, and The Anonymous as Exotic.

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speaking of anonymizers, here’s a lovely 9-minute Berber pop tune released on the Reve d’Orient label’s ‘real’ 3 CD set with no tracklist or artist info on it (in any language).

Mudd Unknown - track 1 from Les Maitres de la Chanson Amazigh vol. 1

the artist is either Agouray or Baha Lahssen or Dujella Hassan or Mustafa Ouaadou.

i have reason to believe that WILEY KAT is the opposite of anonymous (thanks Lamin!):

Three continents in less than a week has left me burning the midnite oil, sipping yerba mate, and falling into deep R.E.M. sleep the moment I sit down in NYC’s shuddering metro system. Naturally, the blog suffers.

But you can expect a grip of print pieces from me in the near future: Fader, Frieze, repeat.

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“We’re just trying to find the greatest next 3 minutes of your life” - a great Observer (Guardian) article on mp3 blogs, in which MuddUp! is featured!

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I’ve been wrapping my ears around lady ‘harp’ music from Peru. Especially Anita Santivañes, totally hypnotic even though it all kinda sounds the same, these intermodulating waves of complicated & repetitive string arrangements falling from cracks in the sky down to a world holding less love than it needs.

Here’s Anita Santivañes from Anita Santivañes vs Anita Santivañes. Guess who wins!

Anita Santivañes - Bebi La Miel de Tus Labios

(heartbreak poetry encoded at 56 kbps, a MuddUp! low-fidelity record!)

& because it is late-nite and late-nite allows for little if any organizational logic, here’s a scratchy old banjo-powered recording of Algerian chaabi great Dahmane El Harrachi that i picked up at the Barbes Fassiphone shop a few days ago, where Sonido Martines took great pleasure in watching the Parisian Arab girls in impeccable makeup make fun of my musical selections.

Dahmane El Harrachi - Khabi Serrak

Nettle covers this tune in fact; this is the first time i’ve heard a recording of it by its original composer.

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speaking of Sonido & cuuuumbia, He’s straight outta Bogota via BnsAires and ON TOUR IN EUROPE RIGHT NOW! AY AY AY! & he’s got some killer CD-r mixes with him… be sure to ask…

in a hotel whose eves are lit with neon on the outskirts of a city on the outskirts of Lyon. Women are boxing each other in slo-motion on the television - who put on the sports channel? anyhow
Paris this evening! (Soot family + friends in the house! last of the ___ international playboys)

DJ/RUPTURE / FILASTINE / SIBOT & SPOEK are PLAYDOE / SONIDO MARTINES / KHIASMA. Le Nouveau Casino.

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Cairo Sound City: “…people who are shouting – without realizing that they’re shouting – even while they rail against the all-pervasive noise; with people who are screaming – without realizing that they’re screaming – even while denying that the city has become quite loud; and with one man who, oblivious to the cacophonous sounds around him, turns on his radio – and cranks it all the way up in order to hear it.
The overall effect, then, is that the city now sounds more like a stationary airplane engine, an endless and deafening roar on the deltaic northern fringe of the Sahara Desert.”

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late nite flamenco deflects the chill of reluctant french spring:
Tomás Pavon - Cantes de Tomás Pavon (from Early Cante Flamenco from the 1930s)

WE ARE RAIDERS

ok, so its probably gonna be at least 8 weeks until this 12″ emerges into the world and the (longer) CD version will take even more time, but head to the Dutty Artz myspace to hear “Go Round Payola” & get the full update at DA blog. Short version: it’s been a pleasure gatherng beats for JD to eat.

…for that Trim grime tune we were talking about recently. As Tim Abdellah enlightened us in his comment, Radioclit sampled a few bars of the Gnawa Diffusion’s Bab el-Oued Kingston album to make this beat. Check the original, it’s great:

Gnawa Diffusion - Gazel Au Fond de la Nuit

huge thanks for all the latin american literature recommendations! great stuff, very useful.

Tomorrow i go to South America! I need to see some people about some stuff - very excited - don’t worry, you’ll hear about it. (any latin american literature recommendations?)

Today a Mexican whose name isn’t really Rayo gave me 3 gigabytes of poorly labeled cumbia MP3s (just the song titles, which are not always correct). Yikes! Future libraries are gonna grow weirder and weirder. Oral culture & digital culture - virus-powered all. Replication thru mutation.

When he saw my studio he nodded in affirmation. “Yes, i recognize this. Mine’s the same way.” then he used a Spanish word i didn’t know so i said “what?” and he repeated it, gesturing. “In this chaos, you probably know exactly where to find things.”

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speaking of dark mirrorings, one of my fav compilations from 2007 features just that. Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics.

True, i would like this purely on the basis of the cover art: a strangely white woman reflected, darkly, in the surface of an old record, her real-world mouth white as if in the spotlight, her mirrored mouth falling into darkness, as black as silence. Open but mute.

But then there’s the music! an eclectic grab-bag of songs from 78s between 50 and 90 years old. The taste of compiler Ian Nagoski is fantastic, so the overall feel this CD transmits is of something quite special and cohesive.

If i’m ever talking too much or doing something annoying, just play this tune and i’ll stop everything and just listen.

Nji R. Hadji Djoeaehn - Tjimploengan (Indonesia)