Category: radio

HEARTS AND FOG

heartfog

Tonight’s radio show felt its way through hearts and fog which is what we all do, really.

tracklist:

Yussef Sheta Ya Helu Ya Asmar Egypt
Bayta Aicha Music From Saharan Cellphones, v. 2 SahelSounds
Forest Swords Glory Gongs Dagger Paths EP
James Blake Sparing The Horse Diplo Presents Blow Your Head Mad Decent
Stagga & Doshy Hornets unreleased unreleased
Ø Heijastuva Heijastuva Sähkö Recordings
Sepalcure Fleur Fleur EP Hot Flush
Deaf Center Time Spent Owl Splinters Type
Shaykh Ahmad Barrayan Layali Egypt Virgin France
Deaf Center Animal Sacrifice Owl Splinters Type
Seefeel Airless Seefeel Warp
Natural Snow Buildings Drift The Water Soul Waves Of The Random Sea Blackest Rainbow
Abdu Dagher Al Nil Al-Qadim Egypt Virgin France

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

ON RADIO GOOGOO

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Over at the Kindle Project, a guest blog post by yours truly, on my Radio GooGoo sound installation project for the Studio Museum in Harlem, which I never recorded or documented. The generosity of the Kindle Project was a real lifesaver & inspiration in the past months; I’ll post more about that soon. Until then, here are two pieces of my write-up for them:

excerpt:

“In 2010 the Studio Museum in Harlem invited me to create an audio installation for the museum’s front rooms, as part of their StudioSound series. My main concern was for the museum staff – the guy who does coatcheck, the people behind the front desk. They have to stand around there all day, so the last thing I wanted to do was make a 10-minute song which they’d be forced to listen to, on repeat, for months. Museum guards are the main audience for museum art. How could I create a constantly changing audio piece that wouldn’t wear out its welcome? “

excerpt:

“When it was up & running, Radio GooGoo cycled between three FM stations/algorithms, one each day:

* A classical station transforms into floating ambience. The results are a gauzy, drifting cloud, which is periodically tuned to the dominant musical scales of North Africa (Arabic, Berber). Classical music receives an enormous amounts of funding. This piece engages ideas of “classical” both as a Western system of listening and a virtuosic performance, but mostly it sounds like Beethoven on zero-gravity painkillers.

* My piece for Hot97 (“blazing hiphop and r&b”) makes the station’s broadcasts sound like a lovesick synthesizer inside a dripping cave. Mostly it’s a lot of atonal, irregularly spaced bleeps with a timbral palette that alludes to classic mid-20th century musique concrete, but at times it resolves into legibility and you’re able to recognize the stacatto main riff of a popular song (albeit replayed on a vocoder). Sometimes the signal with go completely unprocessed for seconds, so listeners can hear the transformations.”

read the rest

WELCOME IN AKAN

Did today happen? Does adulthood exist? All I know is that it’s snowing, again — or maybe it never stopped. The last time I was this tired I was walking through a forest after a show and before the airport. Mudd. Deliciously low visibility. A river. Nature has so many things without off switches. We passed a homeless guy pushing a cart.

Last night’s radio show, now streaming, featured a very informative Benjamin Lebrave from Akwaaba Music.

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

ALL-BOY ALL-GIRL

It is a good thing, we discovered last night, to begin and end with mister Arthur Russell. Hard to go wrong in a a loose and loving space. Along the way: Ghanian hiplife in preparation for next week’s guest, Chicagoan footwork sold to Americans by the Brits, the Bronx’s own Colombian low-end king Jorge Meza, Caroline Bergvall reading Dante, and and (aka always more).

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

tracklist: Continue reading ALL-BOY ALL-GIRL

AKWAABA GETS MUDDY

BREAKING NEWS: Paris-born, L.A./Ghana-based Benjamin Lebrave (aka Bbrave), founder of Akwaaba Music is extending his NYC stay to join us on Mudd Up! radio. Monday January 31st, you can tune in to WFMU from 7-8pm to hear Benjamin play music from his fast-growing label dedicated to African music and discuss his approach, which is refreshingly low on old-school music biz costs and high on context. As he writes:

Akwaaba is dedicated to African music and pop culture. We started Akwaaba because we found it way too difficult to access the music of Africa today. There is no reason for it to be so difficult: there are zillions of new sounds pouring out of thousands of digital studios, all over the continent. And sharing and selling this music is pretty straight forward with this whole internet thing.

Not only is our goal to make this music accessible, we also want to show where it’s from, show who made it, and make sure the people behind the music actually make some money from it: too often, even when the music is available online, the original artists are completely left out.

I’ve spent time with Benjamin in San Fran and Europe, and he’s always got incredible new tunes and a fresh take on what the music industry should be doing in 2011. The fact that he speaks four languages and has traveled widely across Africa gives him a particularly well-informed outlook.

For a quick intro to Akwaaba’s sounds, here’s DJ Zhao’s Akwaaba Music 2 Year Anniversary Supermix:Djzhao – ChopChop Akwaaba Supermix by Akwaaba Music

CORRUPTED ARCHIVES

A laptop hemorrhage left me flustered and spectacularly unprepared for last night’s radio show, but these things have a way of working themselves out. We are all listeners.

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

tracklist: Continue reading CORRUPTED ARCHIVES

COOL & OUT

Last night’s radio show was, as listener Marmalade Kitten commented, “cool and out.” And Ike noted: “Is it just me or is this show awesomely slower and creepier and glitchier lately?” So it goes. Emotional radio. Skip straight to the Quixotic track for sublime slow & creepy…

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

tracklist: Continue reading COOL & OUT