HOTEL RWANDA, VARÈSE, & FRIENDS
-
just saw Hotel Rwanda. Pretty good! Not Schindlery-saccharine at all. Of course, it's no substitute for the essential / informative / scary good Philip Gourevitch book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. But as a piece of Hollywood biz it's great, well-acted, and the structural elements are actually dope. Almost on this africanized Ondaatje tip: the individual trying to maintain decorum as the social landscape slides into violent evil conflict, the order of a hotel hemorrhaging from first-world playground to refugee hideout; hotel as fixed point in postcolonial mapshreds putting 10-cent Chinese machetes in the hands of neighbors to kill their neighbors, contrasted with and fueled by radio's prominent role as an unstoppable placeless layer of hate--'Hutu Power Radio'--decentered poison beamed into every ear.
Pop bonuses: Don Cheadle in a non-secondary role (think Ocean's Twelve, shoving nonwhites to the plot's periphery) and drunk Joaquin Phoenix.
A Spanish mag asked me to write about 'the 10 artists that impacted my view of electronic music' or some similarly unwieldy title. That kind of list that probably changes from day to day, but I ended up writing on: Edgard Varèse, The Hanatarashi, King Tubby, Pere Ubu, Steely & Clevie, Gregory Whitehead, Timbaland, Mannie Fresh, DJ Scud, and Wiley.
He lives in a Lexus but can't afford gas for the tank.
- the
Caps Jones 'Moving in Stereo' mixtape is super A.D.D. I thought my friends 606 &
Jason Forrest were ADD, but they've got nothing on this Smashing
Pumpkins Pixies Nintendo Neneh Cherry Bowie Eno hard-drive megamix,
almost like zipping around the US in a car so fast that the radio
(ClearChannel, let's
face it) shifts from one station to the next, but seamless, no
static. ---Thought
byproduct: the Venetian Snares and Otto Von Shirachs and Sickboys of
the world actually have to spend A LOT of time to make their music as
change-happy as it is, which requires paradoxical amounts of patience & focus and/or the right chemical combination.
BOOGIE DOWN BERLIN
If you're in Berlin this Saturday, come get loose with us: Support Your Local Ghetto @ NBI Schönhauser Allee 36. with my Ruptured self, Matt Shadetek and Sheen Tagteam, Barbara Hallama, and Sick Girls! no boring electronica, just joyful bump n grime, doubletime, thump, crunk, reggae-tonnage, snarecrack rap.
this party should be hype b/c it´s NBI reopening (full soundsystem!) & a rare chance to catch a bangin' beats party where there are more female performers than male, that stubborn gender division overturned for a night. Damage is 6€ -- all you broke Berliners got no excuse!
DRUGS & MUSIC
Low End Theory got that Crack! nice informative piece on crack cocaine and its various manifestations within hiphop communities. MP3s at the end include Immortal Technique's nuanced, amazing "Peruvian Cocaine".
(It's crazy thinking what would happen if drugs were legalized: at least partial removal of brute political distortions in South America fueled by U.S. drug consumers' money, Cam'Ron would start a line of Snow White Blow, prison corporations and their holding companies would collapse and invest in fried chicken, etc. etc.)
WAR DEM KNOW
Dancehall
deejay Cobra takes on the timeless subject of war (as-metaphor),
twice. Kills it both times with the same title. (Only way to hide
anything digital from Google is by calling it the same name as other stuff. Weird names locate
you instantly.)
From intense gangsta falsetto to baritone hardcore and back again: Cobra on Mario C's Bomb a Drop riddim from 2004 (7” on 3.5.7., greensleeves riddim album 2005). Mario made Scoobay too. Bomb A Drop delivers another gleefully zonked raggaoid mecha-bop with a dusting of menace which Cobra rides rather expertly. He's versatile & totally in control on this one. Tough guys don't talk fast; toughs harmonize.
Six
years earlier on Bruckout. I think 98 was a good year for reggae.
THE ANIMALS EAT IT
The poetry of Joyelle McSweeney shows a fantastic closet conservative love of words over the sense they can form; a kind of poetic garbling. Suspiciously invulnerable, physical, non-Euclidian buildings of words.
(read more)/RUPTURE "BTTB" MIX 4 DWNLD
I
did an off-the-cuff live improvised mix for german radio a few days ago.
you can download it here. some effort-intensive ruptured blends, some relaxed radio moments where i chill &
let tracks roll over Hamburg airwaves. 98 minutes total. it's also streamable.
starts grimey, goes rap, then fast stuff, then i can´t remember, then i
ran out of vinyl and played pretty african mp3s. enjoy! respect to Marcus
Back-To-The-Basics.
GYPSY GATHERINGS
yo-- if you´re near Marseilles or Brussels, this weekend, come down!
friday
I´ll be with dDamage, great live dub band Ez3kiel, etc. at a festival in Carpentras, FR.
saturday,
the Arabesk throwdown in Bruxelles. I´ll DJ with an eastward
lean and do a brief collabo with Chronomad (who´ll play Persian
percussion thru guitar amps over my beats). My Istanbul point man
Serhat Köksal aka 2/5 BZ is gonna blast us with a live audio-visual
set. No turistik - No egzotik! Turkish lo-fi punk sampler saz psychedelia never sounded/looked so good!
WAVE OF MUTILATION
Naomi Klein rips it on how cutthroat capitalism reconstructs economies in the chaos following natural or manmade disaster. Now thing heartbreakdown. To learn how the world works, follow the money. Greed is a non-repeating pattern.
Reading Klein I think of Charles Simic translating Rade Drainac, a Belgrade writer who served in WWI then died of consumption in WWII. And wrote: I would need a distance of a hundred years / To learn all the horrors I was contemporary to.
Drainac passed in 1943 to be exact. Same year that mister new Pope,
after having been a member of Hitler Youth for a coupla years, finally
entered the Third Reich's army. Which means nothing compared
to the number of people his anti-contraceptive stance will indirectly kill. There are 120 million black Catholics in
AIDS-stricken Africa & he's discouraging condom use ('contraception - intrinscially evil').
But I digress:
GARBLED NO MORE
arrgh, after a day of
mucky internet zookeeper glitch, Mudd Up! resumes ir-regular
service. Sorry 'bout that.
Kelefa Sanneh inks Houston rap for the uninitiated. A very good place to begin by all counts, and essential if you haven´t heard of DJ Screw or screwed and chopped mixtapes. (you can use “toneburst” for login and password to read it)
Sonzala blogs the initiate´s version. (includes the full text of Sanneh's NYTimes piece). Don´t sleep on the Dizzee Rascal 'Damage Control' radio show recording : crunk-grime connects in the flesh! i.e. not just on my decks.
Since I don´t sleep, I don´t snore.
I love the way Swoon's stuff decays. Unlike trad graffiti, her wheatpasted prints and cutouts live on city walls, they wear and wither through seasons; it's hard to make something that will fall into ruin beautifully. Her tatters hold poetry, partake of their environment.
HARDCORE ROOTS
...is
what the Warsaw Village Band call their sound. Fastforward-and-rewind-able realPlayer
live set here.
(Jah bless the BBC, one of the few British institutions that doesn't
systematically overcharge and underserve you). Hadn't heard WVB before this but their
rebuilt
Eastern European folk approach packs a wallop, particularly the
biting full-bodied female vocals. I recognize a trad tune they
cover, I think; I think Boiled In Lead versioned the same one.
Pleased
to announce Warsaw and I will be playing a show together at Bristol's Venn
Festival in Bristol early June! Super-interesting
lineup/curation--us, Matt Elliott (also doing a special Third Eye
Foundation set!!), Acid Mothers Temple, Mark Stewart, Oneida, Z'ev,
Adrian Sherwood, Mu & maybe
even DJ Scotch Egg.
All too rare, the summer music festival that actually takes risks &
asssembles an unexpected, noncommercial lineup. (not just whoever happens to be juiced by press/promo-power and on tour)
I was gonna write something about Warsaw Village Band vis-a-vis patriotism versus
nationalism via my accidental Harpers subscription and
dark/ironic/distanced contemporary musical reclamations or
reconstructions, but typing in those silly band links took up all
my time... Not sure if the problem is me or the intrinsic nature of the
world wide web.
Matt Elliott
gave the most moving live performance I saw last year, mindblowing
use of loopers and pedals as he & partner strolled off the path
between spare sorrow-scented melodies and walls of skeletally tuned,
liberatory noise. Plus, he´s taller than me.
Part of the Warsaw Village Band in action, cameras always chop people off, it's unavoidable--
EXPIRATION DATE
I've always thought of death as the ultimate deadline, so it seemed to me that Jim was determined to hand in his work early when he forced my door at half past noon, clutching a empty bottle of vodka and wearing an enormous grin.
Guess who's still alive? he said. The doorknob fell clean off.
MÁS FUEGO
Kind words about my words over at Pitchfork.
I'll be DJing in Rome this Saturday. Beats to ruins and back again. @ La Palma. Pontiff candidates get in half-price!
If I were in London on Friday I'd hit this party. Roll Deep's Riko doing a dancehall PA at a bashment/reggaeton dance! Heatwave indeed. They're looking to bring Macka Diamond out soon too. lovely. Real bootleggers are reverse pirates.
A LITTLE LESS OIL
spicy online excerpt from James Kunstler´s The Long Emergency. Lucid screwface Cassandra envisions a post-petrol world. He kinda hates on Southerners though.
What´ll happen
when fossil fuels dry up? Stuff like:
“Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or
a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the
cheap energy props that support bigness fall away”
CATWOMAN
Left for dead by her boss, the first African-AmericanTM woman to win an Oscar® for Best Actress is brought back to life by a supernatural sports bra - mask combo. It fits. Male prop has his chest waxed, heroine wakes up with her makeup on. Lovers fight the cinematic fight. Interrogation. One lover cages the other.
Ass against the moon, good (or good-looking) triumphs over evil (or less good-looking). The credits roll on and on. Gender roles in movies aren´t about gender or roles, they are about movies, how to force action forward. Narrative KY. Are you a cop or my man? Say this out loud and they'll arrest you.
BACK TO AUDIOLANDIA
some new reggae/ton vinyl tunes compressed into zeros and ones for yr listening pleasure:Tego Calderón feat. Volito - Se Van
This
reggaeton banger isn´t just optimized for maximum party-rocking
-- I see it as upping the whole game: lyrically fiery, notched up
production skills, energetic arrangement, latinoified sample-DNA of
those
familiar piano notes, all topped with the brilliant brutal refrain
surfacing in the
last 30 seconds... no te quiero ver por mi casa, nooo....
Calderón
and (protege?) Volito recently
teamed up for some 50 Cent bootlegs, which makes sense:
they all inhabit the same street-penthouse of virtuoso drawls, the
exacting mic nonchalance that´s by definition much cooler than
verbal science that shows us its sweat and seams and struggle. This track's from Reggaeton Club Bangerz vol. 06.
Tanya
Stevens - Gangsta Ride (Indian Summer riddim)
Japanese-produced dancehall with hardcore Jamaican vocals! Stelfox had been repping the Indian Summer riddim for awhile now, but it wasn´t until I got my reggae on in Osaka´s ridiculously good record shops (Japan = best place in world to buy Jamaican music?) that I grabbed & paid attention to it, then I read Diplo´s good Pitchfork interview and everything clicked.
Indian Summer riddim (released by Bacchanal) is indeed on that grimey/D&By doubletime swung snare tip. When Harlem´s Dipset uses similar strategies, the snare cracks in choppy uptown slapdown mode, but the Japanese take on it is slinky, breezed over by orientalist flutes, more for winding waists than butting heads.
The above Tanya Stevens track stands out from the rest. Zumjay kills it too, stepping up to the beat's doubletime challenge. Diplo´s right about the zero-delay up-to-dateness of reggae in Japan, the big name dubplates, etc. On top of all that, labels there properly license a ton of ragga riddims for homegrown favorites like Ryo the Skywalker to voice in Japanese. Posters for an upcoming V Smooth and Serge Sniper bootleg masterbash covered Osaka; Shiro the Goodman and L?K?O? each opened their sets at our Romz party with reggaeton. In short, it´s just everywhere.
Zumjay
- Take U Hi (Indian Summer riddim)
HAVING BEEN TOGETHER = NOT HAVING BEEN TOGETHER
Reading
Javier Marías is like having scintillating dinner conversation
with a worldly, well-oiled man who's wearing a touch too much cologne
and keeps trying to peep the waitress's boobs. But when Marías
nails it he's unbeatable, like yo, the heft and consciousness of
literature; the way a novel can still excavate consciousness and
evoke things no other form can.
I like him even more
because I know all the obscure Madrid streets his characters plot
through, having once been in love with the useless private pedestrian
backstreets of Madrid, which are slightly less than innumerable and
smell fantastic after unexpected spring rain.
A few months ago I
posted the first sentence to his novel A Heart So White. A surprisingly sensual book considering paragraphs like the one I´m about to quote. It´s a doozy. Here we
go:
"And I was impatient because I was aware that what I didn't hear now I never would hear; there would be no instant replay,
(read more)GOLDILOCKS
Sizzle
thinks through breakcore via Nordic headbanging rock n bleach. My
only 2 cents are: the ragga revival movement and breakcore are pretty
much the same thing these days. Sunday nite in Osaka we hung out in
Ove-Naxx´s zero-profit anarchy pub DOxCORE, basically a T.A.Z.
house party. The other DJs played *nonstop* amen-driven
ragga breakcore jungle. So boring,
I hadn´t heard that
many amens in years, it´s just the easiest laziest sample to
use. I´m often bummed out by the fact that amen breaks
and what Szl calls "decontextualized Jamaican soundclash shouting" and
all the other cliches of ragga jungle / breakcore still hold such
underground party-rocking validity in certain pockets of the world. Spice, sure. Main dish, no more.
The
post-jungle underground is almost as conservative as 'proper' d&b.
PIT COATTAIL CRESCENDO
no
time to type (semi) real (non) news (house of distraction), but I will be doing a collabo with the Catalyunan
National Orchestra (they want to use a 90-person configuration) at Barcelona's SONAR
this year. Should be HEAVY. We´re trying to use the works
of this amazing wayward Viennese composer, no stranger to twelve-tone
serialism, killed by “friendly fire” from
an occupying U.S. soldier as he fled Hitler's
massive bootheel in 1945. American guns rarely get anything right. Rest of the fest lineup looks fun too.
Soft is the new hard, but heavy remains the timeless heavy.
DOMO ARIGATO, MR. ROBOTO
Yo, back from Japan, words soon come. General craziness, personal freakout, very good food, very little headroom, Hiroshima museum heaviness, anecdotes to translate, surprising (?) amounts of reggaeton, lots of horrible snapshots, a bunch of sound which I´ll rip and post... and the Bush cut-up from my Res mix was from British Chris Morris (Jam, Brasseye, the Day Today). Both the mp3 & a well-done video version can be had here.
RUPTURE RESONANCE FM MIX UP
japan japan japan. .. but until then (can't talk about a place til you've left),the Red ZERO Radio festival is now available for MP3 download, highlights from the sets of each artist.
check it here. Mine is fast & noisy. I haven't heard any of the others yet. Kano is not that Kano.