what was I saying about Matt Shadetek being a badman ninja producer? Diplo just upped Mad Again, a new riddim by Matt, this version voiced by 77Klash and Johnny Osbourne! Dutty appetizers, dutty meal soon come.
& in case you haven’t heard, Ghislain Poirier’s got a LARGE new mix available, cooked up from his own ingredients, Bastard Bass. tracklist @ Pitchfork. Paul Thompson can only hear screaming. Track 5 features my Maghrebi bredren Abdelhak Rahal on violin, which I engineered & recorded back in BCN.
My Nettle project has evolved (myspace dormancy notwithstanding), but as a live band, Abdelhak has played with me from the beginning (UK deportation setback notwithstanding). At a basic level, I feel that music should aspire to be about the movement of ideas and sounds and people not only on the dancefloor (shake what yo’ mama gave u) but also across borders; my gripe with remix culture of the ’00s is that sounds flow but people holding certain passports remain blockaded and tied-up as ever.
e.g. as stuff like kuduro bubbles around the blogosphere largely uncoupled from author-attribution, it’d be nice for kuduro producers in Angola to get repped and actually play some of the, um, ‘global ghettotech’ parties, which involves paperwork and bureacratic globalization realness and a small but solid push towards freedom, at least for the artists at hand – for them to bring their sounds to us on their terms, artistically. It ain’t easy yet it is sometimes possible… I’m saying this on a personal level, a passport level (read The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delaney, golden). While trying not to let geographic/political borders supercede all the microborders that penetrate you and I & inflect the social spaces we pulse through daily… Freedom & fish in a barrel & shooting. My own life: filled with walls.
The first track Abdel & I did was for Ghislain’s beat on my album, and the new tune with Abdel (Exils, on Ghis’s album No Ground Under) revisits and flips that moment. Due to Our Current Geopolitical Situation, it hasn’t been possible for me to bring Nettle to the United States of America, but we just received word that will be resolved in 2009…
fans of gnaoua can listen back to yesterday’s show.
[Maalem Mahmoud Gania cassette at WFMU]
Grimey bassline top producer Dexplicit will be my special guest in 2 weeks — Dex is putting together an exclusive mix of his own material with lots of unreleased surprises for the show. He’s making his US debut at the Trouble&Bass party, held inside the very-nice-sounding venue Love, which promises craziness.
Re: Kuduro
I talked to Galianno last year to see if he would come to Pop Montreal with Dog Murras and it was doable. Galianno mentionned he could convince Dog to go over his ego and get a minor fee for the gig. The main problem would be the actual attendance in North America. How’s going to come see perform a kudurista if he’s not paired with a fashionable dj? Because on the other hand, in general, these parties are too small, so that someone brings guys from Angola and lose just a bit of money. The other possibility is to organize a tour and that’s another story of hours of work. I mean we could try to bring djs maybe…
Re: Dexplicit, lucky New Yorkers
hey G — yes, its admittedly tricky. excellent that you tried!! funk carioca’s popularity at least enabled a handful of DJs & MCs from Rio to travel globally & get decent fees to play parties and festivals, so it is eventually possible with kuduro. For any small genre, only a few artists can actually get gigs and tour widely.
The global ghettotech scene could learn from the world music scene — insofar as there are tons of big, well-funded world music festivals that pay all this money and have this huge infrastructure to bring artists to Europe and Japan,etc., would who otherwise be unable to perform in those places.
i don’t mean we should start booking Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld artists, but this kind of work verges into ‘cultural exchange’ territory, and there are sometimes good sponsors or arts funding for that sort of thing. On rare occasions it is as easy as a national airline agreeing to provide free flights for a band to perform abroad.
Nettle´s UK tour with Nass el Ghiwane & Clotaire K happened b/c a cool arts promoter pitched it to the Arts Council and the proposal was accepted…. Strangely enough, sometimes we should be thinking bigger I feel, setting targets higher.
Yeah I know, there’s lots to do. I was actually thinking that in a few years, that would be a good idea to start a festival for new urban music from everywhere. Link Dakar to Montreal with the Hip-hop festival. All that jazz. But it’s a big project and for a tour or a festival, the whole grant thing is a long process and I lack so much of time…
And also, I mean who likes to go to festival where there’s barely anybody in the audience? There’s also the difficulties of actual interest from people. The whole world music is a different economy also. Usually older crowd with more money to make it simple.
true true true! but hey, hipsters are the new yuppies. they got cash too.
“WANTED: aficionado of new urban music who loves bureacratic paperwork, with a background in grant applications.”
and while the best part of most world music festivals is getting paid to play at them, the one thing they do right is squeeze out the arts funding / sponship angles on the basis of the cultural importance, thats the only thing to really learn.
“Wanted: Jace to write a inspiring text about cultural importance of a “world ghettotech” festival cultural exchange. hé hé”
PS: Hipsters are buying Iphones and think paying more than 30$ for a show is a rip off. That’s the downside of free music on the internet.
A festival is a great idea fellers – and one that I personally would be happy to find the time to work on. Logistically it could be tricky. The location as you both say is essential in making it work, finding somewhere with the biggest potential audience with the biggest amount of disposable cash. However promotion and press, especially in somewhere like London would not be a problem – Journalists are currently jumping on this kind of thing. But I do wonder, exactly how many people it would potentially draw…Looking forward to the ‘inspiring text’.
might be a better plan to take your idea to an already existing festival and fill up a stage with your program?
buzz- that idea is precisely what i was emailing Guillaume about last nite! i think its a the most plausible option. here’s what i wrote: “i wonder about pitching it to an established festival, as a club counterpart, like the opening & closing party of a bigger world music festival. smaller, could be held in small venue but funded by larger thing.”
Good ideas all around!
This weekend, there are two ‘world music’ festivals happening in NYC –(artists, interviews, discussion here – http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2008/01/11).
I would love to be down with something like this. I have no background in grant applications, but I think the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and NYS Council on the Arts are two places to start to look for support to bring global ghettotech to NYC.
NYC is one of the best staging place for this type of event. It has a large African youth crowd—the Senegalese crowd will be pretty heavy. We just have to make sure we bring the right artists.
I predict a big year for all of us in that scene.
Also, lots of big festival started small. Keep that in mind.
The other way, as mentionned, is to integrate an already big festival with one stage and that’s really faisable.
bp in Australia is working on stuff like this with Uberlingua.
there´s also a bunch of promoters who would be into this in San Francisco. Make it a tour. I´ll organize in Oakland-SF.