I’d put heaven by your side
[audio:Marvin Gaye – If I Could Build My Whole World Around You (acapella).mp3]Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell – If I Could Build My Whole World Around You (acappella)
[audio:Hard Mix – Alright.mp3]Month: July 2010
PROVIDENCE DIY CARNIVAL
This Saturday, July 31st, I’ll be closing out the Wooly Fair in Providence, Rhode Island with a midnight set. They call it a “Providence-born DIY art carnival”, and it looks to be a very fun time. Creative grassroots events which aren’t necessarily focused on music are often the best places to DJ. Wooly Fair runs from 1 in the afternoon to 1am.
Lately I’ve been squeezing more Arabic moments into my sets. Here’s a clubby/rootsy gasbah flute track from Algeria:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/KamelNemri-Lemrabta.mp3]Kamel Nemri – Lemrabta (from 2 CD Maghreb Dance Party)
and a re-up of a great clattering Tunisian beat workout (nobody commented on the original post. sigh.)
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Ramzi-CocktailTounsi.mp3]Ramzi – Cocktail Tounsi (Maghreb Dance Party)
The image below is a drawing of a temporary/permanent/growing installation, centerpiece of this year’s Wooly Fair. It’s “the Flower Tower, a pyramid of container gardens that will be distributed after the July 31st event to hospitals, schools, and other organizations.”
SU MAJESTAD: LA CUMBIA
Cumbia fans listen up! Diego Ibáñez (aka Sonido Desconocido II) is finishing an epic, informative radio series dedicated to Cumbia history. It broadcasts Friday nights on Mexico City’s UNAM radio, and is available as podcast/stream… Lots of information: songs, a breathy female narrator (very cumbia), interviews… In total, a whopping 22 hours of cumbia infosharing!
En Español, claro, pero the musical selection alone offers breadth and depth (and accurate playlists). Your personal cumbia canon will be expanded! I’m particularly excited by episode 10, on Andean cumbia. The breathy lady begins: “I am cumbia andina mexicana, I’m saya, I’m huayno… I’m Peruvian, Ecuatorian, Chilean… I’m synthesizer, mandolin, and harp, I’m the integration of folklores…”
Introducing the entires series, Diego writes:
Esta serie abordará diversas trayectorias de la cumbia, desde sus inicios en el continente Americano, el proceso en que empezaron a implementarse instrumentos electrónicos en dicha música, desde guitarra eléctrica y órganos melódicos de los 50´s – 60´s hasta el uso de sintetizadores y procesos digitales del presente, trazando cronologÃas con relaciones geográficas y describiendo algunos de los sucesos que revolucionaron este género y sus diversos subgéneros.
This series will trace various cumbia pathways, from its South American origins, the process by which it embraced electronic instruments – from electric guitar and organs of the 50s & 60s to the current use of synths and digital FX, mapping timelines to geographies and describing some of the events that revolutionized la cumbia and its many subgenres. (“translation” mine)
MUDD UP RADIO: JULY 26
STERILE MALE SCREWWORM, MEXICANS WITH GUNS
PostNatural Organism of the Month over at The Center For PostNatural History.
“During the late 1950’s… Full-scale fly factories were produced in Florida and Texas capable of producing 500 billion sterile male flies per week.”
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Processed dogs, lazily melodic toddlers, wubstep’s testoster-wobble sculpted into audio commentary on aggression by Ernest Gonzales’ solo project, Mexicans With Guns.
[audio:Mexicans_With_Guns-Los_Perritos.mp3]Mexicans With Guns – Los Perritos (buyable)
LEAKTHINK
some links/leaks, some mp3s, some youtubery from Finland.
Art of the leak. Hua Hsu connects Big Boi downloads to US military seacrests escaping via Lady Gaga CD drag. Information value related to the chains surrounding it.
A different type of Cage – BP paying academics for their silence. Gag rules.
Post-payola: in this provocative interview, Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman “divulges a possible shady major label practice of buying iTunes singles with label money in order to hype music up the charts, among other things.”
Binyavanga Wainaina strikes again: How To Write About Africa II, wherein we learn that his original piece first entered in the world as an email rant. Gotta love Binyavanga! I feel sorry for those who haven’t seen Bidoun in its physical form, that magazine-journal-artwork looks good, even if sometimes you have no idea what’s going on.
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Here is a song. A slowed-down cumbia rebajada. The most popular version of this is by Super Grupo Colombia — and, frankly, it annoys me. Here Super Combo Dinamico space things out. Their syrupy screw version pulls new details out from the molasses accordion morass. Todo un exito! Unlike Big Mister President Hugo Chavez, the vocalist dedicates his song to Venezuela and Colombia:
[audio:SuperComboDinamico-La_Cumbia_del_Cuervo.mp3]Super Grupo Dinamico – La Cumbia del Cuervo
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Here is a song. A summer dance HIT from Ghana’s Appietus that’ll be released next week on Akwaaba. Is this a leak? Is this viral marketing? Is broke the new black? What might that mean for us current blacks?
As you contemplate these questions, please consider buying me a book from the Mudd Up! Amazon wishlist. I deserve to be rewarded… for something, surely.
[audio:Appietus_MissDoctor.mp3]Appietus – Miss Doctor feat. 4×4
“She just wanna wanna commit a crime.” The mp3’s metadata says: “Copy this song, burn it, pass it around, give your mom a copy, and while we’re at, consider buying it [release date: July 27] if you really enjoy it! Appietus put a lot of work into it.” What DO we pay for?
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LAST BUT NOT LEAST, I just became the 3,975,087th person to watch the following video. Late is better than the new never, which is always. Sample source for the Erick Rincon sublime tuba-enhanced tribal guarachero makeover I posted last week.
MoMA PS 1: WARM UP!
[2010 Warm Up Party from Jacoplas’s flickr]
This Saturday, I’ll be DJing at MoMA’s PS1 Warm Up series out in Queens. Also playing: Kalup Linzy (fresh from his life-imitates-video art-imitates-soap appearance on General Hospital!), Le Tigre’s JD Samson, and “surprise guests.” Weather right now says it’ll be 94 degrees with possible thunderstorms, but at this point in the summer, New Yorkers are used to that. This particular Warm Up is part of the Greater New York show.
Event runs from 2-9pm, I’ll be playing toward the end of the day. Hot weather music.
July 24th
MoMA PS1 Greater New York presents:
JD Samson / New York (DJ set)
MEN / Brooklyn (live)
Kalup Linzy / Brooklyn (R&B, Soul, Disco DJ set)
Kalup Linzy and the Sweet, Sampled, and LeftOva / Brooklyn (live performance set)
DJ /rupture / Dutty Artz, Brooklyn (DJ set)
With surprise guests!
2-9pm, $15 includes museum admission.
WILEY UNFILTERED
Game-changing event alert! British MC/producer Wiley just gave away 200 songs for free, including his unreleased new album. Wiley also fired his manager, had a cup of tea, and twittered.
Value. Music. Access. Catharsis.
Best to quote Dan Hancox’ The Essential Wiley from last year:
It’s not unreasonable to compare Richard Cowie to Bob Dylan or Miles Davis. It’s not like he’s not churned out a lot of shoddy material, like other legends, but his ability to adapt and find new ways of nuancing his skills is astounding. Wiley’s compulsive about music, and compulsively restless in the way he makes it. His plans change like the weather, he’s constantly unavailable, constantly changing his various mobile numbers: famously he’s like the 38 bus, cos he never turns up. He’s had beefs, fall-outs, and hissyfits galore, been stabbed 14 times, retired at least twice, and never released an album without denouncing it at some point, often before it’s been released. But each time you think he’s too bitter or dejected or exhausted to keep on making music (or at least, to keep on making good music), he hibernates as a ‘studio rat’ and comes back with some fresh wonder. He can’t help himself.
It’s worth noting that the new album The Elusive, was slated for release on a major, Island/Universal, as part of a 4-album deal he signed last winter. (Punk’s not dead!) Wiley is a major force of change, fearless, constantly imagining how things could be Very Different (music industry norms, synth settings, common sense etc) then making his fundamentally ‘other’ vision real.
RADIO GOO GOO
If you’ve visited the Studio Museum in Harlem in the past month or two, chances are you heard my installation wafting down from the front two rooms. It was a soft launch of the piece, Radio GooGoo, which officially opens on July 15th. By the end of its Studio Museum run, Radio GooGoo will have created hundreds of hours of “original” “music”, plus the museum will offer free CDs with an hour of Radio GooGoo. I’ll have more info as well as audio excerpts soon… In the meantime, here’s an official blurb:
StudioSound: DJ /rupture’s Radio GooGoo
DJ/Rupture’s Radio GooGoo is a radical audio installation that challenges widely accepted notions of authorship as well as the deep associations attached to musical genres. Radio GooGoo features computer based algorithms that assemble media sounds from a range of radio stations in real-time. Combining and synthesizing these sounds, Radio GooGoo continually broadcasts in the Museum lobby.
I like that they call it ‘radical’ — I would add, importantly, that Radio GooGoo lies at the fertile intersection between ‘radical’ and ‘lazy’; as an Artist, I consider myself an active participant in a venerable lineage of Negro Laziness. I’d write more, but it takes so much work…
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And my actual radio show was broadcast last night. You can listen back here.
TRIBAL INDEPENDENCE GUARACHERO DAY
I can’t remember exactly, but tomorrow, July 4th, we Americans celebrate our Independence from Microsoft, or the Constitution, or Google, or the British, or the RIAA, or Illegal Immigrants, or Apple products, or People Around The World Who Hate Our Freedom, or maybe Slavery or the Birth Certificate itself. It’s an important holiday, especially if you like to eat dead animals.
So what better way to join the festivities then hunched over my laptop, carpal tunnel syndromin’, listening to incredible new Mexican music of the 1st decade – or is this already the 2nd decade? (Is it true that time isn’t circular but tubular?) – of the 21st century!
Erick Rincon from Monterrey gifts us with a sublime tribal guarachero refix that wraps hypnotic playful voices around some ill tubas. Deep sonic multitasking from northern Mexico. As the 16-year-old producer says: “Bueno pues ahora, Dejandoles algo de Tribal, Mezclandole algo de Norteño!! que suene la tubaaaaaa!!” Let the tuuuuuubaaa sound out!
I just listened to this two-minute song a dozen times in a row, now you can too:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Erick Rincon – Loituma (3ball Experimented).mp3]Erick Rincon – Loituma (3ball Experimented)
