i’m struggling to reach a writerly deadline while folks want to take me out for ceviche (beach) and books (missed an Aira presentation by two days) and $0.50 – $2 bootleg indy films in Lima’s ‘Blue Dust’ mall.
but at times like this I heart the internet (and/or the hive mind)
tags: Bigfoot cryptozoology six million dj rupture
a new piece of mine on rai, in The National. Yalla!
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and another in n+1. about… how the international DJ thing works? The article isn’t online. Issue launch party in Brooklyn tonite.
Mode Raw of Bigger Judgement put together an incredible two volume comp, Gaza Lords. Which melts my brains. Lots of Jamaican heat, Di Genius shivering everyone’s spine. I’ll write it up proper in one of those ‘best of MMVIII’ lists, until now, if you harbor a soft spot for gangsta synthetics:
[audio:01_back-rhyno_-_Mek di Paypa.mp3]
the thought of going from sea-level to 4 kilometers (13,500ft) up is a bit intimidating, but apart from that:
next Thursday Sonido Martines & I will be playing a show in La Paz, Bolivia. (Test presses of the Sonido Martines 12″ are now floating around London!)
And then I’ll be leading a 2-day hiphop production workshop for some young producers/MCs in El Alto. There’s a lively scene of indigenous kids rapping in Quecha & Aymara.
This free workshop is happening at radio station Wayna Tambo 101.7 fm, who are helping to promote the party. It should be lively, nobody knows quite what to expect… Also probably another fiesta in La Paz saturday night…
the following week we’ll head over to Lima for 3 more events, more in a bit.
also, NYC-side: tomorrow fri. nite Badawi is playing @ Dub War and Uproot Andy & Feliz Cumbe are playing at Bowery Poetry Club. I just received the new final Skull Disco /Shackleton 2-CD with remixes by Badawi, yrs truly, and a bunch of others and its got some great moments, Raz’s treatment is expansive… deep.
Samuel Delany and Junot Diaz reading in NYC this monday!
Monday, November 24th
SPECIAL NIGHT! With Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) and Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren, Dark Reflections).
@ Solas Bar, 232 E. 9th Street
7:30PM sharp
this is an indicator of my level of busyness. I am just now listening to a CD i personally bought up in Harlem nearly 3 weeks ago, called Amadou Barry – Super Accordeon. It cost $3 and the store where I got it is open 24-hours. They mostly sell phone cards and dvds.
On the ultra-xeroxed cover Mr Barry is wearing a v-neck t-shirt printed with a large picture of a black woman’s foot. She’s in dark heels with a red flower and matching toenail paint. There is no leg. Barry looks worried, startled, purposeful, intent. “Demi-Talon” is what his shirt says.
The poorly-photocopied image has given Amadou Barry a high-contrast bright white aura rimmed by electric blue. The synth with its resonance pushed way up takes precedence over the super accordeon in this song:
[audio:AmadouBarry_ SuperAccordeon.mp3]Amadou Barry – track 8 from Super Accordeon
Here’s a video, audibly taken from a cassette. The sound gets filtered out pretty regularly. Head-cleaner has its uses…
first stop: “Sam Cooke Was Right”. Matt Shadetek on what just happened last night. YES.
Friday before last I awoke to find many ‘congrats’ emails in my inbox, for Pitchfork’s 8.8 “Best New Music” review of my new mix CD, Uproot. At the time I didn’t realize quite what that meant, but soon learned… Over CMJ weekend Uproot shot up to #4 in the iTunes Electronic chart (of course, this may mean like 34 sales, who knows?), blogs started spreading it around, and, as this Last.fm screenshot reports:
The Beatles, popular this week! Rupture stock, up 492 pts! Life is strange.
if you want to hear Uproot, let’s be honest: there’s any number of pirate-booty ZIPs and RARs are floating online. In digital space, popularity is inseparable from ubiquity. Or check the Agriculture’s myspace, their music player has some selections. (A special shout goes to the James & the Agri label, since releasing a 100% licensed mixtape in 2008 is a thankless task involving fun stuff like mountains of paperwork and fees to other labels).
& if you want to buy the darn thing — me and all the artists on Uproot are ‘independent’, which mostly means “in need of cash” — download spots include eMusic / Amazon / iTunes / Other, etc. Physical copies are in stores too. There’s a digital-only companion called “Uproot: The Ingredients” which presents all the tracks I used in their unmixed form — much longer, and quite different, from the mix itself. DJ-friendly shops like Boomkat and Juno have the Ingredients as lossless FLAC or WAV files.
Anyhow, today I woke up to another email, my friend Neil ‘Astral Social Club‘ Campell saying he heartily agrees with my pick of Sheffield UK’s Rare and Racy as one of the best records stores around. Friends who read the internet are better (and faster) than Google Alerts. He’d seen the ‘Rupture Guest List’ on Pitchfork, published sometime last night as we all sat around in prObama post-election amazement and disbelief (more on that later!) Guest List is a weekly interview piece they do, asking artists about their favorite new music, books, movies, etc.
Guest List. includes cumbia talk, César Aira talk, Years of Rice and Salt talk, and talk on why Bob Dylan and The Pixies are like museums. The filmmaker I mention, Bani Khoshnoudi, has a semi-private NYC screening of her latest film this Friday, very exciting.
I’m voting for Michelle
busy days, these.
KEYWORDS: raï, autotune, eurotrance, instant familiarity.
[audio:houari_manar_feat_mafia_de_la_rue-hya.mp3]Houari Manar feat. Mafia de la Rue – Hya
so there’s this looooong ongoing trope of comparing various types of world/other music to black american music. “raï is the rap music of the Arab world” or “rembetika is the blues of Greece” etc etc etc. it gets a bit boring.
Between Timbaland’s synth arpeggios and sounds like the one in this tune, maybe terrible eurotrance should be the new go-to genre for ’00 comparative musical realness/authenticity.
“Timbaland brings Eurotrash to US pop!” “Raï is the eurotrance of Europe!”
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excerpt from Chan’s ‘ambient video essay’ Baghdad In No Particular Order:
Shehab, either uptown or in Cairo, has a music blog ! nice layout.
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a friend was visiting some record shops in Texas — digging for crunk cumbia on my behalf. the main place had closed, and a few others turned up empty.
i’m a bit worried. maybe the culture was too viral. You do need some original loops to enter every now and again to keep things bouncing. [try this ZIP for dozens of reggae-soundclash fx lil jon airhorn type samples.] but the AV8-style booty cumbia edits? Perhaps the iterations of iterations of iterations (of accordion loops) went dry. drought…
