ONE HUNDRED STRAINS

Faramarz Payvar

[Faramarz Payvar]

An Iranian filmmaker friend tells me that one of her favorite santur players, Faramarz Payvar, has just passed away. He played the santur (le grand maître du santûr moderne!), a kind of Persian hammered dulcimer whose name means one hundred strains. Tiny hammers like the heart.

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[audio:Faramarz_Payvar-Dastgah_E_Nava_XIII.mp3]

Faramarz Payvar – Dastgah E Nava XIII (from Improvisations on Santur)

santur

A fitting companion to this song would be one from Ivan Tcherepnin’s Flores Musicales / Five Songs / Santur Live! album, which I like a lot but don’t have. (Do you?) On it the Russian-Chinese composer (another santur wizard) mixes the instrument with impressive live electronics from the Serge modular synthesizer, named after his brother, who built it.

For more experimentally-minded Persian music, try Dariush Dolat Shahi, two fantastic albums of his are hosted on UbuWeb.

And of course, my recent piece for The National on Ata Abtekar and Alireza Mashayekhi.

JEANS AND DRESS SHIRTS AS CAMOUFLAGE

A little over a week ago I filed my first dispatch for WNYC’s new website. It’s a piece about the possibility of a multicultural thong swap. The essay includes the following four sentences:

You don’t need to be so precise with mythic time.

“I’d like them more if the white men were wearing the red thongs and bodypaint, and the black guys had on jeans and polo shirts,” I said.

World music festivals will pay good cash for groups from “remote” places whose presence reinforces the idea that our planet is still filled with the kind of mystery that allows indigenous traditions to continue without interference from cellphones or multinational corporations.

So you take off your sneakers and hoodie, and put on the facepaint.

BLDGBLOG HITS THE AIRWAVES

bldgblog

On Monday December 14th, Geoff Manaugh, author of the BLDGBLOG book & blog, will be the special guest on my WFMU radio show! Geoff’s a consistently fascinating writer on architecture, contributing editor to Wired UK, and a former DJ. Expect discussion to range from architectural acoustics & unexpected sample-discovery to a selection of Geoff’s favorite techno.

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.

TELEPATHE REMIX

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Telepathe‘s Dance Mother album has been one of the year’s standouts for me; the instant I heard it I knew I wanted to incorporate some of the material in our Solar Life Raft‘s emergency toolkit. (Never face the end of the world without nice synths – solar-powered when possible – and singing).

Matt Shadetek and I did two totally different remixes of “In Your Line”. This version, where we excavated a drafty house with bass foundations and disappeared the original guitars & drums, won out.

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Telepathe_InYourLine(DJ_rupture+MattShadetekRMX).mp3]

Telepathe – In Your Line (DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek remix) from Solar Life Raft: The Ingredients

PATTERNED MILLIONS

Global Bass Underglaze

bluewhite

[blue and white ceramic tile from dramagirl’s flickr]

For centuries, Persian potters had been using cobalt to paint underglaze blue decorations. In the early fourteenth century, some bright entrepeneur had the idea of taking it to China. The Chinese potters tried out this ‘Muhammadan blue’ on their highly prized white porcelain, and in about 1325 started to export the barbarous results back to the Near East. The shapes were based on those of Islamic metalwork, the blue decorations incorporated jolly chinoiseries. Soon, imitations were being made in Persia, then in Egypt and Syria. Later on, the Ottomans took blue-and-white to heart and put tulips on their pots; the seventeenth-century Dutch then fell in love with it, putting windmills and armorials on their pots, and tulips in them. The bastard transfer-printed descendants of blue-and-white still leave Stoke-on-Trent in their willow-patterned millions.

-Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine

MEXICO: MICTLAN DUB FESTIVAL

Picture 008

[Salon Calavera]

puebla

 

This weekend I’ll be performing at the 3-city Mictlan Dub Festival, alongside Adrian Sherwood, Mungo’s Hi-Fi, and various local DJs and bands in each city. Things kicked off last night with a screening of the Dub Echoes documentary followed by a Q&A with me in the incredible Salon Calavera in the center of Mexico City. SKULL SALON. Mictlan, by the way, is an Aztec concept involving the proper path taken on the way to Death.

I’m looking forward to these dates. In NYC sometimes people ask me to do ‘cumbia’ sets, so it’s quite fitting that in Mexico I’m asked to do a special set presenting my interpretation of ‘dub’. I’ll be playing out a lot of stuff I rarely play out. Dub classicists beware!: much as I love Tubby & Co., I’m hostile to canonical interpretations/reiterations of dub…

Picture 005

[Salon Calavera, roof view]

for info–

Nov 27 – Puebla Cholula

Nov 28 – Mexico City

Nov 29 – Guadalajara

gdldubfest-web

THE UNBUYABLE SUBLIME

monitor mix main

Two weeks ago Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney asked me to contribute a piece on her NPR blog, Monitor Mix. She was doing a series on ‘End of the Decade’; I looked back across a broad landscape.

You can read my post here: Free Music and the Unbuyable Sublime

It includes the following four sentences:

  • A decade, in music, is a terrifyingly long time.
  • Sounds now move faster than the speed of context.
  • Music confounds value.
  • I want the giants to fall even faster so we can see what weird flowers start blooming in the spaces left vacant.

THIS WEEKEND

slr booklet

Friday November 20 – DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek, Devlin + Darko. @ The Empty Bottle, Chicago. Free with rsvp, $10 otherwise. to get in free, email: rsvp@emptybottle.com

Saturday November 21 – DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek @ The Video Saloon, Bloomington Indiana. A Benefit Show for the Indiana Forest Alliance.

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for a taste of what Matt will be spinning, check his latest mix, S3CR3T KN0W13DG3 – triangulated somewhere dutty between Matt’s own productions, up-to-the-times dancehall, and UK funky.