FOOTWORK: A LADDER THAT’S FOREVER

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[photo by Dave Quam]

I Only Know (What I Know Now) – James Blake

In the waiting room of heaven’s dentist office they play James Blake’s “I Only Know (What I Know Now)” and nobody feels any pain ever again. On the other hand, DJ Nate is what the angelic kids doing nitrous hear, up there.

And then there’s us. We’re stuck in this real-seeming world, sometimes a terrifying place to be if your heart is open, and this is music for competitive dancing, which equals graces times speed multiplied by gravity and the fight against it. Gravity’s a stubborn law. Hard to break. And yet these samples detach, float upward, unhinge themselves from the beat as the angelic kids fool around with anesthetics, way down there. Songs as spells for moving feet, bodies — that focus of purpose, its functionality, is what lets footwork (the music, the dance, why separate them?) get so weird. In Chicago!

Dave Quam is up to his eyeballs in this.

[audio:DJ_Nate-My_Heart.mp3]

DJ Nate – My Heart (buyable)

& a Lil Wayne refix. you can’t get on my level / you will need a space shuttle / or a ladder that’s forever

[audio:DJ_Nate-3_Peat.mp3]

DJ Nate – 3 Peat

 

asongisaspell

ART FIGHT: OPENS THIS THURSDAY

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[Rocio Rodriguez Salceda – untitled 2010, courtesy of Caption Gallery]

Spanish artist and general superstar Rocio Rodriguez Salceda has her debut solo show in New York City, opening this Thursday at Caption Gallery in DUMBO.

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The show contains photographs and an animation. The photographs inhabit a provocative space between psychological portraiture, fashion, and creepyland. Powerful! “Though Rodríguez Salceda ultimately blacks out the individual faces of her models, a gesture that lends them both anonymity and universality, all of the women that she picks as subjects are close friends, often artists or performers themselves. Taking stereotypical ideas of femininity as her jumping off point, Rodríguez Salceda proposes a psychological alter ego for each model…”

Join us at the opening this Thursday! It’s open gallery night across DUMBO and in the building at Water St., so there’s much to see.

Caption Gallery is pleased to present Art Fight,
an exhibition of new work by Rocío Rodríguez Salceda.

September 30th- October 21st
Opening Reception October 7th, 6:00-8:00pm

Caption Gallery. 55 Washington St., suite 802, Brooklyn NY.

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[Rocio Rodriguez Salceda – untitled 2010, courtesy of Caption Gallery]

NEW CITY READER

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[New City Reader, first edition!]

The New City Reader is an experimental newspaper “on architecture, public space and the city”, headed by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab, and published weekly as part of the New Museum’s Last Newspaper exhibition. Each issue will be devoted to a single theme (Obituaries, Real Estate, Science, etc). As Kazys explains: “These sections will be available free at the New Museum and—in emulation of a practice common in the nineteenth-century American city and still popular in parts of the world today—will be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading.”

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be guest editing the MUSIC section in December, along with Daniel Perlin. Today’s inaugural section is, appropriately, City, and it looks back on the 1977 NYC blackout via the frame of “Connections: Cities, Complexity, and Collapse.”

As a performative cherry on the cake, the New City Reader’s editorial office will be set up in the New Museum itself (4th floor gallery I believe), so museum visitors can come heckle chat with us…

OMEGA EL FUERTE

The great thing about Omega fandom is that it requires no explanation. Either you haven’t heard of him (in which case, read the Omega profile I wrote for The Fader last summer) or you have, and his bad-assness is utterly self-evident. It’s simple: this former reggaeton choreographer is “El Fuerte”, one of the best musicians around in any genre right now, period, the undisputed dark king of Dominican merengue urbano / mambo. Plus he’s kinda scary – we’re not fooled just because he dropped the “y su Mambo Violento” from his name. (When you find an Omega fan, ask ’em about Rita Indiana — they’ll have an opinion on her too.)

Omega El Fuerte plays twice this weekend in NYC – as I tweeted: “all NYC’s latin ‘cosmopolatino’ websites that *didnt* mention OMEGA’s gigs here this weekend: #FAIL” (gracias a Carolina for the head’s up). Although it’s always nice to be reminded that much of the craziest stuff happening on this planet is primarily offline, lazy journos & surfers miss out.

Ears a la calle… If you live in New York City and don’t have your ears to the street, then you won’t have noticed the strong strange Puerto Rican proto-reggaeton Playero revival emanating out of Dominican cars… That sentence might not make any sense, but it sounds exactly like this new Omega track bumping in a style that was popular in PR like 15 years back:

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Omega-tirense-to.mp3]

Omega – Tirense To

GIF from last night’s show:

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and an excerpt from my Fader profile on Antonio Peter De La Rosa Aka Omega:

His street-viral swagger means that folks at every point in the food chain—from Dominican TV producers to dudes in Washington Heights who cobble together concert recordings—figure they can make a buck by tapping into El Fuerte’s power. “We get a lot of fans buying flights to Santo Domingo just to see us perform,” he says via phone from the Dominican Republic. Visa and deportation problems have kept international Omega appearances scarce… [issue 62 PDF]