Category: decentertainment

MUDD UP RADIO GUEST: ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

[UPDATE: Daniel Oneohtrix will join us on Wednesday March 21st (not the 14th as originally announced)]

[Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never]

I’m pleased to announce that Oneohtrix Point Never (aka musician Daniel Lopatin) will be my special guest on the Wednesday March 21st edition of Mudd Up! on WFMU.

Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2011 album, Replica, was a rare type of excellent — not only was it a moving & detailed work of experimental/ambient goodness, it also felt significantly different from OPN’s earlier releases, adding uniquely arranged samples and rhythmic moments which conjured a pop spirit into experimental sound bodies. The trend tends to be for musicians to become more… standardized? commercially groomed?.. as their visibility rises, so it was so refreshing to hear Replica pull things even further out.

So. Join us on Wednesday night to hear OPN share music and chat about his songwriting + live performance approaches, VHS-visions in the era of YouTube, synthesizers, slowness, what he is up to co-running the Software label. Also for discussion: Mexican border sci-fi (Sleep Dealer reference anyone?), and, if we’re lucky & can get the muddy scoop declassified in time, we’ll get to learn about Lopatin’s very recent work mixing a great indie band.

The show will be two-hour special, 7-9pm on Wednesday March 14th.

You can stream Replica below.

PALM WINE BEYOND DIGITAL MIX ON CASSETTE

PW cover front

This is the artwork for a small-run tape / cassette-art project initiated by Simone Bertuzzi. One side features his recordings from Tangiers and the Joujouka Festival in Morocco, and the flip side contains a mix that Maga Bo and I arranged while on a train from Casablanca to Tangiers during Beyond Digital. Simone asked us to select tunes, keeping in mind that the tape would be inserted into Moroccan “bootleg” distribution networks, given out for free in Joujouka, as well as being avaible to all you lovely internet creatures via a 10euro paypal order.

For more on The Master Musicians of Jajouka and/versus The Master Musicians of Joujouka, check out my piece for The National, “Past Masters.”

Simone’s project intrigued me however, as he was more or less sidestepping the aura of arty mysticism around Joujouka and working with what you might call distributional aesthetics — something I think about a lot as well.

tape label

[artwork from the notorious lost Fesmaatic edition]

Bertuzzi writes: “My main goal was to have a sort of non-official distribution in Morocco, things are quite interesting in terms of bootlegging, cd-r and distribution in general in Morocco. I wanted to let locals listen to both the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka (very known in the rest of the world, but more or less unknown within Morocco) and the eclectic mix of music by Rupture and Maga Bo. This is also why I didn’t decide to focus specifically on Morocco and moroccan music, but I asked the djs to put as much music as possible from many different countries and epochs.”

This is taken from his long, honest post chronicling the ups & downs of whole process.

SUPER TIGHT: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

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If Super Tight isn’t your favorite ersatz public access TV series yet, then you just wait… Puppets, gender melt, sketches — and, in this new Halloween special, an interview with my dark side.

Remember: if you can’t beat them, join them start your own alternative economy slash media ecosystem.

screenshots followed by SUPER TIGHT episode 2: Hollow Weenies.

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and here’s a handy breakout video of the interview.

BOOMBOXES NEEDED

boombox

Dear Internets–

Do you have an old boombox? The rectangular kind that is big, boxy, held together with real screws? With large dials and analog push-buttons? If YES, then I’m interested in it & will pay (non “vintage” prices) for it. If you’d like to donate your crappy old boombox to a very good cause (more on this later, I promise you will not be disappointed) well, that’s cool too.

Dutty Artz newcomer Sam is based in NYC and will help scoop it up, and if you live outside of NYC then we can talk about shipping it.

give us a shout: boombox @ duttyartz dot com

On behalf of myself, my crew, anyone who has ever sported a high-top fade, and the entirety of the 1980s & early 90s, I salute you.

GOOGLE RUPTURE GOOGLE TALKS

Asaf-Hanuka

[sketch by Asaf Hanuka]

On Monday, May 16th, I will participate in a panel discussion at Google’s NYC office. Topic?

You guessed it: thee Musick Industrie.

The other panelists are: Justin Kalifowitz (President of Downtown Music Publishing, Founder of Songtrust)
Sam Valenti (Founder of Ghostly Interntaional)
Dermot McCormack (Executive Vice President of Digital Media for the MTV Networks Music & Logo Group)
Anthony Volodkin (Founder of Hype Machine)

The talk organizer, Jacky Tran, will moderate.

It’s not open to the public –but I’m allowed to bring a small posse, and our discussion will viewable online as part of their GoogleTalks series.

So if you are interested and available next Monday (things begin around noon), email me or leave a comment below (with your email), I’ll get in touch if there’s space.

And remember: secret google cheat codes are real – but don’t bother Googling it.

GO-GO WASHINGTON D.C. VHS FLASHBACKS

I first heard of Go-go back in the mid-nineties. I was visiting relatives in Virginia and attempting to explain jungle, the music that had me so excited at the time. After listening to my description, one of my aunts said: “Oh, you mean Go-go?”

I’ve since heard fascinating stories about the Washington D.C.-based sound from them, as well as Ian MacKaye and a few other DCers who witnessed Go-go at the heights of its popularity. Percussion-heavy live bands operating like DJs by vamping out current radio hits, long long performances, issues of segregation and public space in the predominantly black scene, the many struggles of a genre that never quite broke through beyond the D.C. area. There was a lot going on…

Earlier this year some of the Anthology of Booty sisters took me to a nice 2nd-hand vinyl shop in DC where I had the chance to sift through old Go-go 12″s. More than anything, they felt like artifacts, little durable reminders of a much larger, harder-to-hold-onto moment. Those 12″s left me wanting to hear more about the histories of Go-go and those of the people and places where it took root.

A 1980s BBC documentary on Go-go was recently uploaded to Youtube. I hope it lingers… Here’s part 1:

KOPENHAGEN KLIMATE CHAOS

A lot of people like to talk about the politics of sound / sonic weaponry (often with a technophilic edge), but Filastine is one of the few who regularly puts himself at physical and legal risk to engage in mobile audio activism – from his now-defunct Infernal Noise Brigade (a marching band created specifically to perform at street demonstrations) to the current project: Climate Chaos.

It’s basically a “HIGH VOLUME” multichannel bike-mounted soundsystem to be used inside the Bike Bloc during the Copenhagen Climate summit.

Says Filastine in his open call for sound:

From the 7-18th of December the world’s leaders will be in Copenhagen to decide the conditions of this planet’s future. Given the suspects & their financial backing, it’s nearly impossible we’ll be presented with solutions, far more likely we’ll see further privatization, enclosure, and commodification of the our atmosphere under the alias of carbon trading. This is your chance to put pressure, speak truth to power, or sonically disrupt, at HIGH VOLUME. Anything on-topic is welcome: remix the speeches of corporate & government leaders, environmental soundscapes, the sounds of nature or its undoing, appropriate collages, home-cooked theme songs, subliminal mob-inflaming drones, advertising.

& here is 16 seconds of Filastine recording with 16-year old gitana singer La Perla, inside a squatted cave on the hills of Granada overlooking Muslim palace La Alhambra… It’s a big world. And fighting for stuff you believe in is a fast & sure way of building communities within it.

LUIS

So. Halloween was last week, but there’s still time for a little gothic animation / reverse room destruction / nightmare from Chile. Sporting admirable production values: “Materials: charcoal, dirt, flowers, found objects, and cardboard.”

1 + 1 = 3

1+1=3

Before Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and Uproot and all of that, there was my 1st mixtape, 1 + 1 = 3.

Made in ‘The Toneburst era’ (late 90s Boston), recorded straight to cassette, and sold at our shows, 1 + 1 = 3 is a nice document of what I was up to about 11 years ago (arabic music, hiphop, dancehall, noise, xerox machines)

Wayne & Wax ups an excerpt and a fun interview with me about it. Check it out. He writes, “Even as 1 + 1 = 3 gives a sense of how much he has grown and morphed as a DJ, it still offers some recognizably rupturey maneuvers and seems to prefigure the strange melange of Gold Teeth Thief. Trad middle-eastern sounds meet modern beat science, from slurred boom-bap to minimal dancehall, rollicking jungle to proto-breakcore noise.”

It is strange for me to hear this mix now, in part because I can no longer ID all the tracks! I usually remember what the record artwork looks like, but sometimes the artist/label/track names have escaped me. And in part because my technical reach and narrative pace has expanded since then.

It also makes me think about how our whole way of finding (& mixing) music has changed in the past 10 years or so. When this mixtape came out, in order to get reggae and dancehall I had to trek across Boston’s segregated cityspace out to Blue Hill ave. in Dorchester. Pre MP3 smorgasbord, we would haunt the record shops & tape the radio. Learning paths through music pre-Google, pre-blogosphere, before Ms Internet + Mr MP3 got married and made us all their children.

When interviewers ask me some variation on ‘why Arabic/north African music?’ I tell them that I’ve been listening to it for as long as I can remember (I can only remember as far back as high school: pathetic, I know), that it’s as familiar to me as the other stuff I DJ. Which this excerpt — 9 minutes from the start of side B — illustrates.

And as for Toneburst, it was a Boston-area production crew, including folks like DJ C and myself. “the Toneburst Collective was a loose-knit crew of DJs, electronic musicians, and video-and installation-artists, who together produced approximately 20 large-scale multi-media events in offbeat locations around New England and New York. More carnival than rave or concert, the crew’s productions mixed experimental beats, video, and performance art in unorthodox spaces.”