FREE MAIZE

Wiley! (at length)

Skream! (1hr with Gilles Peterson)


Binyavanga Wainaina! (on, among other things, Negroponte’s 100-dollar laptops “for the whole brown world”, Binyavanga first muddied up here.)

When free American maize turned up in Kenyan schools in 1984, thanks to Bob Geldof and USA for Africa, it arrived in gunny bags and presented itself at school dining tables: steaming yellow, not white like the maize-flour we knew as a staple. We had heard that this food was coming. We had heard that people were starving to death – only a few miles away from us, in fact, over the border. But even that was “out there.” We were all hearing on the radio this song by big celebrities about the starving people in Africa. We were singing these songs, as well – thrilled that we, too, could feel mushy about people in Africa. We saw the sacks unloaded. But they were silent. So we started to speculate. I must confess that I hated school food, anyway, and that yellow maize porridge tasted not that much worse than everything else we were forced to eat. But our speculation was powerful. It is American animal feed. And it started tasting a bit too earthy. It has been treated with contraceptive chemicals. And it started to taste metallic. It was sent to us because it has gone bad already. And it started to smell funny.

Soon, in the Njoro High School dining hall, vast amounts of yellow porridge went directly into the bins. Our teachers, normally violent fascists in matters of discipline, looked the other way. We had food fights with the porridge every evening, and the floor would be littered with the clumpy remnants of America’s love.

– from Glory, Binyavanga Wainaina. Bidoun.

AMPLIFIER HOUSE

BLDG BLOG, which you should probably be reading anyway, considers Mix House, an evocative & disturbing expansion of modernist transparency in architecture into sonic space. excerpt:

These “sonic windows” – or parabolic ornaments – amplify the audio setting of the house, thus making location, I’d think, several orders of magnitude more important than with many others works of architecture. . . Drunk homeowners mix burps with airplane roars, standing at an audio booth in the kitchen. Someone plays layered tape-loops of the sounds of their house from yesterday – which gets picked up by the neighbor and rebroadcast, with reverb, over the noise of a distant lawnmower. Enemy teenagers declare audio warfare, their microphones left open all night long. Paranoid husbands spy on all possible rivals.

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&, Capital Movements:

But what if they’d moved the capital – a mere two miles? Or one mile – or twenty-five feet? The entire imperial capital picks up… and moves eight feet to the southwest. Thirty-five centimeters. The buildings themselves aren’t changed – though perhaps all the streets are renamed.
Meanwhile, everything looks the same.
Except…

POLIBIO MAYORGA, MAESTRO

Nine gigs in ten days mean much delicious realtime & a certain healthy neglect of the Matrix aka Mr + Mrs Internet. This trip began with Mexican riches (edible) in Sunset Park followed by a car service ride where my Ecuadorian driver introduced me, musically, to Polibio Mayorga. He lent me the disc, I will return it. Certain types of objects, experiencing them, turn you into caretakers of the object.

Polibio Mayorga – MuddUnknown (unlabeled cd-r from cab driver)

The sweet recklessness of a nationally famous composer/accordionist who has learned to rejoice in the fact that he can make his music on a synthesizer keyboard, all by himself, playing every part on his own. No, it’s not that simple…

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But something about his melodic sensibilities I find extremely compelling, plus the weird keyboard settings, the way the guitary-string chords swoop in like a proletarian harp, the gnawa-esque hi-hats on certain songs, the lyrics which enter fragmentary like dub, the organ schmaltz, the confidence, and so on.

“Como se llama este tipo de musica?”
“I guess you would have to call it… musica nacional de Ecuador” he said, our conversation in Spanish a bit difficult for me to understand – in every new world the language that comes to it forks.

TO KNOW HOW TO DISAPPEAR

The sudden absence surrounding a referent grows weak to strong, its fading echoes feedback, intermodulate new shapes, thoughts & make-up in the mirror, proliferation in the spaces left by someone who made them possible. Or,

dying is pointless, you have to know how to disappear
– Jean Baudrillard

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>> Pushing his argument into even more contemporary issues, Baudrillard urges us to recognize the degree to which the “real” Gulf War, for example, was not actually fought in the Middle East but rather in the trenches of CNN and the global media. The Gulf War (and by implication, almost every other major event of the past two decades) was about images, representations, and impressions at least as much as it was about guns and oil and other “underlying” material conditions. He looks back to the Watergate break-in the same way, stating that “before, the task was to dissimulate scandal,” that is, to lie about it, while today “the task is to conceal the fact that there is none,” that what appears to be a scandal is actually the normal workings of the American government. As always, Baudrillard (hyper) flamboyantly overstates his point to drive home the importance of his overriding argument, that something profoundly different is happening today in the relation between the real and the imagined, creating an epochal change in how we comprehend the world and act within it. However one sees it, reality is no longer what it used to be.

Baudrillard’s persistent and often purposeful exaggeration has angered and frustrated many of his readers. Many, especially on the Left, dismiss his work for its seemingly stultifying political implications, its apparent call to sit back and live with the irresistible world of simulations rather than struggle against it. But underlying his more fanciful flights is a powerful critique of contemporary epistemology (the study of how we know that our knowledge is true and useful) that deserves notice for the new insights it brings to an understanding of the restructured urban imaginary… << - from Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

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AT YOUR DOOR

heaps of gigs this month.

March 8 DJ Rupture, Filastine. Seattle
March 9 DJ Rupture, Filastine. Olympia
March 10 DJ Rupture, Filastine. San Francisco .
afterparty w/ Lemonade & 606!
March 16 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Amsterdam NL
March 17 DJ Rupture @ Bashout. Bristol UK
March 19 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Paris FR
March 20 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Tourcoing FR
March 21 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Orleans FR
March 22 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Amiens FR
March 23 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Brussels BE
March 24 Rupture+Andy Moor duo. Nancy FR
March 25 Nettle: quartet w/ dp on video. Seville SP
March 29 DJ Rupture @ Reboot. Barcelona. SP

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ASENA

It goes something like this: For her self-titled album, Asena, a megastar Turkish bellydancer with impeccable taste in backing musicians, recorded a version of the self-titled song by French-born Algerian vocalist Warda (وردة).

If I understand correctly, Asena dances along to Warda wearing some combination of halter-top and/or reflective plastic jumpsuit. So perhaps it’s best to simply post the music, which is fiercely good.

Asena – Warda (from Asena)

Elegant and swooning the way only Cairo-centric string arrangements can be. Asena’s darbouka contigent pulls the rhythm in unexpected directions with an efficiency that beggars description while demanding immediacy — a tapping finger, loosened shoulders, limber and unfolding. Epic in under 4 minutes! Spacesuit bikinis fully optional.

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ATLAS IMPRESSIONISTIK

“Don’t ask me about any of these Berber cassettes,” said Rachid’s asssitant at Nassiphone (BCN’s best shop for Maghrebi sound) as he hefted a milkcrate from behind the counter. “I know as much as you do.” Meaning: very little.

the cover of this cassette depicts Mr Tamount seated, a capoed & fretted banjo loose in his hands. The orange photoshop blur behind him anticipates vocoders and drum machines coded into Berber patterns. Imazighen.

Idriss Tamount – ? (Box Music)

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For those who prefer less processed roots…

Amazigh band and dancers in the Atlas foothills, scattering timeless sound into the air with generator-powered amps. I enjoy watching the notion of a mainstream dissolve into a trillion scattered data-bites. Let’s dance on a red rug in wilderness!

The best part about YouTube is the impressionistic quality of its compression algorhythms… YouTube is always more storytelling than documentary. Suggests, does not inform.

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In this clip, a string player & vocalist the size of Godzilla perform over a rich evergreen forest while alien geometries intersect the landscape. Visuals a strange but not unsatisfying partner for the ensemble’s Berber folklorix.

MUDD RADIO: RUPTURE & MATT SHADETEK

Tomorrow, Saturday Feb 24th, I’m hosting the ‘listener hour’ at WFMU, 9-10am. Streaming. Matt Shadetek (of Team Shadetek) will be the special guest, playing us some exclusive productions & chatting about his new album on Sound Ink, transatlantic bass shipments, and (if we’re lucky) what’s up with that Homeland Insecurity cop footage at the end of Shadetek’s fun & powerful future-now rockers video. check it — Brooklyn Anthem ft. 77Klash & Jah Dan:

I’ll be muddying up the airwaves with some dubstep & DMZ ruffage in anticipation of Dave Q’s DubWar party at Tonic happening later that day – he’s brought over Mala (Digital Mystikz) & Loefah.