The entire movie is up on youtube, in pieces, with french subtitles.
Month: January 2008
AFRICOLOMBIA
another big shoutout to our peripatetic South American point-man, Sonido Martines — his latest heads-up comes in the form of a deadly recommendation:
http://africolombia.blogspot.com/
…is EXACTLY the blog I wanted to exist right now, but didnt know existed, until now. The subtitle — Africa – Colombia – Cultura – Música — just about covers it, a treasure trove of mp3s & album cover scans and INFORMATION. Syllart rubbing elbows with Cartegena cumbias & other forms of tropical? si señor. ¡Adelante!
PLATA PASTA Y BACHATA
Altruism. Web-hosting fees. If you feel like employing the former to assuage the latter, click that button… AKA i must pay MuddUp!‘s bandwidth, and you can help with a small paypal donation.
Any funds received can only be used to pay web-fees. Rest-assured that I will not spend your generosity on food, shelter, ice cream cones, blin-blineo, or health care. As an American in America, I gotta pay for that stuff out of my own pocket.
OK, back 2 our regular deprogramming.
Bachata Roja: Acoustic Bachatas from the Cabaret Era is a solid comp of the Dominican guitar music that you now hear in its slicked-up contemporary form all over NYC’s Latino barrios. There aren’t any female vocalists on it, and this assortment of love (& lust) songs would unequivocally benefit from a female perspective (ok, maybe it’s not so solid) but if you’re feeling this tune, then the album is worth looking for:
I for one am digging (for) Latin Caribbean guitar music. Bachata Roja showcases the old school’s dude romantics and spry unplugged elegance.
Contemporary bachata swirls around the streets & pulses up through the floorboards of where I live, and one of the best moments is when the sound coming from a neighboring window or passing car switches from bachata (which i don’t know at all) to reggae classics (which I know and consider ‘my own’). These wonderful Antillean geographies displaced and collapsed — condensed — into Brooklyn, where like and unlike across at least two languages join hands to bump.
EVERY SINGLE ONE
[signage, Charles de Gaulle airport]
Todos los pasejeros volando a USA AHORA pueden COMPRAR todos los productos. CADA UNO.
WOLOF, TV, RADIO
any Wolof speakers here?
and – Dutty Artz TV is looking for an on-screen ANNOUNCER to help with our NYC street fashion segments. the person should be comfortable on-camera & interested in urban / youth fashion. (look for color everywhere) If this sounds like you or someone you know, myspace us or email datv @ duttyartz.com.
today on the radio, an exclusive mix session by Dexplicit. & tix giveaways for his Friday Trouble & Bass party at Love, plus a bunch of new jams from Flamin Hotz and more. podcast version of this will be upped next week.
Grime/bassline producer Dexplicit is responsible for one of grime’s biggest hits, Lethal B’s Forward (also called Pow). Alongside Dizzee Rascal’s I Luv U, Forward was one of the milestone riddims in grime — soaring up in the charts, getting banned on UK radio demonstrated its overground power and populist force. UK & European radio, unlike its American counterpart, doesn’t censor (you can use all those nasty words), so it is rare when a tune gets banned.
But these days, it is Dexplicit’s groundbreaking 4×4 bassline tunes that have our ears ringing. We’ll catch up with him the following week for an interview.
ART & THE FREEWAYS
I’m trying to experience more visual art this year. If you’ve seen any outstanding shows currently up in NYC, please let us know… To break the ice:
tomorrow, Tuesday, School of Visual Art’s thesis show @ Visual Arts Gallery, 601 w. 26th, 15th floor. opening reception 6-8pm.
Two talented artists I’ve worked with will be showing, RocÃo RodrÃguez Salceda (whose painting graced Minesweeper Suite) and Tom Weinrich (whose painting ‘Noon’ will appear on the cover of Uproot)
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30 min. NYC radio rip over at Dutty Artz.
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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road made a huge splash in 2007. If you found that novel moving, I strongly recommend Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (written 15 years earlier). I’ll try to find time to write about them together, in depth.
Rather tellingly, and in an entirely different context, after an extended meditation on “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” in Ecology of Fear [PDF link of David Harvey’s review], Mike Davis places Butler’s novel (“low-rise dystopia”) against the “strangely anachornistic and suprisingly unprescient” film Blade Runner as the far more accurate “extrapolative map of a future Los Angeles”, using the book as touchstone for the concluding chapters of his book. Davis’ reading of Parable of the Sower downplays the tenacious hope expressed in Octavia Butler’s vision but he, like me, is floored by the stark, vivid plausibility of Parable’s world.
RADIO UPDATE
radio news! — this year each episode of my MuddUp! show on WFMU 91.1 FM NYC will be podcast.
As you probably know, each show can be streamed for a few weeks after it airs (and is rebroadcast on a few European stations), but now we’re upping the ante.
Because FMU is a ‘real station’ we must tunnel thru a small mountain of paperwork and clearance forms, getting release forms from labels & artists for the majority of RIAA-radar material.
What this means is that the podcasts will be edited versions of the regular broadcast, containing all the material we are able to clear – so tune in live and check the streams for the full thing. But podcasts have their uses too…
if you are a label or artist and see the value of having your material mixed in & talked about on the show in a 128kbps downloadable format, get in touch with tally@ruptureradio.com.
this week’s show (tonite, wednesday, 7-8pm EST) will pick up with more Moroccan gnawa and move into who knows where, w/ tix giveaways for DubWar on Friday.
upcoming goodness live guests:::
Jan 23 – Dexplicit exclusive mix
Feb 20 – Brian from Awesome Tapes From Africa playing awesome tapes from Thailand!
Mar 5 – Ghislain Poirier
THE ICE CREAM CONE CONTINUUM
Several times i’ve started to write a critique of the UK journalistic conceit of a ‘hardcore continuum’, but stopped. If you haven’t heard the term, cease reading now & save yourself some mental space. Word.
I mention it here because, along with Word-the-Cat, BokBok just summed up all I would have said in this excellent post:
“I’m not normally one to be so dismissive, but isn’t the hardcore continuum just a way for older guys to relate to these off-the-wall kids making totally new original stuff that, aesthetically at least, bears little resemblance to the genres that the ‘Nuum designates as their supposed predecessors.”
Yes, it is.
To clarify: the ‘continuum’ notion is one among several that can supply a useful general overview of UK electronica/club migration patterns.
But more often than not, it gets used as a conservative canon in drag. In these cases, it’s a rather blatant attempt by critics to secure their formerly-relevant areas of specialization as the proper ones, usually by employing offensively reductionist binaries, rigid historicization & classification, and an (alarmist) overvaluing of drugs’ role in musical subcultures. Moves which alow them to import the same old interpretive frameworks, suppressing the wonder of unwieldy new variables to deliver the same old answers.
I don’t have time for stuff like this so i never wrote the post, but this week a few people wrote it for me…
note: I’ve read all the post-structuralists in K-Punk’s toolkit, and it strikes me as bizarrely inappropriate that he invokes Luce Irigaray in a “nuum” article reinforcing simplistic MALE vs FEMALE readings/classifications of club music. Écriture féminine his Fact piece is not. Even if the mistake presents itself as homage to another writer’s refried ideas.
As Chris says in his great continuum critique: “music is music, everything is everything (reductive yes, but liberating in its absolute reduction). we don’t need to map our own binaries onto music (screwface/smiley face — masculine/feminine — skunk/MDMA). music takes you past that.”
And I just saw John Eden’s hilarious, spot-on piece at Uncarved.
Re: actually talking to bassline producers, the mighty Dexplicit will stop by my WFMU show next week to drop an exclusive mix session, which we’ll follow up with an interview.
COLOMBIAFRICA
There is no way to expect beauty, or to deserve it. – Ursula K. LeGuin
[Colombiafrica myspace photo]
Colombiafrica – The Mystic Orchestra – Sambangole / Tres Golpes Na’ Mas
“I mean we don’t care very much about salsa, because we were born into salsa, right? We care about soukous, we care about highlife, Afrobeat, mbaqanga, Soweto music, Kenya music, Nairobi music. You know, in Colombia, salsa is for the people who have money, to go into a disco. But when you are a black man in Colombia, you can’t go in that places. So you have to make your party in a street.” – Lucas Silva
vamos a grabar… rooted champeta, Colombiafrica. three hits, no more. music for places.
TELE-CUMBIA
Cumbia wheels keep turning! Gervase de Wilde inks it up in the Telegraph, including a Sonido Martines shoutout!
I don’t have time to post any tunes right now, but you can check Very Be Careful for some rooted L.A. vallenato & cumbia sounds.
