” Manhattan is full of extra rooms! people scream. There are secret hallways everywhere! People start knocking on walls and rifling through closets, desperately searching for a place of their own. Maybe an undiscovered planetarium in the basement crawlspace.
In any case: we’re now doing it “
its been a few months, or more, since someone commented on one of my maghrebi music posts. that’s ok. I. WONT. STOP.
from a 4 CD Fassiphone comp you can cop for 20€ in the right town. Allal Yaala (the man on the left above and below) is responsible for the banjo playing, which cuts straight to the heart. they are like this live – surefooted and unhurried – always opening spaces for Omar’s spoken words. when NeG hit their rhythm and all parts conjoin, the momentum, contagious.
La Gazette du Maroc just published a fascinating interview with one of the major north African expat producers in Paris, Brahim Ounasser, centering around his work with Nass el Ghiwane.
Qu’est-ce qui explique cette ruée vers la musique en ces années-là ?
Les immigrés vivaient majoritairement dans la solitude.What explains this rush towards the music in these years?
The immigrants lived mainly in loneliness.
today’s radio show: special guest Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic for The New Yorker. info & google-oracular screenshot here.
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in other news, Dr Auratheft follows up his excellent Doabi Gypsies mix with a new one: The Gypsy Trail Revisited, a nice soundtrack to the whirled music discussion at Wayne’s World.
Auratheft writes: ” I just want to show – in sound – that identity is a problematic and ideological discourse. And it’s dangerous to think there’s something like a Judeo-Christian Foundation of Europe. There are many roots and routes, tracks and trails, narratives and stories, texts and contexts. Let’s make our own atlas, folks. This is what we share. Or expressed in sound and music: listen & learn.”
all this talk of identity makes me think on the following Charles Simic poem, from The World Doesn’t End:
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There’s a gorgeous, gentle album which fits into these discussions — apparently I wasn’t the only one who brought it to Auratheft’s attention after hearing Doabi Gypsies. ‘Imagined’ by ney player Kudsi Erguner, the full title is: Flamenco & Musique Soufi Ottoman: L’Orient de l’Occident: Hommage à Ibn Arabi, Sufi de Andalucia.
أبن عربي
L’Orient de l’Occident – El Alba de la Unión
(my scanner put in those waves, it must be as heat-fatigued as i am)
“Muslin Gaze”, an essay I wrote on Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze was just published in the summer issue of Middle Eastern arts & culture magazine BIDOUN. The print version is reliably lush and well worth seeking out.
You can read the essay online here.
nice to have words in print. expect more soon: this blog post = me procrastinating from another long piece for a journal… i’m so late for deadline that i’m terrified they’ll deploy their intern-assassin to my home.
Here’s a Muslimgauze tune I reference in the article, from his 1996 album Gun Aramaic.
both me & Nettle will be playing in Denmark soon, but i’m lookin’ fwd to this, as DJing on the radio & w/ friends in Boston was how my life in music began. plus, on the December US tour w/ The Ex, Boston/Cambridge was BY FAR the rudest place we encountered, especially the bouncers at the Middle East Downstairs, and so it’ll be nice to bounce that bad taste out of my mouth with W&W, Flack (currently on tour in Australia), and more..
cut n pasted promo text: “The first-ever Bouncement at the Linwood transformed a metal venue into a booming dance club, and Part 2 won’t be much different. Headlined by such an accomplished and Boston-bred artist as DJ /Rupture, we expect madness.
Basstown and Beat Research present:
BOUNCEMENT 2
Featuring:
DJ /rupture (Decks n EFX)
Wayne and Wax (Beats and Rhymes)
Baltimoroder (DJ Set)
w/ DJ Flack (DJ Set)
& Daviday (DJ Set)
Visuals by Zebbler
@ Great Scott
1222 Commonwealth Ave, Allston, MA 02134
MBTA Access: Harvard Ave. Green Line “B”
(617) 566-9014
Saturday July 28th 9pm-2am 21+
$5.00
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/deejayrupture
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/basstownpresents
Website: http://www.mashit.com/beatresearch
a popular guide to unpopular music
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if you haven’t been paying attention to the Genre Known as Grime lately, i’d recommend checking Durrty Goodz’ new 9-track EP, Axiom. It’s shockingly good. (Has he always been this on-fire?)
As a grime MC, Durrty’s taste in backing beats is unbeatable: riddims by Bass Clef, Coki, Fireworkz, and more. haven’t had time to absorb lyrics & digest his mic-persona-aura, but there are some virtuoso, challenging flows around those beats. Case in point:
blubber!
while i’m an advocate of self-released music — don’t eliminate the middleman, become him/her — my brothers in grime should either spend more time with photoshop or hire a designer. Goodz loses points for his X-Files / Star Trek cover, which feels like wack German techno from 15 years ago:
Yes, that is a red fingerprint in outer-space.
Tune in today, no excuses, play it loud, make new neighbors: Dissident Bar-B-Que Special .
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a year or two ago i wrote:
RZA wipes angel dust off the sampler and stares into his computer monitor. Star simulation screensaver. He thinks about sticky rope. What was that that Mingus was playing with? Maybe it was a bundle of cotton that looked like rope. Whatever it was he could rip it so easily. He was strong… but it was sticky, wasn’t it?
White wife and a shotgun in the studio. Life isn’t funny, it’s true, and great people get evicted. Can you clean computer screens with Windex? Can you drink Windex? Where’s my damn cellphone? How old would Mingus be if people didn’t die? Maybe it was rope-looking type wax & age wouldn’t matter so much. He’s gone and we can’t ever ask him anything.
We can only listen around the corners.
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Mingus, the film that inspired this entry, plays at Brooklyn’s BAM this weekend
Today’s song is the title track from Gaâda Diwane de Béchar‘s album Ben Bouziane. The France-based musicians hail from Béchar western Algeria, btwn the Sahara and the Atlas (mountains), natural setting for their afro-Maghrebi sound. Usually i’m burnt-out on anything that could be considered gnawa fusion, but Gaâda, at least on this cassette, nail it consistently with crisp original arrangements and tight playing (“le groupe a conçu son monde autour d’une relecture moderne de presque toutes musiques africaines” explains their MurdochSpace blurb).
Which reminds me: anybody know of a good cheap place to take French lessons in NYC? I’m tired of bluffing my way thru francophone websites & conversations…
Ga̢da Diwane de B̩char РBen Bouziane
They namecheck Nass El Ghiwane & Tinariwen as influences (Tinariwen also namecheck NeG as an influence), partaking in north Africa’s excellent tradition of what you could call ‘cosmopolitan roots’: bands repping the local (one amazing travel web writes “Béchar is the largest town in the western part of Algerian Sahara, and the administrative centre of the Saoura region. That’s more or less it. A place to stop, use as a base, stock up on food. But there is nothing at all to see here.”) while doing a self-conscious ‘relecture moderne’ (modern rereading, right?) of various relevant musical traditions, played on acoustic instruments, but wired into MySpace & the French world music market.
Local is good, but French concert revenue and arts funding is better. These are non-exclusive entities, and we are the richer for it.
(Homage to Germaine Tillion, Southern Algeria, 1938-39, Dr John 2005 creativecommons flickr.)
Also check his Migrados series, “A current project documenting the experiences of migrants in Spain, the spaces they occupy, their journeys, and the traces that they leave behind”. from which comes the following, Immigrant Wall Drawing, Madrid, Spain, Nov 2003. Lavapiés no less:
tonite’s guest is DJ Eddie Stats! A clubb dj’s dj, Eddie has deep crates and pushes the pulse of now as a in-demand NYC selector and contributing editor for The Fader. Dancehall, bhangra, and he might share some TRANCE-y (think: nyabinghi, not goa) specials for us.
(Plus, Eddie DJed the Mavado party in Manhattan a few weeks back, which i’m kicking myself for having slept on, inexcusable.)
as usual, playlists & streamable archives here.
and a new web for the show, not-quite-finished but functional, is: http://ruptureradio.com.
over there is where these weekly radio blurbs will be posted from here on in… if u prefer that Rupert Murdoch owns it, it’s done, he does.
