Month: March 2007

POLIBIO MAYORGA, MAESTRO

Nine gigs in ten days mean much delicious realtime & a certain healthy neglect of the Matrix aka Mr + Mrs Internet. This trip began with Mexican riches (edible) in Sunset Park followed by a car service ride where my Ecuadorian driver introduced me, musically, to Polibio Mayorga. He lent me the disc, I will return it. Certain types of objects, experiencing them, turn you into caretakers of the object.

Polibio Mayorga – MuddUnknown (unlabeled cd-r from cab driver)

The sweet recklessness of a nationally famous composer/accordionist who has learned to rejoice in the fact that he can make his music on a synthesizer keyboard, all by himself, playing every part on his own. No, it’s not that simple…

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But something about his melodic sensibilities I find extremely compelling, plus the weird keyboard settings, the way the guitary-string chords swoop in like a proletarian harp, the gnawa-esque hi-hats on certain songs, the lyrics which enter fragmentary like dub, the organ schmaltz, the confidence, and so on.

“Como se llama este tipo de musica?”
“I guess you would have to call it… musica nacional de Ecuador” he said, our conversation in Spanish a bit difficult for me to understand – in every new world the language that comes to it forks.

TO KNOW HOW TO DISAPPEAR

The sudden absence surrounding a referent grows weak to strong, its fading echoes feedback, intermodulate new shapes, thoughts & make-up in the mirror, proliferation in the spaces left by someone who made them possible. Or,

dying is pointless, you have to know how to disappear
– Jean Baudrillard

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>> Pushing his argument into even more contemporary issues, Baudrillard urges us to recognize the degree to which the “real” Gulf War, for example, was not actually fought in the Middle East but rather in the trenches of CNN and the global media. The Gulf War (and by implication, almost every other major event of the past two decades) was about images, representations, and impressions at least as much as it was about guns and oil and other “underlying” material conditions. He looks back to the Watergate break-in the same way, stating that “before, the task was to dissimulate scandal,” that is, to lie about it, while today “the task is to conceal the fact that there is none,” that what appears to be a scandal is actually the normal workings of the American government. As always, Baudrillard (hyper) flamboyantly overstates his point to drive home the importance of his overriding argument, that something profoundly different is happening today in the relation between the real and the imagined, creating an epochal change in how we comprehend the world and act within it. However one sees it, reality is no longer what it used to be.

Baudrillard’s persistent and often purposeful exaggeration has angered and frustrated many of his readers. Many, especially on the Left, dismiss his work for its seemingly stultifying political implications, its apparent call to sit back and live with the irresistible world of simulations rather than struggle against it. But underlying his more fanciful flights is a powerful critique of contemporary epistemology (the study of how we know that our knowledge is true and useful) that deserves notice for the new insights it brings to an understanding of the restructured urban imaginary… << - from Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

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AT YOUR DOOR

heaps of gigs this month.

March 8 DJ Rupture, Filastine. Seattle
March 9 DJ Rupture, Filastine. Olympia
March 10 DJ Rupture, Filastine. San Francisco .
afterparty w/ Lemonade & 606!
March 16 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Amsterdam NL
March 17 DJ Rupture @ Bashout. Bristol UK
March 19 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Paris FR
March 20 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Tourcoing FR
March 21 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Orleans FR
March 22 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Amiens FR
March 23 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Brussels BE
March 24 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Nancy FR
March 25 Nettle: quartet w/ dp on video. Seville SP
March 29 DJ Rupture @ Reboot. Barcelona. SP

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ASENA

It goes something like this: For her self-titled album, Asena, a megastar Turkish bellydancer with impeccable taste in backing musicians, recorded a version of the self-titled song by French-born Algerian vocalist Warda (وردة).

If I understand correctly, Asena dances along to Warda wearing some combination of halter-top and/or reflective plastic jumpsuit. So perhaps it’s best to simply post the music, which is fiercely good.

Asena – Warda (from Asena)

Elegant and swooning the way only Cairo-centric string arrangements can be. Asena’s darbouka contigent pulls the rhythm in unexpected directions with an efficiency that beggars description while demanding immediacy — a tapping finger, loosened shoulders, limber and unfolding. Epic in under 4 minutes! Spacesuit bikinis fully optional.

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