Month: April 2008

EX, PATCHES, RAVEPOLITIK

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.

KNOWN UNKNOWNS

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!):

NO SLEEP MORE MATÉ

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 Santiva̱es РBebi La Miel de Tus Labios

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

anita santibañez

& 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.

dahmaneh

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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…

sonido3yv2chichadeffi1

PARIS EVENEMENT

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)

GO ROUND PAYOLA

ImageImage

WE ARE RAIDERS

jd art blogvers2
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.

jd art blogvers2

BLACK MIRROR

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.

black-mirror-cover

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)

THANK YOU FOR BEING BLACK, OR, IF YOU DONT LIKE SLUMMING YOU DONT LIKE CLIMBING

All of the reggae covers of Police/Sting songs I’ve heard are great. Freshest name on the list:

Junior Reid – Synchronicity

junior-reid

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Team Moji flew from Harlem to Copenhagen to party when I played there, and we were the only black people on the boat i think and a Danish woman came up to my friend Erin and said: you have a great smile. thank you for being black!

I was like wow and Moji said to me: “i LIKE being thanked for being black when i’m in europe. yup, it is a singular experience, a real treat, and something you don’t really get uptown (where everyone is black and already sick of the black people they know).”

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anyhow, let me get b(l)ack to making fun of a [correction!] Anonymous Poster on W&W’s blog, which was the original intention of this post. He expressed this sentiment, doesnt matter which way the waters flow so I mirrored it darkly:

“…Refined European polka and waltz started being exported to the Texas area in the late 19th century, where it was welcomed by uneducated Mexicans, always in search of the newest first-world dance beat to mimic and ape, last season it was the waltz, now it’s polka! These Mexicans call it Norteño.

“It’s a shame seeing these Mexicans take the glorious German accordian and refashion it to their own rural, underdeveloped needs. Completely unaware of the polka classics, the wonderful songwriting of the Volks, ignorant of Wagner and our traditions, the Mexicans have appropriated our instruments and pulled them down into the realm of the popular…

“I freely acknowledge that my general visceral reaction against working-class usages of cosmopolitan elements grows out of the confirmed suspicion that these things are not usually carried out in the sense of submission and homage, but rather, as you say above, cross-class climbing and an indigenous craving for a mediated refinement / urbanity / sublimity [insert desired quality of our population here]. . .

NOISE WILL BRING THE BOYS IN BLUE

Somebody come get me, before I kill this man. Somebody come get me, get this knife out of my hand.

Syren Hall – Somebody Come Get Me

roots love, roots pain. Is this girl a major label test-tube baby? what looks like a realish myspace only lists 69 friends.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, bachata that runs easy laps then breaks into gabba-sprints, cooked up from Dem Bow bullion:

Viejo – Apretaito

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Maga Bo live on the radio tonite, playing a NYC show tomorrow

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In other news, huge online reggae store Audiomaxxx was shutdown.

The seizure Wednesday of more than 200,000 CDs and DVDs from the production shop of Winnipeg-based Audiomaxxx.com is likely Canada’s largest in the a decade, says Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association. “Independent producers and smaller record labels, including some from the Caribbean, played a big part in pushing the industry and the police to investigate, Henderson said. “Their whole market was being chopped out from under them in the Caribbean, by stuff made in Canada.”

This criminal takedown is not surprising to anyone who knew of Audiomaxxx: there was a bounty on the Canadian’s head for his particularly ruthless theft/bootlegging. For scandal, check the ‘Boycott Audiomaxxx‘ Myspace.

(Winnipeg. It gave us Venetian Snares and King Raj of Audiomaxxx. )