EL REY DE JETLAG

I’m a bit too tired to narrativize my life, but the raw facts of the next five days are:

Today, this Friday, Dutty Artz goes to Boston: Jahdan Blakkamoore, Matt Shadetek, and I will be perform at the Institute of Contemporary Art’ s waterfront outside space, along with Nomo.

On Saturday, 2 events in D.F. Mexico City, both free! First, the ‘Cumbias de Caos’ picnic-talk (picnic as a model of sharing) with Mariana from Proyecto Sonidero and myself. Vamos a platicar un poco acerca del caos sonidero a lo largo y ancho de la calle, el internet y sus alrededores. This happens at 7pm in Miscelanea. Hugs to Las Teorias del Caos! The picnic talk will be video-streaming somewhere in interlandia.

Then we gather up our dancing shoes and relocate to the incredible terrace of the Centro Cultural de Espana. I play around midnite maybe? CCE has a great soundsystem. Last time I DJed here things got crazy. We’re going for crazier. (It’s right around the corner from Zocalo, the plaza, notable for its ridiculously large national flag and the smell of frankincense.)

If you haven’t gone to Mexico City, you should… It’s the kind of place where (this happened to me) suddenly you find 12 people in the flat where you’re staying (you’ve invited them up, apparently) at 2 A.M. and one of them is putting together an Afrosound compilation and then you all decide to go eat and the place you arrive at used to be a Chinese restaurant, but that flopped so it turned into yet another Mexican restaurant serving Mexican food in Mexico (this is good thing), but they kept the intensely ‘Oriental’ decoration anyhow (reverse ethnic-ization?), and when you finally return to the apartment you find a freshly cut potato lying on the table. Not a whole potato, just a sliver cross-section. The apartment had had no food or knives in it. One of the girls must have done it but you have no idea which one, or why. Had she been carrying the potato all night? I ask B. to tell us a ghost story and she says “i have one but it’s true” and while she’s telling it A. falls asleep but I’m left up, awake (not for long, let’s face it), because the story was truly awful. I had asked for it.

As if to explain the potato slice & many other things, all of them in fact: “se ve cualquier cosa en Mexico” said my friend Symphony the next day, temporarily partially blind, before he stumbled out of the Tepito ceviche stand in search of a bus to take him home. Gender melt. Also, Mexico City is a nice place to get books in Spanish.

but back the schedule.

Tuesday finds me (celebrating my birthday) in Santiago de Chile, where Andy Moor & I will DJ the opening night of the Santiago International Film Festival. (Andy’s a great DJ!).

On Thursday at the same festival, I’ll be joining Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Andy, & T. Griffin, as we perform live music to a new Jem Cohen film, Mexico City By Chance. Jem has re-edited the material from our D.F. debut a few months back; this recent incarnation is looking lovely. There will be a workshop or talk as well, with Jem and some of the other musicians, but I will be flying back to D.F… to fly back to NYC… to fly to France… but more on that next week.

So. If I fall asleep while talking to you, you know not to be offended.

lascumbiasdelcaos

 

and Guy as incredible modern dancer / performance artist

1 + 1 = 3

1+1=3

Before Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and Uproot and all of that, there was my 1st mixtape, 1 + 1 = 3.

Made in ‘The Toneburst era’ (late 90s Boston), recorded straight to cassette, and sold at our shows, 1 + 1 = 3 is a nice document of what I was up to about 11 years ago (arabic music, hiphop, dancehall, noise, xerox machines)

Wayne & Wax ups an excerpt and a fun interview with me about it. Check it out. He writes, “Even as 1 + 1 = 3 gives a sense of how much he has grown and morphed as a DJ, it still offers some recognizably rupturey maneuvers and seems to prefigure the strange melange of Gold Teeth Thief. Trad middle-eastern sounds meet modern beat science, from slurred boom-bap to minimal dancehall, rollicking jungle to proto-breakcore noise.”

It is strange for me to hear this mix now, in part because I can no longer ID all the tracks! I usually remember what the record artwork looks like, but sometimes the artist/label/track names have escaped me. And in part because my technical reach and narrative pace has expanded since then.

It also makes me think about how our whole way of finding (& mixing) music has changed in the past 10 years or so. When this mixtape came out, in order to get reggae and dancehall I had to trek across Boston’s segregated cityspace out to Blue Hill ave. in Dorchester. Pre MP3 smorgasbord, we would haunt the record shops & tape the radio. Learning paths through music pre-Google, pre-blogosphere, before Ms Internet + Mr MP3 got married and made us all their children.

When interviewers ask me some variation on ‘why Arabic/north African music?’ I tell them that I’ve been listening to it for as long as I can remember (I can only remember as far back as high school: pathetic, I know), that it’s as familiar to me as the other stuff I DJ. Which this excerpt — 9 minutes from the start of side B — illustrates.

And as for Toneburst, it was a Boston-area production crew, including folks like DJ C and myself. “the Toneburst Collective was a loose-knit crew of DJs, electronic musicians, and video-and installation-artists, who together produced approximately 20 large-scale multi-media events in offbeat locations around New England and New York. More carnival than rave or concert, the crew’s productions mixed experimental beats, video, and performance art in unorthodox spaces.”

ZRI ZRAT WASHINGTON WASHINGTON

apparently, sometimes Safari thinks that this site contains malware. I’m looking into it… if it does, it won’t be there for long. Apologies for any hackery weirdness.

Out the door to record over in Bushwick, so quickly –

Night music, Berber fusion, info here:

[audio:07-Zri-Zrat.mp3]

Nour Eddine – Zri Zrat

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Alva Noto & Anne-James Chaton vs. a Japanese vending machine.

+ Anne-James reading in low light

CHIDA LA CUMBIA / CHAOS PICNIC

en Nueva York chida la cumbia ya se baila

Literally minutes after my arrival in Mexico City this spring, we found ourselves in a packed restaurant with fluorescent lighting, and 3 flatscreen TVs all on the same channel. I was eating the best octopus taco I’d ever had. A wrinkled old man walked in, going from table to table carrying an ancient wooded box with ‘Toques’ engraved on it. Scrappy wires attached two metal rods to the box.

He was selling electric shocks. Apparently it’s something you do, sometimes, often when drunk: friends buy a ‘touch’ , hold hands, and everybody gets mildly electrocuted. About 10 minutes after he left a young woman comes in selling books of poetry. I’ve been plenty of places where someone comes in with their homemade chapbook, but she had ‘real’ books from a publishing house.

While neither vendedor ambulante made any sales (to my knowledge), at that moment I fell in love with D.F. Electric shocks and poetry. There has been no turning back. Out of all the places I have ever been to (many, trust me..) this is the place I’m most looking forward to return to.

So I’m pleased to announce that next Friday, I’ll be back in Mexico for a picnic…. “off- and on-line conversation about property, capital, and content, from the capital of chaos.” In this edition of ‘Theories of Chaos’, the invited speakers are Mariana Delgado of Proyecto Sonidero and myself – we’ll be talking about these issues in relation to our other love, cumbia. Needless to say, I’m super excited.

After the nocturnal picnic, we’ll head over to the Centro Cultural de Espana (this event is also free) where I’ll DJ their roofdeck party.

lascumbiasdelcaos

here’s a quiet, melodically intense old cumbia from Los Wawanco, an international assortment of musicians based in Argentina. 50 Years of Partying! announces their website.

[audio:LOS WAWANCO – VIENEN LAS BRUJAS.MP3]

Los Wawanco – Vienen Las Brujas

FESMAATIC

Künstlerisch wird die Zukunft eine hochspannende Angelegenheit sein! digitaleevolution djrupture christophvoy spex321

German magazine Spex has a long interview with me in their current issue. On “Digital Evolution”, masterpieces, hard disk failure and forgetting, and music biz economics in the 00s. (Or at least I think that’s what it’s about, we did the interview back in February…)

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it’s true: “DJ /rupture to release new mix album“. title: Solar Life Raft. Co-produced with Matt Shadetek, about 30% of it is original material & remixes from us. Link has some tracklist & other info.

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Jem Cohen just returned from Tangier, where he was doing a special project with Luc Sante! (whose Low Life is a must for New York underbelly reading). Jem kindly brought back a stack of CDs for me, including some hard-to-find 70s requests…

Here are two tracks from the bunch. Fes Maatic, a chaabi group I’d never encountered. Moroccan chaabi bands play like a DJ, all the songs segue into each other, it’s a work of groove and momentum.

I miss proximity to this music.

[audio:Fes_Maatic.mp3]

Fes Maatic

ESKIMO MUSIC

He’s had beefs, fall-outs, and hissyfits galore, been stabbed 14 times, retired at least twice, and never released an album without denouncing it at some point, often before it’s been released.

– Dan Hancox on 10 Essential Wiley tunes

Pretty sure I’m already on record citing him as arguably the most interesting person in music today – producer, lyricist, anarchic bizness force.

Some Wiley tunes will make it onto tonight’s radio show.

Lamin posted recent Wiley heat over at Dutty Artz; here are two instrumentals & a stellar diss track with Riko from a few years back. As alien and captivating as they were when I first heard ’em.

[audio:Wiley – Fire Fly (Bass Mix).mp3]

Wiley – Fire Fly (bass mix)

[audio:Wiley – Shanghai.mp3]

Wiley – Shanghai

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“…it’s not even an exciting intro”

 

 

 

 

THE EDGE OF ONE OF MANY CIRCLES

blackbird

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

– Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

 

Perhaps you didn’t know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program “20/20.”) Perhaps you didn’t know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church’s Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye’s?…

People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There’s a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The “shadowy figures” of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved.

– Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Black Man

BROOKLYN TONITE

“Come, my sweet love”

[audio:dulce amor.MP3]

dulce amor

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“it’s 4AM in the morning”

[audio:2nda de la chida.MP3]

2nda de la chida

thematic cumbias (from a no-info Tepitos mp3 cd-r) on the occasion of tonite’s Dutty Artz party in Brooklyn. As Geko Jones says: “I’m over the bananas, our sh*t is rainforesty.”

This one should be fun… I can vouch that Matt & I have a bunch of new remixes and exclusive tunes to run, Gex & Lamin always bring it, and Zuzuka is meant to be a firecracker.

Dutty (and cheap- $5, then $8) tropikkkal fun on the edge of Brooklyn, sound enhanced by Grimm’s reggae bassbins.

let the CIA know yr coming by hitting Facebook.

CIA HISTORY PART 3

roots reggae rips. 7″ style: http://rootsfromyard.blogspot.com/

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GangstaBabyCIA

CIAFRICA has a new free mixtape. CIA History Part 3. As I mention in the Pitchfork interview:

…I’m also very soon, around the same time, releasing a mix CD– actually I’m mixing it, from these African MCs and singers from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, called CIAfrica. its great because people think… “Oh African music, it’s dancey, it’s happy, nice melodies, very uplifting”. And these guys are abrasive, synthetic, angular, non-dancey lyric-driven music. It’s fantastic. So that’ll be coming out soon too.

that’s for fall. until then, you can check CIA History Part 3 or any of various other free mixes floating around their myspace.

[audio:3) URgencia by MANUSA and PRINCE ABRAHAM for CIAFRICA.mp3]

Manusa & Prince Abraham – Urgencia

[audio:6) THE WICKEED MAN by MESSENGERS for CIAFRICA.mp3]

Messengers – The Wickeed Man

STRONG OPINIONS.

CIA-HISTORY-PART-3

PITCHFORK FEST + NEW YORK TROPICAL

This Sunday, July 19, 2009, at precisely 4:30pm, I will play a set at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. I would tell you to come, but Sunday tickets have been sold out for a month.

So my advice is more specific: gather at ‘Balance Stage’, up close and on time! Especially because it’ll be a short “45 minute set – STRICT set length”. (in Band time, 45 minutes is often enough; in DJ time it passes so quickly.) Which means we will have go in deep, together, from the very beginning, at once and completely.

At first I was a bit worried about being the only DJ at a big 3-day festival. I was gonna invite an MC, or a video artist for projections, or a cellist… Then I decided no. I’m just gonna DJ, as I always do, and if I’m not as exciting to watch as, say, every other act at the festival, then that’s that — you should be dancing anyhow. Life in DJlandia evolves via participation (bouncing around, dutty wine, grinding, etc) not spectatorship, in part because the crowd’s energy & responsiveness to certain tunes or moods actually changes what will get played. A feedback loop. A symbiotic relationship.

Put another way: let’s dance!

OR, it’s better to think of DJs a mediums (rather than performers or Artists or whatever). Grabbing the dictionary…

Medium – (1) a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect (2) a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment — compare mass medium (3) an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthly world and a world of spirits (5) a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish.

but mostly, these days, it’s about cumbia. and our homegrown beats. and Kassav’! (Also – where are the cumbia / Mexican music shops in Chicago?)

A week from today I’ll be back home in BROOKLYN, playing the latest installment of New York Tropical. Think hummingbirds.