2010, for me, is shaping up to be a year of projects. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on but before I talk about any of it, let’s look around for inspiring music:
Responding to my Columbus On Hold piece, @SinkDeep created lovely mixtape accompaniment to the prose – check it out!! (Her served crashed when I tweeted this over the weekend… time for a repeat performance?)
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Awesome Tapes From Africa has been busy lately, with many welcome forays into north Africa. As I tweeted recently: Jil Jilala’s banjo+drum machine phase was a great one. Digitized cassette evidence courtesy of ATFA.
also: let’s think about sufi plug-ins and sufi click-tracks.
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And while we’re on classic Moroccan chaabi from the 70s and 80s, try this post quartet:
Morocco II (Nass el Ghiwane 7″ rip & George Orwell waxing weird on tourism in brown-peopled lands!), III (Jil Jilala 7″ rip!), IV (folkloric stuff I don’t dig!), Morocco I.
Man, you deserve one million and fourty-six kudos for this post. Thanks!
Scatter, huh? 🙂
And sure… now I’m thinking sufi thoughts about sufi plugins and sufi click tracks. (do tell… I’ll take a plugin to make shit sound as badass as Sadreddin Özçimi or Onur Il)
a click track i’ve been obsessed with making (which isn’t classical, but I think has significant sufi flow) is a 12 beat/15 beat cycle rhythm… My wife Laura and I composed it around the time of our wedding (June 2005) and I’ve been tinkering with it ever since. it’s pretty much infinitely divisible and links up strong with a lot of other rhythms…
my part, a 12 count beat is:
123-1234-12345 or in Dum, Tek & Kah (hand drum notation):
DKT-DKTK-DKTKT
which moves into Laura’s part, a 15 beat cycle:
123-12345-1234567 or
DTK-DTKTK-DTKTKTK
the beat is awesome. the twelve can be readily dissected into 8, 6, 4, 3 & 2 count rhythms, and the 15 is a cinch for 5 & 3 count rhythms. I usually work with 16 cycles of the twelve followed by 4 of the fifteen… I’ll play it (and it’s kin) for you in Pittsburgh… hopefully with my turkish music obsessed buddies. drums! (now where’s the bass?)
Anyway, the reason I’m going into all this is that I’m thoroughly excited (and have been for a while) in click tracks of a non 4/4 nature. A buddy of mine has been claiming he’ll teach me to do this in Ableton forever, but we both have young children and time keeps passing… some day I’ll make fierce bass music in 5, 6, 7 and 12 count cycles. Wagawaga is the only producer I know who has done this and still has it feel like songs (and not just exercises…) There are some noodley fusion new-agey groups who do stuff in weird time (like Zohar), but it feels un-funky when they do it. And there is little worse than unfunkiness… Also, supposedly Moby made some tunes in 5 but I’ll admit I don’t care.
Anyway, nice post. Always love your North African posts (like that track “his heart is as pure as milk”!). Look for an email soon regarding the PGH show… can’t wait.
And some day I’m making fierce bass sounds in those time signatures.