I was semi-delirious during last night’s radio show, but I hope you can’t tell… Kicked things off with new material by the Durutti Column and floated upwards from there. Subtext: listening to the silences between Buenaventura Durrutti and Downliners Sekt. Three cheers for Spanish anarchists & their spiritual children.
In fact, it’s worth quoting Downliners Sekt talking about the Portbou train station . Where European infrastructure standards conflict with Spanish ones – but what the passengers get is pure existential pause-button edits. I know that station well, and love the idea of music visions & postrave oblivion flowing from it.
FACT:Where does your name come from?
Downliners Sekt: “Well, originally it was a 1956 song called ‘Down The Line’ by Roy Orbison [also covered by Jerry Lee Lewis], then eventually used and modified by an obscure British band as Downliners Sect. We sampled the name from them because we thought it sounded great. Also, it has a special meaning that connects all of us to Portbou. Portbou is a train station that gets you in a really weird mood especially if you happen to stop there after raving “under the spinning lights†of Barcelona clubs all weekend. This place has a very Twin Peaks oppressive atmosphere. It’s the changing point between Spanish and French railway networks, and once you get there everything slows down for the customs check between borders. Because since 1845 the Iberian railway gauge has been 233 millimeters wider that the European gauge, the train has to undergo a break-of-gauge before crossing the border. It feels like time stands still in the town and Portbou, almost imperceptibly, shrinks by 233 millimeters. The sect of ravers trapped in oblivion, “down the line†in Portbou. Since then, when we feel a bit down, we kindly use the expression: “en descente de Portbou†— which means “going down the line from Portbou.â€
Last night’s radio show, SIPPIN’ BATHWATER, is now streaming. Over the course of 60 minutes: Lapalux provides a timely antidote for those suffering from the letdown of James Blake’s album, Quechua queen Luzmila Carpio occupies her rightful place as the missing link between Gang Gang Dance and Gang Gang Dance, Bombino’s Sahelian compositions acquire a desert-motorik lean, Lamin Fofana enters the building, Clams Casino gets motivational in a subtractive #based mode, Tim Hecker shimmers anew, and Berber highlights fresh from Casablanca sweeten New York’s reluctant spring air.
I’m arranging for *live* broadcasts of my WFMU show from on-location in Casablanca, Morocco this June… But first, let’s catch up on the last two weeks:
Then Monday’s show, which threads together Arvo Pärt, Jim Jones, Reverend John Wilkins, Laurel Halo, and more, with an exclusive from Andy Moor & Anne-James Chaton:
I previewed tonight’s show here. The above portrait comes from a recent Spanish-language interview in Frente (warning: it’s one of those horrible flash-based sites whose ‘digital layouts’ ensure that none of the content can ever be linked to). Clearly, Daniel brought the heat to our city today. The radio show kicks off his NYC stint, keep an eye out for the Thursday book party + Columbia U. talk
Right now I’d like to excerpt two sections from his new book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City. Together they hint at its narrative arc as Daniel moves from “a sort of native foreigner” to a sharp-eyed chilango whose self has been rewritten by the city he writes of — from ex-punks tending their aging legacies to the birth of fashion blogging to neo-indigenista sweat lodges– with such lyricism and insight.
“Uff,” I respond, and frown. Among some Mexicans in the United States, La Malinche is reviled as a traitor, the Judas Iscariot of the New World. By grunting I think I am doing my duty.
But Victor, an artist with whom I have struck a fast friendship, recoils. “You Chicanos need to get over the conquista,” he says. “La Malinche was amazing. She was incredibly smart and beautiful and knew many languages. She is one of the only women historical figures we have from the period.”
I am strolling with Victor after lunch. It is a warm and drizzly day, mid-July 2002, just a few weeks into my first visit to Mexico City. From the moment I land, nearly every human interaction and every street corner turned offers an eye-widening lession. The onslaught of information and sensations leaves me fatigued. Almost anything I say is analyzed, mocked, or critiqued in relation to my being a sort of native foreigner — a Mexican born in the United States, Mexican but not quite. Victor’s reproach shocks my brain. . .
And then, crescendoing with feverish visions after several years spent in D.F., we get to this section of chapter 15: The Seven Muses of Mexico City:
Everything is thrilling in Mexico City because everything is out of whack. There is a sense of delirious rupture, everywhere. The Cathedral, built over a dead Aztec temple, is sinking. The video game arcades are packed. I’m looking at male stripper clubs for women in Iztapalapa, extremely open public displays of affection on the metro, between men and women, children, and men and men, at political propaganda calling for the death penalty for kidnappers. A man without legs is begging on the sidewalks, just a human stump riding a skateboard. A little indigenous girl is stricken with panic, screaming in an indigenous language, as she gets off a metro car before her mother can reach the closing doors. On the platforms, the blind are walking with blind. Chaos and mutation on every corner. How, I wonder, can we mediate the doom?
We are not asking it enough. We are watching out for ourselves, like true urban rats, wondering, What is it that I want? I fall into the same mind-frame, thinking lecherously, I want it all. I want clothes. I want the Hustle. I’m a Mexico City mutant eating sidewalk hamburgers for dinner under a pounding brown rain. I want cactus juice to flow through my veins. I want to dance upon the pyramids. I want to sweat droplets of jade. I want acid.
+ + +
Bogota’s Frente Cumbiero has a year-old mixtape of originals and edits, which makes for a fine soundtrack to our displaced Mexico City memories on this warm Nueva Jork / Puebla York / Neza York day:
You can stream last night’s radio show for deep, consistently fascinating discussion from Liturgy! Topics include: tremelo strumming, 19th ct. Romanticism, encore vs apocalypse, the value of effort, and my esoteric theories regarding Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s esoteric theories. Liturgy’s musical selection began with 14th ct Frenchman Guillaume de Machaut and ended with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In between you’ll hear weighty black metal, including previews from their upcoming album on Thrill Jockey.
How to follow up such a rich show? With another equally rich show.
Next Monday, April 11th, I’ll be joined by Daniel Hernandez, author of new book Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century. I read an advance copy late last year, it floored me. SO GOOD. Honest, searching, implicated. Lovely to experience Daniel in longform (he’s a great blogger, too). Most alive non-fiction I’ve read in ages, and the prose communicates D.F.s insane energy, which is major. For the past two years I’ve been devouring all I can about Mexico City, from Spanish-language contemporary noir novels to John Ross’s epic history El Monstruo, and Daniel’s work shines out – can’t wait to take the conversation to the airwaves.
Last night’s radio show had a nice line pulling through it. Began with some powerful Marrakchi sounds and lifted into the ether from there. As the comments grew increasingly surreal.
Mon. 3/28/11 7:25pm max: hey rupture I was curious as to your thoughts on odd future
Mon. 3/28/11 7:27pm /r: I’D LIKE TO SEE AN “ODD” FUTURE IN WHICH A GROUP OF YOUNG BLACK WOMEN MADE SOME CRAZY ART AND RECEIVED A FRACTION OF THE ATTENTION HEAPED ON ODD FUTURE. #GENDER
. . .
Mon. 3/28/11 8:02pm k:/: will definitely be returning to this show, louder than i can play it in my office. wow. my mind is official blown. thanks much.
Mon. 3/28/11 8:03pm max: No you didn’t misunderstand, get the Audiobook version of Pale Blue Dot if you want Sagan reading Sagan. He doesn’t read the whole thing but theres a solid couple hours of Sagan reading Sagan, it’s pretty awesome even if the info is out of date
Mon. 3/28/11 8:03pm CARL SAGAN?!: Somewhere out there, /r, in the multiverse, that book is waiting for me to find a wormhole so that I can get to it and read it.
. . .
Mon. 3/28/11 8:05pm streets ahead: last night, a cosmologist saved my life
Radio tonight! Tunes from Morocco plus fresh sounds from Matthewdavid, Egyptrixx, Blawan, Laurel Halo, Lamin Fofana, and more… 7-8pm EST. wfmu.org. 91.1fm NYC.
Then next week, it’s LITURGY! I last saw Liturgy’s founding member Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in Amsterdam. He was reading the new Deleuze Guattari biography and telling me about a gringo who moved to Mexico City to make impossible music for player pianos. Time before that was in Tennessee. Hunter was holding a manifesto he’d written on transcendental black metal, the importance of ‘rupture’, and ‘the blast beat’. Clearly, there’s a lot going on.
[Hunter Hunt-Hendrix]
The 4-piece are perhaps NYC’s heaviest and most hypnotic live band, it’s a textural, choral, intense experience that ends up feeling like floating. They’ll join me to talk about American transcendentalism, guitar bodies, ritual space, infinite limbs, and more. I honestly don’t know what negro black metal is, but maybe we’ll discuss that, too. Plus they’re bringing in a deep selection of music to share.
a quick reminder that L.A. visionaries Nguzunguzu will be performing and talking LIVE on my radio show tonight, 7-8pm EST, 91.1fm WFMU, streaming at wfmu.org.
For a warm-up, here’s their Moments In Love Art of Noise-inspired mixtape, and here’s a great interview courtesy of Mixpak Records.
In addition to hearing them live (a kind of consolation prize for those who didn’t experience them at Dutty Artz’ SWEATLODGE party last Friday), Daniel and Asma will discuss life, wildness, DJing for MIA, building microutopias, and more. Then they go tour Europe and I go research in Morocco.
COMING SOON: black metal transcendentalists Liturgy will be the next guests on Mudd Up!, joining me on Monday April 4th. To discuss choral music, impossible compositions for Mexican player pianos, Hunter’s vision ‘the rupture beat’ (see the Liturgy manifesto!), dissonance & the sublime.
Holiday PATH train times aggravated an already-late start this Monday, so I missed the first few minutes of my radio show. Benjamen played a few rock tunes then I showed up, breathless, clutching a 99-cent Kassav LP and the mudd began. Hausa music, new Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor, Illum Sphere, Jamie xx in various capacities, Palestinian ambient dabka, and the line that threads through it all. (Shouts to listener Shane, who wrote “Thanks to technology I know I’ve listened to “Time 2 Get Paid” by Beniton 18 times since I heard it on Mudd Up! 24 hrs ago.”)
I now turn things over to Columbia PhD student Amy, who has been thinking very hard about What It All Might Mean:
MUDD UP! LISTENER SURVEY
Dear listeners of Mudd Up! and all fans of DJ /Rupture, my name is Amy Zhang and I’m a PhD student at Columbia University doing research on DJ practices and their musical communities. I’ve been especially following DJ /Rupture’s work with Mudd Up! on WFMU.
Though geared specifically towards listeners of the show, fans and general supporters of DJ /Rupture can feel free to share their thoughts as well—fill out whatever is relevant to you on the survey, or email me at muddup.survey@gmail.com.
