STROLLERS
dear collective intelligencers: have any of you done one of Janet Cardiff's audio walks? and how was it?i'm curious about them at the level of sound-art and as stumbling-around-the-city experience. also wondering about others who have taken the idea and run with it... feel free to email if commenting aint your thing.
SCUFFLING, WITH FRENCH SUBTITLES
the mp3 is really quiet but: here you go 'A minimalistic improvisation by Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj 'duetting' with the Israeli Air Force as it bombards Mazen's home city of Beirut. Recorded by Kerbaj on the balcony of his flat in Beirut on the night of 15/16 July 2006.' silence, space, explosion, boredom, scuffling -- the psychoacoustics of modern conflict.
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Hometown love at the Nettle & Khalid Bennaji show last night. Hugs to everyone who came out. (11 hours after the show we were in the studio, recording...)
Haven't ripped new vinyl in awhile (BEATS) so i'll do that soon. until then, here's a followup to the Matar Muhammad post. Seb Catlitter gave me this 3 years ago. it's quite nice. acoustic Imazighen music, spot-on performances, out of print now but available as paid downloads. i've had this on heavy rotation.
the first song is a solo taqsim which flows into the second, the 13-minute Suite Lothar, an accelerating amble of strings, voice, percussion.
Les Musiciens De L'Atlas - Taqsim
I don't believe the Berber musicians call themselves (in French!) The Musicians of the Atlas, but that's how they're marketed by Buda Musique, that's how they become visible, in a sense, to the record buyer.
In order to own it, I have to understand label it? Or the other way around? Not sure. Trying to theorize from a place of little or no cashflow.
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for more outernational words, Maga Bo's generous Kolleidosonic provides summer reading -- an easygoing blend of travelogue and music production thoughts. On being booed offstage in Zanzibar. More questions than answers, more anecdotes than proclamations, you'll notice I can't quote Sontag because Against Interpretation is in the other room and it is too humid to move. Plant weather!
IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
if you are in Barcelona tomorrow (thurs. july 20) , i suggest that you come to the Nettle concert. Our first hometown show. A special one-off set with guest Khalid Bennaji on lead vocals and guembri. Nettle significa ortiga en Castellano.
new (imazighen) songs shall be sung!
>>El productor norteamericano de música electrónica Jace Clayton (conocido como DJ /rupture), la violonchelista escocesa Jenny Jones y el multiinstrumentista de Marruecos Abdel Hak forman el trío Nettle. Aplicando la rítmica y la tecnología contemporáneas a la música del norte de África, Nettle entienden la fusión con las músicas de raíz de una forma propia y libre de los habituales clichés de la “world music”. Hace cuatro años publicaron el álbum “Build a Fort, Set That On Fire”, y su segundo disco está previsto para el próximo año. Aunque los tres músicos viven en Barcelona, éste será su primer concierto en la ciudad.
El cantante Khali Bennaji nació en Marruecos pero vive en Perpiñán, donde forma parte del grupo Al-Azhar. Con ellos mezcla la música gnawa con el jazz y toca músicas populares de su país. En Barcelona ha actuado con Abdeljalil Kodssi del grupo Nass Marrakech, y ésta será su primera colaboración con Nettle.<<
UN MAÎTRE DU BUZUQ
Matar, in Spanish, means to kill. It's the infinitive form, action holding its breath, unassigned possibility, a space between heartbeats.
Buzuq, in Arabic, refers to an instrument outside the classical repertoire, embraced by gypsies from Syria and Lebanon. The word derives from the Turkish başıbozuk -- a name applied to Ottoman army irregulars -- meaning uprooted, corrupted head, disorderly. The bashi-bazouk combined brutality with recklessness in a prescient mercenarism.
Matar Muhammad, a dead Lebanese man, played the buzuq exceedingly well.
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Look Aduna for a quality cache of Mandinka music & Malian superstars in concert. Google trans here.
GROUND BITS
tomorrow, july 11th, i'll be Rupturing in Mallorca -- special show @ a theater space with visual artist Daniel Perlin on live video.
friday july 14th, Nettle performs at Amsterdam's 5DaysOff festival, Paradiso. with Ryoji Ikeda, Lillevan & Vladislav Delay, and the Kilimanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble (Kilimanjaro is to Bong-Ra as Nettle is to Rupture. breakcorey people have formed non-dance bands.) Perlin, fresh from the Whitney Museum's ISP, will join us on Nettle video ("slower! darker! more boring!" i say, and he gamely complies)
celebrity deathmatch: Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault. Anarcho-syndicalism & orange juice in an unusually stylish youtube timewaster.
before my laptop hard drive died yesterday, it made a horrible horrible screaming/screeching noise -- quite literally the sound of mechanical error grinding all my information into dust. Ouch. Big ouch. Turns out you can run Linux off a CD, don't even need a hard disk. Who knew? Thanks Knoppix! So i've plunged into penguin world for a minute, at least until i can get a replacement drive and/or the Mac proselytizers convert me.
people ask: do you know Serhat? i say yes and they say good. Do you know Serhat? 2/5 BZ? sounds like Türkçe Sözlü Nanarchist Müzik, and, like everybody else, he has just moved his art slash propaganda output to MurdochSpace with downloadable tracks.
(Do you realize how much information MySpace generates? who likes what and how much and when and how old and what colors even and the connections and the geographic locations and the songs' popularity and the nodal points and the hotspots and whatever -- someone will get very very wealthy selling that information to interested companies from record labels to clothing manufacturers to TV people to... Ad revenue is old school; meta-data is the new petroleum. thanks to dp.)
Re-Up Gang: are there any tracks I've posted that you missed and would like to see briefly online again? Leave a comment and I'll see what I can do. the moral of the story is don't sleep.
FABLED
You heard the one about the scorpion and the frog?
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"
The scorpion replies: "It is my nature..."
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There are several things to learn from this fable.
One: animals can talk to each other. If human scientists devoted more time to unlocking the mysteries of inter-animal communication and spent less time building fancy weapons to use and sell, then many conflicts could be avoided. Since scorpions have no vocal cords, you think: telepathy, and you may be right.
Two: It is possible to feel the absence of feeling ("the frog feels the onset of paralysis"). Although frogs can breath air and water, their chosen metaphor for dealing with mortality is drowning -- which, as a species, they only experience second-hand, at an uncanny and amphibious step of remove, watching other creatures succumb to the river's cold water.
Herodotus alluded to certain unorthodox interpretations of this fable which cast the frog's mortal feeling of no-feeling as a register of empathy (Greek empatheia, literally: passion) for inert objects such as chocolate bars or computers. Herodotus' status as a prevaricator and a plagiarist do not lessen the acuity of this scholarship. Unlike our telepathic insect, he was sponsored by the Greek goddess of victory.
Three: It is the scorpion that pulls humanity down. If you yourself are not a scorpion, or if you are a scorpion but are afraid of water and/or rivers, then you are still unable to play every move of every game in the cooperation zone, because sooner or later you will meet a scorpion. A real scorpion. They don't all need to cross the river. Many live in arid or semi-arid areas where unpolluted water is scarce; the law partner who made a successful motion to cut my draw, forcing my resignation from a law firm, suffered the symbolic fate of the scorpion when the firm's biggest client (the one I alone knew how to service) left as a result, and the firm folded like the legs of a dead scorpion. Yeats' judgment that "things fall apart, the center cannot hold", because "the worst are full of passionate intensity" is a recognition of the fact that scorpions are real
TIP!
Altruism alert! After sitting quietly in my right-column for months the Mudd Up! Tip Jar finally got used! Big love to S-- D--, the first person to donate. You are a superhero.
Appreciate the muddy worldview? Well, you could paypal too... it's setup so that all donations go towards webhosting fees and nothing else, i.e. I can't use the money to pay for soup or hotdogs or health insurance premiums.
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Nerd Alert! the best Firefox greasemonkey script for audioblog frequenters: the flash Inline MP3 player. (or its bulky cousin the Inline MP3 Player with Controls). It lets you listen to the tune before downloading.
Slow Alert! Post-Screw kingpin DJ Michael Watts live on 104.9 FM. Gracias a Quieto
DJ Michael Watts – live on 104.9 (9 minute excerpt)
Outsource Alert! I left a comment on W&W's fascinatin' mumblepost.
Blackmail & I left comments on Sherburne's blog too, and those were hot, but they have vanished. Inquiring minds are working to find 'em. So much thought sinks into the bogs, sinks out of sight forever. /// EDIT -- Philip Sherburne's piece and our comment-age are back online.
Soot Alert! Timeblind's Ghostification EP is out now in Ye Olde Europe. Mailorder spots Boomkat & Warpmart got that bass; bug yr local shop if they dont...
HONOR AMONG THIEVES, or DJ Morality Headscratchers part 1
Summaring a bizarre situation I recently found myself in.... :
Clearing tracks for my new mixtape, I asked one label (let's call em Label X) for permission, offering them the same conditions as everybody else. They refused. A few weeks later, digging in England I found a gorgeous LP released in 1987 on a label called... let's call it Label Y.
Turns out that the song I wanted to use from Label X contains several long samples (10 seconds or more) from this album on Label Y. In fact, these uncleared samples form the entire melody-line of the song, the crucial 'hook' that gives it its particular feel. They have not been flipped or chopped or otherwise rearranged. The song title references the LP they took the samples from. There's also a colonial element that I don't have time to delve into... Several friends of mine work with label Y. The company is independent, well-known, artistically interesting, and enjoys a reputation for fairness. Label X didn't ask Label Y for permission to use the sample. This is common in DJ culture of course -- sampling is acceptable theft and a form of homage and viral culture and fun -- but Label X was trying to assert legal control and squeeze profit using a track which they had stolen. I decided to contact Label X again.
Label X wrote me defending their theft ("We only run a press of 500 so its impossible to pay huge fees for samples."), then in the same breath, explained why they wanted to charge me a lot to use the same track -- which they can't legally control -- in my small-run CD mix!
This is crossing the line. (Fog covers the line.) Even if I were to pay them their requested sum, I couldn't do so in good conscience, knowing that some of the fee should go to Label Y, who -- both legally and morally -- deserve to share in the songwriting composition / publishing credit, and any subsequent licensing fees.
In other words, if I were to pay label X I would knowingly be ripping-off label Y. X didn't sample some pop a cappella or reggae cliché, they nabbed sounds from a cool indy label. So, paying X to use their track is clearly out of the question. But I don't want to steal the song either.
Of course, I'm not the most blame-free person to talk about issues of legal use and ownership in music. (No DJ or mp3 blogger is). I have never jacked sound from an independent label or artist without permission, but as a mixtape DJ, I adhere to John Oswald's stance regarding major label pop. In his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative, Oswald writes "All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain." and "The hit parade promenades the aural floats of pop on public display, and as curious tourists should we not be able to take our own snapshots through the crowd... rather than be restricted to the official souvenir postcards and programmes?"
To complicate the matter(s), hanging out with Sister Nancy or Nass el-Ghiwane has given me more gloomy insight. For example, Nancy doesn't have any songwriting credit on her hit tune "Bam-Bam". One of reggae's classic anthems, lyrics sung and written by a proud female voice, is 100% owned and controlled by a man. Winston Riley. This well-known Jamaican producer maintains complete legal authority over a lot of songs that you probably associate with the artists who made them into hits.
If Sister Nancy retained even a sliver of songwriting credit, then she would receive a substantial secondary income from the many times "Bam-Bam" is played in a public space, sampled, licensed on a compilation, or used in a film soundtrack. All of these have happened. Ask Riley, or his lawyers: they continue to profit from it.
Similarly, Nass el-Ghiwane don't earn anything from their endless radioplay across the Arab world. Both these cases are quite distinct from each other and the labels X & Y chronicled above, although they all share in common the legal frictions and economic shadiness when different legal systems (informal DJ/vinyl culture, pre-1990s Jamaican studio practices, US and UK copyright conventions, Moroccan authors' rights societies, etc) collide with outright greed and perpetually untrustworthy music industry dudes...
thus concludes part 1.
good chance that part 2 will b juicier...
keep your friends close and your legal counsel closer
HISTÒRIA NATURAL DEL SO
7:30pm this Thursday I'll participate in a round-table discussion with Philip Sherburne, Oriol Rossell, and David Albet at Barcelona's CCCB. We're gonna talk (in Spanish) about: “Proliferation and mutation of musical genres. Internal history, styles and positions. The impact of technology. Tradition, experimentation and permeability between genres. Conflict of definitions. Obsolete and new categories.” Sounds a bit vague on paper but I reckon we'll make it lively.
After the chat, Spring Heel Jack will perform. Only 2.50 €!
SUMMERTIME IN BERLIN
I'll be in Berlin this Saturday, DJing at the Sick Girls' Revolution No. 5 party. 103 Club. (Just how ill are they? Their guests this month include Mr Catra, Dizzee Rascal, and they're warming up for Roots Manuva before hitting Revolution). I go on around 1am, Timeblind b4, DJ Maxximus with "two female London grime MCs" and Sick Girls after.
check Sick Girls' blog for a funny SONAR review and sexy photos of the Dizzee partee.
from 6-8pm the Girls & I will drop tunes at Radioeinszueins, 95.2 fm. We heart radio!
Summertime Berlin is quiet and green and spacious and filled with healthy Germans trying not to act German, trying not to get mad at you for jaywalking or touching the stuff in their shops.
It's significantly cheaper than Barcelona, and if you toss a brick you'll hit an electronic music producer or artist of some sort, which means it's always fun to throw bricks in Berlin in summer.
Plus, the IBM microchip in each German's brain is set to a BPM default of around 130-140 beats per minute, so they are naturally predisposed to techno AND grime / dubstep / funk carioca / baltimore. So y'all can expect some of the latter. (like any explorer worth his salt, i like to exploit the natives' weaknesses)
My first time in Berlin, a few years ago, I had this horrible horrible creepy host who basically told me where McDonalds was then pointed out the club I was playing at. As I sat in the club waiting for something -- anything -- to happen, a German girl came up, asked me for drugs, then started hitting on me. I was like: wow, I'm in Germany! The first person to approach me in this country is a real live stereotype-filled citizen -- how quaint. Of all the people to be objectified by, this is one of the better possibilities. I Am The Virile Black Man Who Probably Is Selling 'Ganja'.
These days it is better. I've met dozens of great people who offset the heaps of freaks and bigots I crossed paths with on my other trips. The shopkeepers still yell at me, but I've learned to wear white cotton gloves -- pickaninny chic -- when record shopping, and to never, ever try to put back the record from where I got it. They hate that.
Oona, a complex firecracker in her own right, has introduced me to the world of breakcore youth who try to come to terms (of endearment?) with Adorno, and the incredible anti-German Germans, anti-nationalist nationals, one of whose mouthpieces is a magazine titled, rather amazingly, Bahamas.