Kalup Linzy feat. James Franco, “Rising”. Matt Shadetek and I built the beat structure, then I labbed up with cellist/songwriter Brent Arnold who performs with me in Nettle (catch Nettle’s trio formation at Rome’s Maxxi Museum ‘the National Museum of 21st ct. Art’ next week) to further flesh things out musically. Kalup Linzy made the video which incorporates some footage from James. Enjoy! For more info, check out the Pitchfork post.
Month: June 2011
BEYOND DIGITAL MOROCCO UPDATE: VILLAGE BOYS, VILLAGE MAGIC
[Rainstorm in Issafn, photo by John Francis Peters for The Fader]
The group blog over at our Beyond Digital: Morocco site has been lively as things accelerate. Each week John Francis Peters and I find time to join photos and text documenting some of our time here. The series is here, and you can go direct to this week’s post – Village Boys, Village Magic, and the Best Breakfast Ever.
excerpt 1
Issafn’s empty adobe houses crumble back into the rocky landscape. It’s newer self-built cinderblock palaces line a sliver of green—date palms, figs, monstrous olive trees—around a riverbed that’s walkable barring flash-floods. Ten years ago Issafn had no electricity. Powerlines were strung when the new king came to power, and now local hiphop crews post online videos of themselves rapping in Tashelhit. Hassan and his buddies put together an hourlong DVD (that’s genre-scramble seems inspired by Bollywood’s action-romance-spy-comedy-melodrama-all-at-once attitude) that they shot in the hills. The women still haul water up from the creek pre-dawn, and the cybercafe’s sign has been around so long that it’s rusted, nearly out of legibility. What’s gonna happen in the next decade?
Maghreb Mix Party, Track 9 (Sexy Back Blend) by The FADER
[The King’s Speech, photo by John Francis Peters for The Fader]
excerpt 2
Walking around Issafn, we are the aliens. Most of our crew doesn’t speak Arabic or French, not that those would help much. Tashelhit is the first language of everybody else here, and many of the older generation don’t speak Arabic. So communication turns into gestures and patience. We learn that the Berber term for beetle is iguiliguiz, a word impossible to pronounce without smiling. We learn that a great magic bird named Baz taught people in this land how to make music. We learn that honeycomb and homemade almond paste and olive oil and round bread is the best breakfast ever.
MUDD UP BOOK CLUBB: JUNE 27th CASABLANCA EDITION
As announced in this post, the Mudd Up Book Clubb kicks off this month. We have a time and location now: It’s going down on Monday June 27th, at 7pm on the rooftop near rue Jean Jaures in Gauthier, Casablanca. It’s a particularly appropriate place to sit down and discuss Maureen F. McHugh’s Nekropolis, a science fiction novel set in 22nd century Morocco involving biochemical slavery, immigration, genetic chimeras and more. See the original post for more info on the event and the book.
We’ll have a Ustream feed going for everyone elsewhere. I’m looking at a Filastine’s Barcelona rooftop for the next edition, let’s keep these pages turning…
RADIO JUNE MUDD
Last Monday’s radio show is now streaming. I selected the tunes but hiccuping Casablanca wireless meant that last-minute I couldn’t add my voice — co-pilot Lamin Fofana helped out on that end.
you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: 
, 
Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).
tracklist: Continue reading RADIO JUNE MUDD
DJ SESSION IN CASABLANCA: RUPTURE, MAGA BO, TALIESIN
last minute but hey – tonight we’re giving a free party at the Instituto Cervantes in Casablanca, Morocco. Info here (francais, arabic, espanol).
The party kicks off this week’s Beyond Digital series at the Instituto Cervantes. All events are free and open to the public, and will be conducted primarily in French.
[photo by John Francis Peters]
Tomorrow, Wednesday June 22, we’ll be having a work-in-progress presentation on our Beyond Digital project.
And on Thursday June 23, Fader photo editor John Francis Peters will give a photo workshop session, walking us through his editing process and approach to documentary photography. His growing body of work here is stunning, check our weekly Fader updates for a taste.
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PROJET MUSICAL BEYOND DIGITAL
www.beyond-digital.org
Mardi 21, mercredi 22 et jeudi 23 juinBeyond Digital présente un projet qui vise la relation qu’il y a entre le digital et le traditionnel dans le monde contemporain de la musique chaabi et bereber. Avec la collaboration d’une équipe internationale d’artistes, le projet explore le monde de cette musique à travers l’usage de la vidéo, de la photographie et de la collaboration musicale.
Mardi 21 juin à 21h DJ Sessions avec DJ/Rupture et Maga Bo. Deux DJs de renom international qui proposent une soirée sans frontières. Maga Bo: basse transnational. DJ/Rupture : rythmes inattendus, intelligent + dansant.
Mercredi 22 juin à 19h Introduction: work-in-progress (travaux en cours). L’équipe de Beyond Digital partage un échantillon du travail accompli jusqu’à présent à Casablanca : fragments de vidéo, musique, photographie, encore inachevés. Une invitation à venir débattre et à participer.
Jeudi 23 juin à 19h Atelier: édition de photographie. John Francis Peters, éditeur de photographie de la revue new-yorkaise Fader et photographe de Beyond Digital, nous montre ses photos faites à Casablanca et avec ce matériel – en plus d’autres ouvrages de photographie documentaire – nous propose un atelier participatif sur le travail d’édition.
MUDD UP SUMMER SCHEDULE
Radio radio. WFMU’s summer schedule is now in effect, and, Mudd Up! has been moved back an hour, to 8-9pm EST on Monday evenings. Here’s yesterday’s show:
tracklist: Continue reading MUDD UP SUMMER SCHEDULE
BEYOND DIGITAL: OLD VINYL AND NEW POP IN CASABLANCA
[M’hamed Tijdity at Le Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques, photo by John Francis Peters for The Fader]
Head over to The Fader to check out the first of my weekly Morocco updates for the month of June, accompanied by photos from John Francis Peters and, of course, music.
excerpt 1:
Forget Bogart. Casablanca is an utterly modern city, North Africa’s largest, with traffic-choked roadways and upscale neighborhoods and swaths of shantytowns whose residents have satellite dishes but no running water. While most tourists skip Casa to spend their dirhams in more scenic towns, the gritty magnet metropolis pulls in folks from all over the country looking for work, and powers Morocco’s music and art scenes. I’m here for a month with FADER photo editor John Francis Peters and an international crew of six others. Music brought us. . .
excerpt 2:
This next tune is a song halfway between traditional Berber songs from rural Morocco—popularized in the 1970s by Le Comptoir’s main artist, Mohammed Rouicha—and our Auto-Tuned, pixelated tomorrow. It’s by Adil El Miloudi. Adil performs across Europe and tells me that this summer he’ll be making appearances in to Florida and Boston, for the first time. His breakthrough song, “Nothing Nothingâ€, has well over a million YouTube views. Adil lives in Kenitra and performs regularly at a Tangier nightclub called the Morocco Palace (free entrance but they gouge you on shisha and drink prices).
The Palace has a light-up disco dance floor and really good subwoofers. Everything else is covered in intricate Islamic pattern woodcarvings, except the enormous flatscreen TV right above the stage, which is set to a music video channel and is never, ever turned off, even when live bands are performing underneath it. Adil rolls around town with a phalanx of young guys whose primary duty seems to be handing him various cellphones at the appropriate moment. I know this because, after calling several of those phones, I found myself, along with Maga Bo, at Adil’s house at four in the morning a month ago. “This is Tom,†he said, pointing at his manager. “And this is Jerry,†he said, pointing at his cat.
BBQ HEAT STREAM
Radio from last Monday, Memorial Day in the States. Block by block, we make a wall. Take the wall to a hole, push it over, use the wall as a bridge to get to the other side. The other side of what? If you turn it up loud enough, we don’t have to listen.
you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).
tracklist:
NO COLORS ANYMORE
Gil Scott-Heron – Paint It Black
