Last night’s radio show was a special 2-hour session, with some live DJing (something I rarely do in radiospace) in the latter half. Bump!
Also, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from last week’s edition with DJ and legal scholar Larisa Mann aka Ripley. Many fascinating topics entered the discussion, beginning with copyright in Jamaica and expanding outward.
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meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, Sabbo has cooked up a lovely remix of Jahdan Blakkamoore’s “Come With Me”, a revealing song about leaving his native Guyana to enter America when he was a little boy. #ImmigrationReform
off to Knoxville’s Big Ears festival! It sports an action-packed lineup (The Ex, The xx, jj, GGD, Nico M, Joanna N, et al). I’ll be performing three times, in fairly different contexts:
* a late-night dance set on Friday (with Ben Frost opening).
* a Saturday afternoon set in a theater. w/ Dirty Projectors and William Basinski! Remember: a seated audience is a captive audience.
* and finally, Saturday night The Ex’s guitarist, Andy Moor & I will do our improv duo performance. Here’s a nice preview writeup of my hyperactive weekend.
Sometimes Andy & I go way out. Sometimes, like here, I’ll let a beat play for awhile and we gather corners until it feels like a song.
“Nothing lasts forever” writes Cesar Aira, “something else always happens.” Needless to say, it sounds – is – much better in Spanish.
A side-effect of Andy playing with me is that he gets confused even more frequently with the popular British trance DJ of the same name. Eventually we’re gonna accidentally get booked to play with Tiesto, I know it!
This snippet is from a show in Orleans, France. Photos by Andy.
and this audio is from a gig we did in Holland last summer, here overlaid with an anonymous Iranian video on the eve of election protests (remember those green twitter jpgs? ah, slacktivism! ah 2009!):
On the radio tonight: special guest from Oakland – Larisa Mann AKA DJ Ripley! She’ll start by sharing some Jamaican ‘answer tunes’ which flow into a larger discussion of music as a dynamic social practice (and not simply a collection of objects/recordings). As a legal scholar and formidable DJ, we couldn’t ask for a better person to come in and touch on everything from the social implications of intellectual property laws to, as she put it in our email exchange:
“the many ways that physical property, access to and control of material spaces, are still a prerequisite for music to happen – from control of servers that host files, to temporary or permanent control of streets and warehouses, zoning, etc., to the problem of providing bass, which still requires physically bigger systems than other kinds of sounds..”
In other words: expect heavy tunes and insightful talk tonight, 7-8pm EST, WFMU. For warm-up, Larisa offers a selection of mixes on her blog, like this recent live set.
It’s like this: last week Kalup Linzy & I recorded a collaborative track for his radio program, The Kalup Linzy Variety Show. We sifted through a bunch of unreleased beats kicking around my hard-drive, finally choosing an instrumental remix of Chief Boima that Matt Shadetek & I had just completed. I’ve been a fan of Kalup’s video/performance art ever since I saw this, so it was great to lab up – look for more songs from us in the coming months…
This version, as well more Chief Boima originals and remixes by Uproot Andy and Matt & I, will be released next month on Dutty Artz. Can’t wait? Boima’s FREE African By the Bay EP will tide you over.
…The movies are all in English – the subtitles are in Icelandic. So everyone is watching a subtitled film but me. Everywhere in the world. This is not supposed to be something to cheer about but it is a bland American premium. We may not have health insurance but we have made our language the equivalent of free hot dogs everywhere. For us.
1985 Huasteca, Mexico. Sliding folktones as the fiddler fiddles the guitarist plucks and the singer pushes, yodels his voice around this tale of lost love. It opens at the seashore: he’s jealous of the waves which don’t know what love is… why did you give me life if you had to forget me? En la orilla del mar contemplaba las olas dichosas eran las olas no sabian lo que es amar… Porque me diste vida si habias de olvidarme?
Back in October, Pitchfork TV followed me around for a day: studio visit, Brooklyn tacos with Matt Shadetek, some recording in Bushwick alongside Brent Arnold, and my show on WFMU.
It was a strange thrill to walk around my usual haunts being filmed by a 3-person camera crew: people stare, ask questions. Soaked in the media bath. You feel mildly famous and ultra-conspicuous
the revolution will not be televised – it will be embedded.
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For more behind-the-scenes info, music producers and beatmakers should check out this great post by Matt Shadetek where he discusses our studio technique in detail. Matt will be doing these weekly, take note!
“You never did?” I say quite loud, combining real and feigned surprises.
“Lunch or breakfast.”
“I’m surprised to hear that. Do you think anybody ever did?” I stick with it, wagging my hands. “No one ever talks about it, you know. It’s not part of the legend.”
I am looking at Mingus from the corner of my eye. His head is bent down on his chest. His eyes are focused on his buttons, listening.
“If he was mystical and had so many things that he did,” I conclude, “he would probably have things that he ate.”
His head comes up. “I never even saw him eat a sandwich.” He takes a deep breath. “Max said he saw him eat out of a bag one time.”
“What?”
“Max Roach said he saw him eatin’ out of a bag one time. I don’t know what it was. Somethin’ in a bag.”
