old Mudd!  

REHAB / EAST

at least a couple things have happened

• ran around town with a hotspot of breakcore lads, each unstoppable: Drop the Lime, Rotator, Sickboy, Yann Dub, and another guy whose name i never did catch. Liver & wormwood slippers. The first 3 are on tour in Europe, blitzed aggro fun worth checking.

• I´m Stuck in Rehab with Pat O´Brien. Quintessential demerol grinblog for a post-Office comedy mediascape. Having known people who have gone thru it, who should go thru it, and who started to go thru it but disappeared halfway never to be seen again,  I feel I can say from a non-arrogant/ironic position that this is really funny. This post is my current fav. Very U.S. TV oriented, so I miss a lot of the celeb references, but it still works. Comedy can go places other forms can´t. You can deliver all kinds of explosives wrapped in a smile.

  Also: this blog leans towards the blog-as-new-art end of the spectrum, a development I find exciting. It´s not like this person is posting their novel or photos or erotic stories or poems on a blog, no, that´s just old-school content in a new-school container. Rehab riffs on blogdom itself, making a new shape with the core blogosphere materials of pop, first-person narration, instapunditry, and what SFJ called 'fruit fly news cycles'. The only thing that breaks it (besides the dark gleeful impossibility of it all) is the link to an obvious comedy website, presumably so that the diligent can backtrack their way to the author.

at least a couple things will happen

• Rupture throwdown in Osaka, Japan this Friday. Club Noon. Romz, kind fellows who released the Japanese version of my album (complete with extra track & packaging i can´t read) are bringing me over & it should be big. With the non-Ruins Tatsuya Yoshida (aka Joseph Nothing), Com.a, Shiro, Akainu -- these guys require some explaining and explaining requires visual aids so i´ll try next week. Next day Com.a & I play Hiroshima. Sunday brings the mayhem back to Osaka, find us at DOxCORE bending records until they shatter. No need for shamisen player, we´re sorted.
  

XXX

needletrash

WHY WAIT?

MAPLESSNESS, or TOPKNOT NEGRO CABOOSE

We're bumping along in a moment of rambunctious maplessness. It's a given that everybody's talking at once, but some people are listening too, and some people have their ear to the ground-- bass travels.

    Genres caliente like reggaeton and grime keep puncturing fantastic holes in the underground / indie / pop / Atlantic divide: London street anthem Forward airs on NYC corporate station Hot 97, Miami rapper Pitbull boasts he's gonna release Forward stateside, Diplo produces the amazing Kano joint “Reload It”. Hot shit rains down from all directions. And it's all happening so fast that most critical apparatus just spins in circles muttering about fertilizer brands.

To get comfortable sudsing up in hermeneutic bubble-baths of co-opter/local  authentic/sham  successful hybrid/lifeless derivative debates is to miss the point. However clean it makes you feel. Those arguments don't allow for complexity, polyvocality, the shared space for harmony and dissonance in which a lot of the music I love lives. Muddy waters.

    The same arguments that solidify the slash and separateness between those terms fuel creepy racial & social separatism in other contexts. Dreams of racial or aesthetic purity, stable origins, unmiscegenated legible lineages...

    Non-white public performers especially are always under the microscope; and I'm gonna admit it bugs me out when people swab samples from those artists and stain them on the glass slide so they can believe they see & understand what's happening there. The aloofness required is extraordinary. That sharp dry authority flex, the urge to demarcate, to enclose debate in an area less unruly than life, conflicted, ambivalent, inescapably co-opted life. Very nonsexy. And yeah, it tends to be a guy thing, with all the musk and preen and  uneasiness towards powerful women that that implies.

For example, Simon Reynolds wrote (I'm just using him as an example b/c the sheer amount of webtext he's typed on these topics; I don't wanna bring arms house...): “Not that grimesters etc are barbarians, but A/ those scenes are weirdly cocooned from a lot of mediatized stuff, I'm always amazed at how insular they are on some levels, material from "outside" filters in but in a weird haphazard way. They might appropriate stuff but you couldn’t say the mindset is “eclectic” or ”cosmopolitan”. B/ there is an urgency and hunger to the music that comes from the fact that music is too often their only escape route, whereas art students have a lot more options.”

    Point B is stunning. “Music is too often their only escape route.”?! Is there anyone on this planet who still believes that it's more likely for a black guy (poor or otherwise) to be a doctor or lawyer than he is to make a living from music??

    I feel like I'm watching a Dave Chappelle satire played in straightface: Escape from the Ghetto! Starring poor black dudes as either basketballers or rappers! I mean, that's their only escape route: natural entertainment talent! Leave the projects due to the saving graces of leisure class buying power! Entertain a predominantly white audience who'll judge (praise, berate, fear, blog about) you on what they perceive as your stylized, locally-resonant globally-hip negritude, downloaded & digitized. Sing nigger, sing... --I'm exaggerating here to underscore how sound arguments can start off praising and analyzing grime's intensity, then slip into some strange generalizations which themselves aren't too many steps away from dubious claims about race, class, mobility. I certainly don't mean to smear anybody, I just chose a sample from Reynolds (arguably one of grime's biggest stateside supporters) to illustrate a larger problem of rhetoric and the terms of the debate. (I'm also exaggerating because I bristle at the myth that big vocalists/performers in any scene are making mad cash; Sister Nancy for example was asking me--off all people!!--for legal advice about her endless bootlegs and samplings and reissues--she doesn't see any money from the large amounts of revenue her megahit "Bam Bam" continues to generate).

    Returning to the point-- I´m saying is that even in an argument as “scrupulously balanced and fair” as Reynolds' (his words, not mine), you get spikes like this one, the notion that grime´s thrilling “urgency and hunger” comes from the "fact" that entertaining people is their only escape. Unlike art students.

Before the above quote, Reynolds wrote: “many of the most exciting musics of recent years have been totally bound up with a sense of place-- dirty south rap, grime, dancehall, Miami bass, New Orlean bounce, Baltimore breaks, reggaeton, etc. These are all local musics, not impervious or impermeable to outside influences, but obsessively referencing parochial details and surroundings. I would argue that this very insularity is integral and intrinsic to their ability to generate intensities.” Cool. I agree that local scenes generate intensities, and one of the ways they do this is by creating a safe-space where folks can wild out & push limits with the support of a community that trusts them. (At some point i´d like to write about this in relation to my old Toneburst crew in Boston)

    But I disagree with his terms “insular” and “parochial”-- nine times out of ten it is the predominantly white, predominantly middle-class communities who maintain insulation from the grimey masses, rather than vice versa. Silver spoons are more parochial than food stamps. A century ago Harlem birthed an artistic ´Renaissance´ because blacks couldn´t readily rent elsewhere in Manhattan. They weren´t insular--they were ghettoized. Contained, pushed peripheral and then overcharged. Literally bound to a place.

    Once again, the logic that upholds grime/ dancehall/ reggaeton´s intensity (via-insularity) accomplishes this by positioning working class black or latino communities as parochial & local, a rhetorical move which implies white/middle-classness as normal, open, regular... placeless... global... default. Everywhere and nowhere like Starbucks. And while we're here, might as well buy some urgent, hungry, intense local music to spice things up so we can dance!

    The rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets did not yet have the right to grow a mustache, drink vodka, and smoke a pipe. All he had was his topknot negro caboose. And therefore his character was not much developed at that time; but judging by the big bumps on the forehead with which he often came to class, one could suppose he would make a fine warrior.

MARKING 2 YEARS OF THUG SURGERY

Large peaceful anti-war march in Barcelona (and some other active cities) today. A reassuring mix of young kids, old people, families, squatters, political parties, folks who lead comfortable enough lives not to still care about this stuff but do anyhow.

I was the quietest protester. Mics in my ears recording anti-authoritarian chants, improvised drumming, trebled blasts of call-and-response megaphone spirit. Simply. This is our voice, now. Coming around the corner. Maybe it cracks when we yell, maybe not. Continues.

RUPTURE'S PEACE OFF SPECIAL

At 4 A.M. London time this Saturday nite/Sunday morning, tune in to Resonance FM to catch a new 110% aggro Rupture mix for another edition of the redZEROradio festival. I tried to stay within the suggested parameters of: 'noise, stormcore, breakcore, terrorcore, hardcore..'. For the first half hour I don't let the BPM drop below 190. This one's for the seven dudes out there who thought Minesweeper Suite's Borbetomagus / Scud / Rotator blend was too slow and linear. The crossfader abuse ends with some grime, Mondie's massive crippled Pull Up Dat and other screwfaced solar plexus hits. Sung Iggy:

    Freaked out for another day / No fun by babe no fun / No fun my babe no fun ....
    Maybe go out, maybe stay home, maybe call ma on the telephone.

France's mighty Peace Off cartel just sent me a wallop of headbanger music, really good speedcore / breakcore / hardcore twelves & white labels from Venetian Snares, Mr.Kill, Krumble, Doormouse, Sickboy, and more. (my fav Doormouse release to date, actually, and Krumble kills it on neo-hardstep-ragga tip, driving classic D&B breaks strafed by razorcut fills)
    All these mofos will appear in the mix, along with a few exclusives, such as the ridonkulous new Rotator remix of my 'Descarriada' track that Broklyn will release on 12” along with a new tune by me and some older tracks seeing vinyl for the first time. This comes out early April.

 
+   Look Lemon-Red for mpfree heat, notably Pitbull's Toma (oye loca, ven pa'ca!) and Wiley's Firefly. When I first heard Firefly I thought he was only ripping himself off but the 2nd listen reminded me that Wiley remains a mad genuis allowed to splice his shiny grimy DNA into anything he wants. If each song is a lifetime, listen how gunshots marks eras in this one, burn lyrical.

+   A few weeks ago Sasha was like "I'm gonna take a vacation from this blog thing." 63 hours later, he's back blogging with the strength of ten (if you look at it long enough, it'll start to make sense). The obvious explanation-- he sold his soul to the devil-- doesn't stand up, because he seems like a nice guy too. Plutonium espresso? Be sure to check him explaining grime to Conde Nasti's readership.

NO MONEY, NO SPONSORS: hefty grime radio rips

Having neither the time nor clarity of mind (flu, sizzurp, watching the room spin inside my brain) to write, I rip. And then return to shivering aching and so on. These mud pies were baked from a cassette gift courtesy of Simon Platinum Plus. The egalitarian grime connect. Each mp3 is 20-25 minutes & about 16MB.

• DJ Maximum & Karnage (Roll Deep) -- part 1. (this one is my least favorite of the 3 here, but it's still solid. lots of big tunes on Max's decks)
  

• DJ Maximum & Karnage (Roll Deep) -- part 2

   can anybody ID the first track? full-on sample-based grime orientalism, i ain't mad at that. Eskimo is in the key of B, by the way, with an eastward melodic lean. (The resonant frequency of my studio is E, or the quarter tone between E & E flat. You learn these things by trail and error, and when you hit it the whole building hears.)

    sounds of london's deja vu 9-2-3 pirate style. we aint got no sponsors, we aint got no money neither!!

• Flex -- from a Deja Vu emission. Raw, raucous, climax-averse buildups, smackdown jerk-bass beats. this was “brand new” as of last october 03. Mid-90s a friend went to some big parties in Kingston and said that it was mostly about motorcycles. I know nothing more, except what the virus tells me.

And this: the point of culture is never, ever 'getting to the point'. So yes, this rip starts off with about 5 boring/exhilarating minutes of jibber-jabber -- the equivalent of thousands of pounds of commercial radio payola -- being spent on Westwood smackdowns and, well, jibber-jabber. There's this idea of freedom as not a noun or a concept, but a verb, something you do: freedom as ongoing struggle, constant movement. etc. Freedom only sounds boring to static listeners. You can't buy it, be it, or watch it. Pirate style.

ps. FYI techheads / variable bitrate (VBR) encoders: i did a VBR rip on one of these and the time was 20:31. Constant bitrate rip of the same file clocked in at 22:25. Full wav audio was 22:27. i.e. VBR algorhythms trim trim tcheroo-ed out a full 2 minutes. This bears some sliver-y relation to Achilles and the Tortoise. Snip snip snip. Suppose Homer wants to go to a rave. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a fourth, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on... Will Homer ever get to party? 

BRONZE ANVIL

"Ain't nothing more real in this wirld than American power, but increasingly that means the power of American illusionism. Sadly, Black people in politics and entertainment are coming to appear just another figment of the white man's imagination—dreamers within a dream....  If the creators of The Matrix had read Ralph Ellison they wouldn't have romanticized Black people as too worldly to fall for a virtual reality. Nobody's sense of reality is more absurd. Because at the heart of African American Being and Nothingness sits a paradox of unbelonging and unbudging—the double consciouness of They Don't Like Us Much Around These Parts and We Ain't Going Nowhere. The edge in Black music has always come from mixing up alienation and militancy. It's the sound of us marching where we know we're not wanted and planting a flag. Some call it revolutionary, some call it gangsta. Right now I'd call it about dead asleep."   - Greg Tate, on 50 Cent.

MEMORY, GRAFT, LUBRICATION

Today marks a year since the March 11th bombing at Madrid´s Atocha train station. A NYTimes article, titled by a JRR Tolkien fan, introduces some of the complex power gambits and fingerpointing in public office. (use "toneburst" for username and password if needed)

Recently socialist President of Cataluyna Pasqual Maragall said something to the effect of: there´s no problem that can´t be solved without a big tub of vaseline. The tone of Spanish political life is rarely short of astonishing. He was talking about the one-two punch of a Barcelona metro tunnel collapse in the Carmel neighborhood (pictured below) that left hundreds homeless, and the emerging scandal about a long-running 3% government kickback “tax” on all Catalunyan public works.

REGGAE STRAY

I dunno. But sometimes you really do want to hear Lenky's groundbreaking Diwali rhythm performed by stray Jamaican dogs. Right? ..or is it just me?

Well, here ya go: Dog Gone Diwali. Structurally faithful, sonically oddball, yet another mutation of Lenky's crazy strong Diwali DNA strands. From Wayne & Wax's self-produced CD Boston Jerk. You may have already run across Wayne Marshall (the white Cantabrigian, not the Kingston vocalist) because of that bonkers popular electronic music course he's teaching over at Harvard Extension school. If not, check the syllabus. Lots of links to mp3s, interviews, articles, and everybody and they momma is required listening. Grime, reggaeton, M.I.A., and me jammed together on a Harvard courselist. Weird.
       

 Wayne's an academic who spits on his own beats. Stelfox is a journo who dives into vinyl and needlestitches it together. Posting  results on the internet in files so big I can't download em all via my shaky pirate wireless connect. (Cuts out before I get to Daddy Yankee's Gasolina, reggaeton megahit from the genre's most kickass album last year, Barrio Fino. Recommended for reggaeton agnostics hoping to see some light, o los fans de reggaeton que se durmieron en los laureles el año pasado.)

Not saying that roots & culture are bad at all, but neither are rhizomes & grease. Which means: I'm the kind of reggae fan who looks at Stelfox's FACT mix and skips ahead 20 minutes to enter during the Klymaxx. Macka Diamond rocks 2 versions of the Klymaxx riddim, and Ward 21's version riffs on the unquotable: Don't Say Nuthin by The Roots. (Best non-crunk chorus of 2004?) Pop continues eating itself, lunch dinner and dessert. 
    I was also gonna link to a hot free DJ Ayres dancehall mix but it seems to have vanished from The Rub's generous bootleg crate.

Says Stelfox: Given reggae’s omnivorously post-modern compositional palette and its frequent breaks into the global mainstream, it’s tough to find anywhere on earth in which this music sounds entirely out of place. 

      (tech note: his awkward mp3-binhex.hgx files play fine in my pc Winamp player, no unzipping/decompression needed)

OSAKA VISITOR FLASHBACK # 1

She was right: Ove-naxx lay unconscious in the middle of London, swimmingly drunk, his pockets filled with who-knows-what. Ove looked so competent and unreasonable with his wispy Japanese beard and struggling mustache, barbell-piercing through his lip, eyes closed, waist-length hair covered by a neon orange hat which sat on his head the way clouds sit on a mountain.

    Downstairs a girl was running through rote personal data until we had enough of a match to warrant a conversation. In this case it was geography: "get out!-- you're from Boston, I'm from Boston." Turns out she wasn't really from Boston but Worchester. No escape: that's where I lived when I was an young kid, too.
    Kind Bjorn interrupted: "have you seen Ove-chan?". The girl blinked. "Oh, you're looking for Ove-naxx? He's upstairs sleeping on the sidewalk." 

    It might have been cool if we were in the suburbs, or Japan, but we weren't. (She should have known this.) We were afterpartying in a converted public bathroom one flight under the surface of downtown London, the sprawling oil-on-water city, and our bathroom-turned-bar seemed to have been converted recently because under the stink of beer and cigarettes skulked a huge antiseptic presence---

We ran outside to find Ove-naxx on his back, sleeping peacefully next to a park with a real fox running through it. Wake up wake up! Man, you can´t sleep here..

Latenite industry. A homeless guy materialized. He wanted some tobacco in exchange for a bag with scissored power cables and packets of bubble gum. Not a bad deal I suppose... We woke Ove up in time to see the fox slip away, as thin and private as half-closed eyes. So strange to see you in the city.
  
    (look left for Ove-related Japanese noise blast)

ESCAPING JOBS

• OUTSOURCING 0.1: solid article on sound-as-weapon from a few years back, brought to my attention by Kode9.
  

• OUTSOURCING 1.7:  from blue-collar to white-collar to to no-collar (ironic tee, trucker cap optional). Imagine sending off your next album to a Musical Data Processing Center in Calcutta or Mumbai, I hear they do some amazing work-- System of a Down has outsourced the production of their upcoming album to unionized antisectarian workers along the heavily mined Kashmir bus line, and word on the street is that 75% of Prefuse 73´s next one will be written by Bangladeshi teenagers using open-source MPC emulation software.

              (tranqui--¡es nada más que una broma, Scott!)

SIZZLE!

My man Soze has a brand new blog to kick off this week!  Gonna be good.  Is that handkerchief soaked in paint thinner?

FREEDOM IS BORING, CENSORSHIP IS FUN

Time. Draining down. Another item I´ve been trying to find the time to write on is Bidoun--a lively new magazine dedicated to “arts and culture from the Middle East.” Haven´t finished reading the whole thing--it´s a hefty full-color journal with no ads which means lots of words. Word.

Strikes me as really fresh--a piece on Iranian metal bands, photo spread from the set of one of the many schmaltzy Ramadan-time TV soaps, blurb about the new designer fragrance (Yeslam) from Osama Bin Laden´s half-brother. Ad copy: "Yeslam... to create an ambience of lingering harmony and inner peace." Cool. I like lingering harmony, too.

The closer you get to culture the more varied it becomes. The more voices you start hearing in or out of your head. The more boulevards and alleys you stumble. The less likely you gonna feel comfortable making grand sweeping statements for places you haven´t been to and gotten lost in or fallen in or out of love with. Aside: college is 4 years where you learn some stuff and get a degree, “licensed” is the Spanish adjective for it--she´s “licensed” in this or that subject, allowed to do it. Imagine if all U.S. policymakers had to live in the country whose future they try to shape for four years before they could legislate and intervene in its workings?

So magazines like Bidoun (for the Middle East) or Transition (for Africa), that treat non-western places with the critical gentleness of familiarity, become the slim opposite of bombs dropped from drone airships over territories timezones away from the governments who sent them. You can´t trust readers who don´t bend their nose deep in the book. Writing reality with inkstained fingers.

The article that hit home hardest was the Ramadan TV serials one by Yahia Lababidi. “ 'There is no monasticism in Islam,' declared the Prophet Mohamed. And yet, that is what Ramadan offers a taste of: daytime renunciation and celibacy. Although ideally a time to practice wakefulness, or awakening, people pass the month of fasting sleeping, or sleepwalking through the day... The abstinence and self-denial observed during the day are vengefully displaced by overindulgence in the evening, with unequaled qualities of Oriental sweets devoured during this month. Unsurprising then, in this stupefied and passive condition, that the other glut of the season should be television; more than half of the serials produced by the state-owned Egyptian Broadcasting Company debut during Ramadan. Factor in that most movie theaters are closed for the month, and you have an idea as to why escapist entertainment might be so desperately sought after.”

Touring Britian with Nass El Ghiwane, we were in the throws of Ramadan nocturnal timeshift. NeG brothers Hamid and Rachid Batma, talented musicians, are also experts in locating latenight shwarma stands. Afterwards, Hamid (NeG´s guimbri player) sat glued to the TV, giggling quietly, transfixed by crap offerings on British 2 a.m. telly, not a word of which he could understand. Stay up til dawn, greasy halal lamb & orange juice out of boxes, then hit the sack. U.K. Ramadan.

Oh yeah--if the name sounds familiar it´s because Bidoun began as a Dubai-based arts production crew who invited Mutamassik to DJ, then branched and evolved, one strand bringing me to spin there last year, and the other strand becoming this hip international journal. Mutamassik & I did promo mix CDs for the events, which were compiled together last year on the Violent Turd label. Yep. 

SPEECHLESS

Heads been telling me to check “Wait” by the Ying Yang Twins for a minute now, but for some reason I just heard it. Man o man! Inverted maximalism fireworks just wait til ya see my--

   “--Hey, check this. This is a pop song in America right now.”

   “Someone is going crazy somewhere [deciphers lyrics] ... ¡Vaya sexista! And it´s probably really small."

CLOSER

Unhappiness travels London like a venereal disease. The Queen of the Galaxy abandons the Force to try her hand at stripping. She´s good at it. Easier to take her clothes off than squeeze into those elaborate interstellar getups: most heads of state think this way, few indulge the idea. Royalty across Europe shakes hands with royalty across Europe. They share puppet power, share narrow gene pool, sharing the slow. Cocaine helps George Bush lead the world in a strong way.

Closer. Jude Law, confused by Chris Rock´s jokey attacks, mistakes Julia Roberts for a photographer, snagging his life on her equine grin. Thinks he writes obits. They live in London but don´t like grime. The human heart can be hard to fathom. The heart beats mysteries.