Category: st. elsewhere

RADIO UPDATE

dutty wine bassline.

radio news! — this year each episode of my MuddUp! show on WFMU 91.1 FM NYC will be podcast.

radio 05aradio 05aradio 05aradio 05aradio 05a

As you probably know, each show can be streamed for a few weeks after it airs (and is rebroadcast on a few European stations), but now we’re upping the ante.

Because FMU is a ‘real station’ we must tunnel thru a small mountain of paperwork and clearance forms, getting release forms from labels & artists for the majority of RIAA-radar material.

What this means is that the podcasts will be edited versions of the regular broadcast, containing all the material we are able to clear – so tune in live and check the streams for the full thing. But podcasts have their uses too…

if you are a label or artist and see the value of having your material mixed in & talked about on the show in a 128kbps downloadable format, get in touch with tally@ruptureradio.com.

this week’s show (tonite, wednesday, 7-8pm EST) will pick up with more Moroccan gnawa and move into who knows where, w/ tix giveaways for DubWar on Friday.

 

upcoming goodness live guests:::

Jan 23 – Dexplicit exclusive mix

Feb 20 – Brian from Awesome Tapes From Africa playing awesome tapes from Thailand!

Mar 5 – Ghislain Poirier

THE ICE CREAM CONE CONTINUUM

Several times i’ve started to write a critique of the UK journalistic conceit of a ‘hardcore continuum’, but stopped. If you haven’t heard the term, cease reading now & save yourself some mental space. Word.

icecream-coneicecreamcone2rgb200px-Ice cream cone

[T.H.I.C.C.C?]

I mention it here because, along with Word-the-Cat, BokBok just summed up all I would have said in this excellent post:

“I’m not normally one to be so dismissive, but isn’t the hardcore continuum just a way for older guys to relate to these off-the-wall kids making totally new original stuff that, aesthetically at least, bears little resemblance to the genres that the ‘Nuum designates as their supposed predecessors.”

Yes, it is.

To clarify: the ‘continuum’ notion is one among several that can supply a useful general overview of UK electronica/club migration patterns.

But more often than not, it gets used as a conservative canon in drag. In these cases, it’s a rather blatant attempt by critics to secure their formerly-relevant areas of specialization as the proper ones, usually by employing offensively reductionist binaries, rigid historicization & classification, and an (alarmist) overvaluing of drugs’ role in musical subcultures. Moves which alow them to import the same old interpretive frameworks, suppressing the wonder of unwieldy new variables to deliver the same old answers.

I don’t have time for stuff like this so i never wrote the post, but this week a few people wrote it for me…

note: I’ve read all the post-structuralists in K-Punk’s toolkit, and it strikes me as bizarrely inappropriate that he invokes Luce Irigaray in a “nuum” article reinforcing simplistic MALE vs FEMALE readings/classifications of club music. Écriture féminine his Fact piece is not. Even if the mistake presents itself as homage to another writer’s refried ideas.

As Chris says in his great continuum critique: “music is music, everything is everything (reductive yes, but liberating in its absolute reduction). we don’t need to map our own binaries onto music (screwface/smiley face — masculine/feminine — skunk/MDMA). music takes you past that.”

And I just saw John Eden’s hilarious, spot-on piece at Uncarved.

Re: actually talking to bassline producers, the mighty Dexplicit will stop by my WFMU show next week to drop an exclusive mix session, which we’ll follow up with an interview.

COLOMBIAFRICA

There is no way to expect beauty, or to deserve it. – Ursula K. LeGuin

colombiafrica-photo

[Colombiafrica myspace photo]

Colombiafrica – The Mystic Orchestra – Sambangole / Tres Golpes Na’ Mas

 

“I mean we don’t care very much about salsa, because we were born into salsa, right? We care about soukous, we care about highlife, Afrobeat, mbaqanga, Soweto music, Kenya music, Nairobi music. You know, in Colombia, salsa is for the people who have money, to go into a disco. But when you are a black man in Colombia, you can’t go in that places. So you have to make your party in a street.” – Lucas Silva

vamos a grabar… rooted champeta, Colombiafrica. three hits, no more. music for places.

DUTTY APPETIZERS

what was I saying about Matt Shadetek being a badman ninja producer? Diplo just upped Mad Again, a new riddim by Matt, this version voiced by 77Klash and Johnny Osbourne! Dutty appetizers, dutty meal soon come.

& in case you haven’t heard, Ghislain Poirier’s got a LARGE new mix available, cooked up from his own ingredients, Bastard Bass. tracklist @ Pitchfork. Paul Thompson can only hear screaming. Track 5 features my Maghrebi bredren Abdelhak Rahal on violin, which I engineered & recorded back in BCN.

My Nettle project has evolved (myspace dormancy notwithstanding), but as a live band, Abdelhak has played with me from the beginning (UK deportation setback notwithstanding). At a basic level, I feel that music should aspire to be about the movement of ideas and sounds and people not only on the dancefloor (shake what yo’ mama gave u) but also across borders; my gripe with remix culture of the ’00s is that sounds flow but people holding certain passports remain blockaded and tied-up as ever.

e.g. as stuff like kuduro bubbles around the blogosphere largely uncoupled from author-attribution, it’d be nice for kuduro producers in Angola to get repped and actually play some of the, um, ‘global ghettotech’ parties, which involves paperwork and bureacratic globalization realness and a small but solid push towards freedom, at least for the artists at hand – for them to bring their sounds to us on their terms, artistically. It ain’t easy yet it is sometimes possible… I’m saying this on a personal level, a passport level (read The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delaney, golden). While trying not to let geographic/political borders supercede all the microborders that penetrate you and I & inflect the social spaces we pulse through daily… Freedom & fish in a barrel & shooting. My own life: filled with walls.

The first track Abdel & I did was for Ghislain’s beat on my album, and the new tune with Abdel (Exils, on Ghis’s album No Ground Under) revisits and flips that moment. Due to Our Current Geopolitical Situation, it hasn’t been possible for me to bring Nettle to the United States of America, but we just received word that will be resolved in 2009…

fans of gnaoua can listen back to yesterday’s show.gania_at_wfmu.jpg
[Maalem Mahmoud Gania cassette at WFMU]

Grimey bassline top producer Dexplicit will be my special guest in 2 weeks — Dex is putting together an exclusive mix of his own material with lots of unreleased surprises for the show. He’s making his US debut at the Trouble&Bass party, held inside the very-nice-sounding venue Love, which promises craziness.

DITCH THAT DREAM

Tonite’s radio show will be mostly gnaoua/gnawa/Maghrebi cassettes, inspired by Ron’s Morocco visit. Including styles i havent posted or talked about here on the blog. Spliced in with choice flamenco cuts? You never know how a show’s gonna go down until it happens.

* * *

whatdreamsaremadeof5tw4

[insert Langston quote here]

I played this on my radio show a week ago today — not knowing what it was. A handful of listeners contacted me saying the tune was indeed amazing and asking if it’d been IDed yet. Yes indeed. I like The Dream’s radio-friendly R&B pop nuggets (Shawty is a Ten etc) but Ditch That is on a whole other level of magnitude and songwriterly flex. Yikes!

Let’s catch up with some of 2007’s best music in 2008, The Dream being a few steps ahead…

The Dream – Ditch That

& from this interview w/ The Dream: “I am very vocal when it comes to things I am passionate about. Very political, maybe more political than people would think as a Black, urban artist. Just real no nonsense, I got a lot of whippings when I was little. No nonsense, get your ass in a lot of trouble, do shit that makes sense, use the principles that were beat in you. So that’s me man, I’m just cool.”

THIS YEAR IS OUR YEAR

i’m very excited to be helping bring a lot of amazing music into the world this year. Our systems are in place and you won’t be disappointed.

On the Soot front, Maga Bo has a powerful debut album coming out soon that is almost too good. We did 3 videos for it (senegal, senegal, south africa) and there’s a taster vinyl EP with a Poppa Ghis Poirier remix coming in a month or two. That’s just for starters. (dont let the infrequently updated website fool you). We’re planning a very special compilation CD for spring, curated by the one & only…. ah! the price of secrecy.

I can say now that there will be a new DJ Rupture mix album released this spring by The Agriculture, called Uproot. This is my first ‘big’ mix CD since Minesweeper Suite. An extremely talented video artist put together video for the first track on Uproot (it’s not my tune, but it is the 1st video for a project of mine & i feel like a proud parent for connecting the dots needed to conjure it properly). We’ll be rolling that out in the near future….

I’m remixing Shackleton (great new Shack track!) & Gang Gang Dance this week; its a pleasure (& a challenge) to refashion material by artists whose work you’ve admired for awhile. In the printed world, articles of mine will be coming out in N+1, The Fader, and Abitare, among other places.

& Dutty Artz has mountains planned, not the least of which is DA TV, our internet TV thingy. the first installment is over at the Dutty Artz blog (which you should be reading, Matt holds it down & i’ll start contributing soon). the 2nd episode will have more ‘non-party content’, like NYC street fashion, a show where we ask our fav musicians to show us how to cook something, and more more more.

Basically we’re trying to cram the future full of color.

I can’t even talk about the artists we’re talking to; some of you read this at work and i dont want anyone to pee in their pants with excitement in front of co-workers.

here’s the youtube of DA TV ep. 1. Filmed and edited by Matt Shadetek, whose grillz shine on, lighting our path. M.Sht is a badman cheetah-speed producer by the way. i’ve been with him in a ton of sessions and he makes the seasoned studio engineers and pro beatmakers look slow, its great.

Always keep the ninjas on your side. Takeover time!

AFRICAN-AMERICAN BURIAL GROUND

speaking of remix decisions (and burials), here’s a fresh interment from NYC’s Leif.

leif

Burial – Archangel (Leif remix)

Burial remixes must be a kind of cottage industry right now (if u see the Buddha, remixx the Buddha) but I’m drawn to the way Leif attaches a Baltimore-style kick pattern & interweaves new subtleties into the original while keeping the trademark muted clanky feel. Baltimore structure with Burial timbres – so much more interesting than the plain ‘add B-more break’ remix decision! Leif redirects the effete British rave nostalgia-pop (“ambient trance” a friend calls it) of Burial down a sweatier east coast US alley.

The aura of the original remains intact, just displaced. In fact, the remix meshes so closely with the album track that it eats my memory of that ‘first’ version and becomes the definitive one, for me.

speaking of wubstep & What Happens When It Washes Up in Amerika, i’ll be playing NYC’s DubWar on December 21, at this spot called Love that everybody says has the best sound in NYC. Alongside DJ Geko Jones and Jah Dan blessing the mic. We will crush you.

ENTIERRO DE LA SARDINA

A funeral where everything is fake and exaggerated.

It consists of pallbearers who carry the coffin where the sardine (supposedly) rests, before a group of women dressed in black. These are “the Sardine’s widows”, who cry and scream loudly, confessing their sins to a false priest. Some of the women may not be women. A group of police – also false – precede the convey, and the whole group is surrounded by a high-volume orchestra and people who slowly join the procession.

The streets lie in darkness and one can only see thanks to candlelight throwing shadows and glow across narrow streets. In seaside cities the sardine is taken to the shore and thrown in; in other cities a special burial ground is designated for it.

el entierro de la sardina

[Goya painting]

DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISION

so I was talking with Sonido Martines the other day, and he was upset that a M.I.A. remix he did that gets played alot at Zizek ended up on Diplo’s blog without any mention of Sonido. Here’s a version with metadata intact.

MIA – Paper Planes (Sonido Martines’ Paper Guacharaca remix)

It’s hard to know when the data gets corrupted. You can even think about remix culture as an ongoing exploration of the pleasures of rough data, scrambled bits, a thing’s integrity compromised by dirty outside info (or the impossibility of a thing’s integrity made apparent, take your pick).

But i mostly think of remixes as a series of decisions (even moreso than original music). Taken or not taken. The song already exists, what will you do to change it, and how much change do you need to enact before you can call it yours?

What makes the Sonido Martines remix so radical, in my opinion, is the flagrant simplicity of it: he added a short guacharaca loop to the original… and nothing else. One decision was made. One. The 1-bar loop doesnt even change or drop out, its just there. For the entire song. And, deservedly, he puts his name on it!

It helps, obviously, that Sonido’s decision involves a guacharaca* loop and (critically) not a baltimore-break loop or a disco-electro loop or rap vocal or any of the overrused initial decisions that kids turn to when doing a remix. The cultural context for his remix is foregrounded (loud in the mix, constant, repetitive, inescapable, and, before too long, invisible, inaudible). This is remix as placement, building context – even if you can’t pronounce guacharaca and don’t know what the loping scraping rhythm does in its other manifestations…

Screwed music & cumbias rebajadas (get Sonidos’ screwed cumbia mix for my radio show, thnx 2 WTC) also have that singular decision — slow it down. And honestly, given the wealth of possibilities offered by digital audio software, making a remix that involves only one decision is often a surprisingly lucid declaration of intent / intensity / focus. In this sense DJ Screw and Sonido Martines are philosophical remixers/producers: thinking seriously about one thing, thinking that one thing’s implications through, fully.

*speaking of guacharacas, Jerónimo directed me to this vallenato youtubery featuring incredible guacharaca and accordeon solos.