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!

GLOBALISTAS PERIFERICOS

An article on global ghettotech just appeared in Folha de Sao Paolo, Brazil’s largest newspaper. Journalist Camilo Rocha interviewed myself and several friends for it. Below is the full text of my interview.

. . . . . .

Folha: DJ RUPTURE, Sum up your musical mission.

that’s your job

 

F: What made you pay attention to music outside Western culture?

about 15 years ago I heard some Moroccan music and it was incredible. I’ve been listening to it ever since.

 

F: How do you see the popularization of what Wayne&Wax called “global ghettotech”? Why has there been so much exposure and interest for these types of sounds?

The exposure and interest is overrated. ‘Global ghettotech’ club nights are a minority, it is just a few individuals in a few cities doing it. What has changed is the access — via blogs and wikipedia, a lot of music is suddenly easier to access for people removed geographically from where it gets made. This amplifies the connections and influences, but it simultaneously amplifies and reproduces mistranslations, errors, and power imbalances.

F: How is the acceptance in America for your kind of musical approach?

right now not a lot of people have the musical views that I do. but things change. My mixtape ‘Gold Teeth Thief’ opened up a lot of doors for people, fans constantly tell me that it changed that way they thought about music and mixing, which of course makes me very pleased.

F: You have done a few tracks with a middle-eastern influences. Where have you travelled in that area?

Maghrebi culture is in Europe. It is also in the Maghrebi, but I’ve spent far more time in Maghrebi spaces and situations within southern Europe than in north Africa itself. The music flows through geographic borders.

F: Any peculiar stories about your music-researching travels? Weird or dangerous incidents?

yes.

 

F: A lot of ghetto music bypasses copyright as it is commonly made on pirated software and samples freely. Meanwhile, you defended Oink on your blog for providing good quality free music and comparing it to a library. Do you think we are going in an inevitable direction, where music will become free? Will that be a good thing and why? Should music have a price? Do you manage to make any money selling records?

Free access to quality information is a wonderful thing. And so is artists being able to live from their creations. It’s a strange time now, lots of economic models are melting.

 

F: You seem to have a strong social concern and awareness. Do you sometimes feel there should be more political lyrics in global ghetto music (I’m thinking of Rio funk, reggaeton, kuduro and kwaito which are largely sexual and/or party-oriented)?

Sometimes you need music to be a kind of escape, sometimes you need songs of love. It’s a silly idea to think that vocalists should somehow also be political leaders.

The fear that the “natives'” music is too sexual, too crude is at least 300 years old, if not older…

It is precisely _because_ I have a strong social concern and awareness that I don’t place too much importance on the lyrical content of music.

If you want to talk politics, follow the money. If you want to talk politics in music, follow the distribution, see who benefits from what.

Imagine a ‘socially-conscious’ funk carioca hit… owned by a Westerner who profits from it while the artist gets underpaid. The song appears to be good & politically just, but it is simply an extension of an old colonial relationship. So examining lyrics won’t answer any questions of power.

 

F: Do you perhaps feel that these musics could have more of a commitment to change or denounce their situation (if you think they do promote some kind of social change, please explain why)?

The way in which music creates social change has nothing to do with the lyrics. It has everything to do with the spaces that the culture surrounding the music creates. Certain musical scenes bring together different parts of society and allow for new social possibilities. This is rare, but it can happen. Other scenes *reduce* the chance that various people will mix and share ideas.

What new stuff (styles/artists/producers) have you discovered recently that has really impressed you?

I’m discovering the world of cumbia — there are multiple fascinating cumbia scenes past & present, it’s incredible. Also, reggada, and some Algerian chaabi and Kabyle music.