BATMAN BEGINS
A combination of Kevlar, smart fabrics, prototype weaponry, and a kindly black man relegated to the basement will help him achieve the ultimate white dream: just corporate governance. Over an entire city with an unaccountable (in the Rumsfeld-Abu Ghraib sense) fly-by-night Jungian vigilante sheen. Order 10,000 armor bat-heads from China and I will make this place safe again. American Psycho.
“Poetry”, slurs Mike Jones, “and the ability to enjoy it, is the true measure of man.” “Mmmm, yes darling,” concurs Harold Bloom, massaging Mike's biceps with his ample fingers. “That's it exactly.”1
This explains the poignancy at Bladerunner's end, when the robot gets all poetic before dying. Talking of tears through dingy neon 80s futurism, he makes us want to cry too. But there's no reason to cry. Androids can't die. He crept backwards in time, settling in a compatible near-future city, as underlit and rainy and derelict as home, and found good work as a C.E.O. acutely aware of the profit margins to be had in the defense sector.
As in most movies involving wide-scale conspiracies regarding psychosis-inducing drugs, the ghost of Philip K. Dick grinds his benzedrine-blackened teeth in the script's corner. You can't hear what he's saying, but he's probably right.
Notorious prettyboy American Psycho meets his superior in metrosexual Dr. Crane. Blues eyes, baby face, brunette. 'Leggy' under the professional trousers. Subtext: men who invest too much time in personal grooming are psychotic, often homicidally so. Clause: unless they roll with lesbian Europeans. If American Psycho had found lesbian Europeans in time, none of this might have happened, his fancy stainless-steel kitchen countertop and matching appliances wouldn't remind us of a morgue. Counterclause: psychos are attracted to Katie Holmes. Counter-counter-clause: only in real life, not on celluloid. Plus it was a Freudian thing, and incest thing; they were young, she was a sister figure, the price of cocaine in early 20th century Vienna enjoyed surprisingly few market distortions and medical regulations.
Returning to the movie, when people fight the bodies blur. Rade Serbedzija, the homeless guy who receives the tweedy jacket (and whose name gets misspelled in the credits) was in a great movie called Before the Rain, which has the best violence/confusion scene I can remember: all about gazes and jumpcuts, a guy walks into a restaurant and something violent happens. But it's all about the edit, the swift unsteady confusion of violence, the sudden irreversible unexpectedness. The editing wow-factor of Before the Rain's restaurant scene is up there with moments like the sex scene in Don't Look Now, or the sex-and-accidental-channel-surf scene of Midnight Cowboy. When Bat-people fight the bodies blur and that's it. No existential editing snipped and tucked at the cutting desk. Returning to the movie--
The moral of the story is that money is useful and you need a LOT of it to do anything. And, preferably, a British servant. British servants-- singly or in groups-- can be almost as useful as money, provided they've served you long enough to be cringingly loyal.
1 Harold Bloom has spent so many years typing that he no longer has any fingerprints.
BEYOND FM
I've been meaning to write about the experience of listening to shortwave radio broadcasts for a few weeks now. It's like watching sunsets or the last untroubled gesture of a lover before breakup, any of those brief perfect fading moments of beauty, escaping. You hear a gorgeous song and can't ask anybody what it is, fragile signal, can't understand the language, can't locate it later to listen again and often don't even know which country it is being broadcast from, static snarls and roiling interference. Shortwave listening foregrounds the fact of geographic distance (not to mention cultural distance) as well as the tangible but tenuous possibilities for its overcoming. Sounds pass through you; every single detail you will feel or capture from this untouchable unownable music happens in the now, escaping...
Unless some blogger tapes the stuff and posts mp3s on the web.
ShortWaveMusic: A new (cocky no-external-link) blog offering mpfree shortwave radio excerpts. Of course, the optimal shortwave experience can be had almost anywhere-- via shortwave you can receive music from just about any country, and the radios themselves don't cost much. If low on cash, you can always mug or pickpocket suits in the nearest ClearChannel-owned radio-station or concert venue.
RECORD, EJECT
pirate
style: the last 11 minutes of a recent Bossman DJ set at London's
Rinse FM. He stitches together shimmering blocks of grimy melodic
sound, busy on the crossfader, with a preference for effervescent
melody and the alien low-end weirdness that makes London pirate music
such wild fun. I already said: “Fast cuts n collages, lively beyond
belief, he builds this impressive mad energy just mashing up grime
instrumentals. Respect”.
Bossman
- end of recent Rinse FM session
When
beats are made for MCs, things happen on the regular, in relatively
short loops of sound--every 8 bars for example. It's not about some
slowly evolving tune, it's a beat-clock for the MC to lock on to. The
first part of this Bossman Rinse tape (courtesy Simon
Platinumpoundpolygon) bumps out MC tracks, then there's this
instrumental end. Anyhow, the point is that solid beats for MCs are
also solid beats for DJs to cut up and do realtime edits & blends
on, and Bossman's mix takes advantage of that fact. A complete,
full-bodied song leaves a DJ little or no room to reinvent it. For
magic to happen, you gotta have some space, spontaneity, and a certain amount of unscheduled rawness.
Gibson
wrote a relevant paragraph in All Tomorrow's Parties: The
handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the
plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the
user's hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific,
anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not
failure, the absence of grace.
Technics 1200s were just a radio station-favored turntable with strong torque until the Bronx exploded mid-70s.
I think I´m trying to say that exciting music = velocities & possibilities more than anything else, but it's too hot to think.
At around 6:30 Wiley's Firefly bass mix comes in--I read somewhere that he used to call these things devils mixes until he made a lot of money selling them and bought a car, and crashed that car, and then Wiley changed the name to 'bass mixes'. Makes a lot of sense, tangible voodoo menace in his gutted no-beat mixdowns. I've been playing Firefly bass mix out nonstop, it charges the air and makes new movement possible.
plus
a blog wakeup: Fine Turkish Tobacco, aka Jess is smokin' again! a
zinging & on-point way of writing about music.
ON THE BEACH
If
you live in Barcelona you may already be in shellshock. Today is the
Festival of Sant Joan (Saint John/San Juan). Presumably religious in origin,
the Catalunyan version of Sant Joan is now basically a reason to
explode fireworks. The louder and later into the night the better.
Last night my neighborhood was rocked with elaborate home-launched
projectiles until about 8AM, and which point the heavily armed youth
went home for breakfast or more fireworks and returned at about 11.
Needless to say, this a holiday where people lose fingers.
In
Madrid, people celebrate the night
mostly by lighting candles and making wishes. Ear-shattering
explosions don't really enter into it. People say that in smaller,
more traditional towns outside of Barcelona, folks make barnfires
from old furniture, then jump over those fires all night long.
Apparently things get wilder in Valencia, huge burning figures, but
that's another story.
The
most impressive manifestation of Sant Joan happens at Barcelona's
beach. Everybody goes there at night. You'll see entire
families who have emptied the contents of their kitchen and rebuilt
it on the seashore, preparing elaborate 4-course meals with gas
heaters and open fires. Little 7-year olds with lighters run wild,
gripping sparklers, launching whistlers, tossing M-80 firecrackers
moments before they explode. Pyromaniacs have a field day.
Groups of young adults sit around drinking coca-cola mixed
with wine, rolling cigarettes of corporate tobacco and
greymarket Moroccan hash. They talk quietly despite the constant
banging. Your ears will ring. Every few seconds there is a noisy
flash of light, but this does not bother the guy with a guitar
singing Manu Chao songs as some kind of protection against harm.
Searing
rockets color the sky with sparks. Drunks start plastic fires, get
bored, walk away. The subway runs free all night. New people,
increasingly wasted, refuel the beach
party. Healthy girls play volleyball in the dark, until the beach is
too crowded. Law-abiding illegal immigrants blast merengue and salsa.
They accelerate their language and its idiomatic velocities, bringing
back Latino slang that Castillian Spaniards subconsciously subdue.
Gunpowder, sea, smoke, cooked meat, sweat, and sex: this is what the
air smells like. Sant Joan at the Barcelona seashore is a startling
testimony to Spain's high tolerance for danger. The cops are
elsewhere.
Mentally
ill bums who ordinarily cower on the concrete pathway underneath the
boardwalk nursing sunburnt feet and 49-cent liter-boxes of Don Simon
red wine now stroll proudly along the shore: they are in their
element. As close to home as it gets. This gathering of people is far
crazier and more self-contradictory than any one person could ever
be.
KWIK CLIQUE
some orchestra pics.
video of Sister Nancy sparking a NYC concert! Plus TV on the Radio, Jah Division dubbing out, and heaps more.
-
manuf/r/acturing the next DJ Shadow! some of these are hilarious... white hiphop media papercut grins
MAHGREB MEMORY DEPOT
Creaky
mystical neo-folk from 1970s Morocco. In honor of Jil Jilala's
Mahmoud Saadi.
This
jam from Lemchaheb starts off with a bluesy rock riff reminiscent
of Mali's Ali Farka Toure. Or, more recently, Tinariwen.
Jil
Jilala - ch bikdaret lekdar
An
unhurried rumble from Jil Jilala. They manage to sound solemnly
spiritual and ramshackle at the same time. (compare with widely
exported crazy complex Egyptian arrangements) The
opening bassline maintains a timeless gnawa stride. It's not just
about slipping into a groove, it's edging towards a whole other way
of dividing up the days and activities caged inside them, extending a
moment, spreading concentric rings of community via hypnotic sounds,
call & response vocals; anything worth growing grows slow.
12
minutes of rooted vision from an important Mahgrebi band.
I saw them 2 years back at a massive free Ramadan party outside of Barcelona. 5000 Arabs, Jil Jilala, and rai group Jadwane. Serious!
Jil
Jilala & Nass El Ghiwane - Salamou Alaikoum
64kbps rip but a nice short collabo btwn the two groups.
...last but not least, a heady percussive Jil Jilala tune. Kinda weird, yep. Entrancing too. I'm out of space, so I had to Yousend this one. Sorry!!
Jil
Jilala - Malgalbi dada mey
TROZOS
Barcelona has entered The Time of Slow Walking. Too sunbaked & swampy to move quick.
Low Income Tomorrowland: now Pitchfork approved
-
Long conversations with Abdel about things you can only learn by watching old people play old music. Soon afterwards we learned that Mahmoud Saadi, co-founder of Jil Jilala & brief member of Nass el Ghiwane, passed away on June 13th in Casablanca. I´ll try to post some Jil Jilala music soon.
ECHOLOCATION
What can I say?-- The symphony orchestra thing was a blast. I nailed it and had fun. No-headphones battle DJing with 75 classical musicians at my back! Afterwards people kept telling me A. it was too short and B. they were psyched to see me actually interacting with the orchestra, rather than just laying voices or sounds on top.
It was a total press coup in fact, my image was splashed across the front page of the free Metro newspaper, and then again in the main 'cultural' page of El Mundo, one of Spain's major national newspapers; in his SONAR summary article for the paper, big critic Javier Blanquez wrote: “... Only DJ /rupture reached a high level of creativity by DJing noises, field recordings, and abstract material over pieces by Webern, to the point of being unable to distinguish between what was recorded and what was played live... the hero of the night” Bang!
I didn't get to see much else at SONAR except friends-- but I did receive a stack of fresh Brazilian CDs & CD-rs from Marcos B, DJ Marlboro's main man, running the gamut from baile funk to DJ mixes of deep 70s material. look left for first rip...
GIGS GIGS GIGS
** i think my server capacity is being strained due to heavy traffic. this is both good & bad. apologies if Mudd Up! loads sloooow or not at all.**
This Thursday & Friday night I'm performing with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra as part of the SONAR fest. We've chosen 3 pieces by Anton Webern (nice heavy Viennese composer killed by a mistaken American as he fled Nazis in Europe). I'm doing turntablism ontop, and then playing electronics for the final piece. Richie Hawtin (Plastikman) and Dose-One of Subtle/cLOUDDEAD will also collabo with the Orcs. After that, they play a suite by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Then they ransack the nearest available castle for the glory of Lord Sauron.
On
Saturday Nettle will perform LIVE at the Clandestino festival in
Gothenburg, Sweden. New songs, new intensities. More time signatures.
More gear. We're getting flexible and savage and downright pretty at
times. This time around Nettle will be a duo--Abdel Hak on violin &
oud, me on plugs & switches. Sunday I participate in a panel talk on "Sounds of Dissent."
Usually Filastine plays percussion in Nettle, but he's got his own gigs at the moment. FYI, Filastine's beat “Judas Goat” (on my label, Soot), kicks off Low Income Tomorrowland.
If
you're in NYC, check Filastine this Friday at Subtonic
(the Bunker party), midniteish set.
for the rest of Filastine tour dates in US & Europe with the Infernal Noise Brigade--
(read more)RUPTURE L.I.T. MIX
look lemon-red for a brand new DJ mix of mine, Low Income Tomorrowland.
(Unlike McDonalds, shoes and shirt are NOT required)
30
minutes to make your summer go bump, a soundtrack for the heat.
My session kicks off Lemon-Red's monthly mix series, which (like its
parent blog) should be a quality source for beat-filled newness.
As for me, I keep giving everything away. Anybody wanna pay my rent? Low Income Tomorrowland will be up for grabs until July
4. Some point soonafter, an RIAA-related shadow label will release it
on CD with some other stuff, using all profits to buy handcuffs &
Aunt Jemima pancake syrup.
ONE WINDOW
I've always thought of screw music as a fine example of American Negro Lazy Genius: take a song, slow it down, then sell it. In the hands of DJ Screw this became contagiously brilliant, this strange syrupy thing that probably wouldn't have been possible in a country where whites didn't steal Africans and force them to work for several generations. Grime is work-ethic music, strivers' shouts. Screw is watermelon-patch process, droopy and militant at zero reparations. Why should we sweat if we didn't ask to be here?
Most cultures, even DJ cultures, place a high value on originality. Bugs, flowers, and animosities just reproduce.
Sweden's main cultural export is IKEA, which means a million people furnishing their rooms in the exact same way by personally putting in millions of little screws and widgets and erecting tables chairs desks beds and so on.
Radioclit
is a guy from the Swedish rap act Stacs of Stamina and some other guy
I don't know. We met in France, they videotaped Ove-Naxx exposing
himself and gave me a mixtape I lost. They also just 'screwed n chopped' the new
Roll Deep album, downloads here. (EDIT: 'Screwing' slows it down, 'chopping' adds cuts, edits, and backspins, etc)
So a bunch of people will end up hearing the Roll Deep album in its freely-distributed, slowed-down, Radioclit-branded form before they wrap their ears around the intact original properly-pitched thing. I love the way that interrupts the usual 'do you like it?' question asked of an album, screw music is never about regular value judgments; when you get yr lean on, its just a question of how far you can tip without losing it (R.I.P. DJ Screw). Take “Remember the Days”-- the screwed version bends the original's FM lite-meets-rave piano melodies into something eerily minor, tones slipping off the piano's deep end, sunk in the spaces between keys. The screw slows Remember's sober inspirational down into a darkly psychedelic dirge. Viscous time. It's possible to critique an MC who's speaking directly to your lizard brain, but then you have to ignore all the unnameable information your lizard brain slithers back to you.
Reverse IKEA, you pick something large, something culturally large, and loosen all the screws or put a wrench in the works and send back -- unbuyable or hacked or narcotized or maybe just re-branded repackaged for resale -- into the world. Music just one window to toss a rock through.
NYC IDIOCY
Real
ridiculous news: the Mondo Kims record shop on St.Marks Place in East
Village NYC was raided by cops for carrying CD-r bootleg mixtapes-- which
are pretty much a major label-condoned affair at this point. The
cops pigs arrested 5 employees,
charging them with counterfeiting. Various quotes at Catchdubs sum up the absurdity of it all.
Kims is one of NYC's very best one-stop record shops (which makes it, by extension, one of the world's best). The press reports that manager Craig (who DJs as I-Sound, and makes music as one half of Wasteland) is charged-- I was one of the many local musicians & DJs whose music and homemade mixtapes Craig supports by stocking at Kims. Brother goes out of his way to do some amazing curation & big up underdogs, so this stings as a particularly irrational and vicious slap in the face.
Kims mixtapes-- primarily hiphop compilations with unique DJ blends, one-offs MC freestyles, alternate versions, industry leak tracks, guest hosts, and more-- are a world apart from, say, Canal Street's straight-up bootlegged Vuitton bags and commerical albums & DVDs. The raid was due to a 'tip off' by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Looks like the RIAA's targeting a high-profile, low-threat 'adversary' to serve as an example to other stores. Like Ayres mentions in the Catchdubs blurb, 50 Cent's career was built on the strength of his NYC mixtape appearances. Not only do mixtapes not interfere with major label album sales, they function as this sleek hype machine, a savvy A&R and distribution circuit in a symbiotic relationship with the monied suits that the RIAA mistakenly thinks it's defending by cohorting with the police to stomp down on Kims. Grrr.
NOS VEMOS ALLI
...probably
gonna bog about (my) GRIME AGNOSTICISM soon, but need to
rewind the Roll Deep album a few more times. Until then, here's a
burner off it, the most overtly ethnik manifestation their 'when i'm
ere' audio DNA to date
The first 28 seconds sound like a sublime vision of local folk in one of those semi-treacherous eastern european regions where the cop cars say POLICIJA. Taliban Trim's verses help restore any flagging faith.
*
Both
string players I work with perform here in Barça this weekend. Abdel
Hak, my partner in Nettle, will be at Harlem Jazz Club on
Saturday, playing violin with Abdeljalil Khodssi's group. Khodssi's
lineup shares a couple members with the maghrebi-jazz group Nass
Marrakesh. (Nass means 'brotherhood') Nass Marrakesh's sound is, on
CD, very smooth and jazzy.
The violin is Abdel. Khodssi's group does like 3 Nass el Ghiwane covers. Periodically I feel bad about my online NeG fever, but then I think of the others... U Mean's Dipset Fixation, Chiasm's long Fall... and feel less alone.
&
Jenny Jones will bring her formidable cello skills to bear at Miscelanea (c/Guardia, 10) on Sunday, playing with
the Version Original string quarter. ¡¡FREE!! 9pm. Nos vemos.
____ FLAG
Favela freeness! (open-source in Brazilian govt offices & shantytowns) you can't fake the funk, but you can ditch Microsoft. and IE.
Inequality facts expressed via national flags. i.e. Brazil: green = people living with less than $10 a month, gold = people living with less than $100 a month, blue = people living with less than $1000 a month, white = people living with less than $100,000 a month.
My man Nat Slang offers a poster of remixed flags, blending the flags of various disputing regions (Spain & Basque, Turkey & Greece, etc)
WHERE R U TAKING ME?
Nass
El Ghiwane has a brand-new super not-informative website in French!! Very exciting,
dead links and all! It gifts us with many MP3s.
Try Fine Ghadi Biya
Khouya (Where Are You Taking Me, Brother?) or Mahmouma for starters... Info on our free Brussels gig here.
WEEKENDER
Venn was great, as suspected.
Warsaw
Village Band rocked despite an overly-talkative crowd. Big allure clarion female vocals! Oneida
'rocked' & pummeled, on a Sufi MC5 vibe, particularly the
shirtless drummer whose feral intensity reminded me of Animal the
Muppet, chopping up time by hitting things with sticks. Why have a 3
chord riff when you can make a song from a 2 note riff? Their final
song asked & answered that one.
Outside a bunch of guys disassembled a car with power tools, processing & amplifying the audio. I forgot my camera.
Always
a pleasure to hang out with Matt Elliott (Third Eye Foundation), and
catching another one of his live sets was a highlight for me. Like a
growing number of artists, he's not gonna tour the U.S. because of
the iris-scan - fingerprint - xenophobic U.S. border policy.
That
said, catch him if you can, melancholic deep contrapuntal
guitar & cello & drumkit that extends into walls of tuned
textured noise and a bit of those trademark 3rdEye skeletal breaks,
using loop pedals to build this complexity realtime.
After his set this 7 males + 1 female Danish band called Efterklang played. Synced arty video, horns, violin, etc. You could tell they were big into GY!BE. Not in a Godspeed-xerox way like Explosions in the Sky though. Efterklang reminded me of Jhumpa Lahiri's prose-- generally pleasant, workshopped, exceedingly well-crafted and balanced, but you get to the end and realize that messiness and bad taste can be vital often get a bad rap, especially in places like Scandinavia.
In
Bristol I heard the following songs pumping out of black guys' cars:
Lethal B's Forward, & David Banner's Rep to the Death. Cool
town. (Dexplicit, the guy who produced Forward, just remixed M.I.A., and it's
pretty much like a Forward rmx with choppy MIA vox, very lively!)
This being England, everybody else's ride was quiet,
and the only other citysound of note (apart from the torn-apart
car) was a Koranic reading belting out of Life Express Halal, counterpoint to the Irn Bru signage. Islam versus the most popular caffeinated drink in Scotland.
...then a warmhearted Banksy piece: THE MILD MILD WEST
& backstage at the Malcolm X center
Samuel Fosso = Liberated American Woman
When
I look at myself in the mirror, I am not looking to find out if what
I see is an Ibo, a Central African or even a black American. The only
thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as
handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait.
¡VEN A VENN!, VEXED
-
I´m gonna DJ at Bristol's Venn Festival this Saturday. looks quality. i posted more about it here.
-
The Dutch vote No to the EU Constitution! In a tragicomic and unintentional summary of elected politicians' contempt for real democracy, their Primer Minister said: “The Dutch people have spoken tonight. Naturally I am very disappointed.”
- This tiger is unstoppable. Inna minute ima kick-off his new DJ mix series: free heat in a variety of flavors; party favors from platinum pirates!
WEIRD GENUISES
I dug around and found an English-language draft of the piece mentioned below. The mag, a glossy flossy fashiony one, titled it WEIRD GENUISES... here ya go
(read more)