mudd up!

Yesterday’s guest mix & interview by The Sick Girl(s) was excellent thumping late-summer fun, and I’m pleased to announce that on Monday September 13th, I’ll have South African boy wonder Spoek Mathambo live in-studio on WFMU 91.1 FM! Us black internationals gonna throw an on-air Tea Party.

I first encountered Spoek as part of Sweat X, his duo project that I wrote about for Fader’s Africa issue [PDF] two years back. That piece involved a lively interview and allowed me to get the following sentence into print: “Spoek Mathambo is a slippery post-Apartheid glam-rap prince from Soweto who is descended from distant African royalty, or Jewish, or both.”

Since then Spoek has been making steady moves for world domination, rapping, singing, sending me emails about mythical dinosaurs that can stop the flow of a river (and concept band/videos based on same), generally manifesting polyglot amazingness in all sorts of places (Johannesburg, Stockholm, Mrs Internet, Paris, Twitter), and, finally, AMERIKKKA, the country with the best hamburgers & weapons. Although I do love the gun-fetish object on Mshini Wam’s cover:

So. We welcome him to our strange land with open arms. Fader is streaming his album for the rest of today, and we can watch these 2 videos to get some angles into Mr Mathambo’s complex musical visions… (HINT: the damaged Joy Division cover I’ve been playing out since Pitchfork festival last summer is 100% Spoek…. he’s lost control…)

[Manusa, Eureka, Prince Abraham, and Green Dog of CIAfrica]

the compilation I ushered into existence, DJ /rupture Presents CIAfrica, is officially out today! (For more on CIAfrica, try this post.)

We’re giving away a bonus instrumental , and the entire album is streaming:

DA007 DJ /rupture presents CIAfrica by Dutty Artz

listen up, or — better still, take this music out of “the cloud” and support dissonant African music! Remember: MP3s are more real than money. You can cop CIAfrica at Amazon / Turntable Lab / Boomkat / eMusic etc.

Trash Menagerie sez: “CIAfrica are one of the few Hip-Hop projects to coalesce on the African continent that provide an evocative portrayal of political turmoil, cynicism, and outrage. Often filled with the chaos of compressed snares and drums, earth-shaking bass, and lyrical ferocity, CIAfrica is the raw underbelly of West African urbanity, where the marginalized musics of the colonized and the colonizer are channeled by political frustration and economic unrest.”

Pitchfork sez: “The turbulent minimalism of the music is indeed striking and a welcome alternative to most African music that comes stateside, which tends to be sunnier and breezier.”

Icing on the grimy cake: a new CIA video just premiered on Pfork:

Manusa – J’Fuck

[DJ Rupture presents CIAFRICA cover art, Dutty Artz/Soot 2010]

So the music of Abidjan’s CIAfrica crew does sound a bit like a grimey, glitchy elephant staring you down as angular new-money architecture burns or smolders or looms in the background and the sky’s color stumbles from white to black with a few lasers for good measure, because we’re not living in the future, they are.

(The original cover artwork pictured above is by Timothée Mathelin.)

Sometime last year the visionary ringleader, Amadou aka Green Dog (RZA to their Wu) gave me access to their deep hard drives — packed with singing, rapping & fwd-thinking beats. Thrilling material. I pulled out my favorite 17 songs for a CD which will be released physical/digital on August 24th, DJ Rupture presents CIAFRICA. This coincides with CIAfrica, Nettle, and myself performing at Gotenburg’s Sweden Way Out West festival next Friday, August 13th. I’ll be DJing separately from them, in a party with Sleigh Bells and Fool’s Gold (the band). It’s a 3-day affair, with folks like Wu-Tang, M.I.A., Jay Electronica, The xx, etc performing, so if yr in Scandinavia, might be worth the trip… & I’ve found that drunk Swedes tend to still be really nice, at least in Gotenburg.

It will be the first time the CIAfrica MCs and vocalists perform outside their Côte d’Ivoire/Ivory Coast home base! They have this awesome Pam Grier video for one of their female MCs, Nasty, but it keeps getting censored by YouTube. So here’s a vid from one of the guys coming over, Manusa:

and a placeholder vid for the Nasty tune:

some links/leaks, some mp3s, some youtubery from Finland.

Art of the leak. Hua Hsu connects Big Boi downloads to US military seacrests escaping via Lady Gaga CD drag. Information value related to the chains surrounding it.

A different type of Cage – BP paying academics for their silence. Gag rules.

Post-payola: in this provocative interview, Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman “divulges a possible shady major label practice of buying iTunes singles with label money in order to hype music up the charts, among other things.”

Binyavanga Wainaina strikes again: How To Write About Africa II, wherein we learn that his original piece first entered in the world as an email rant. Gotta love Binyavanga! I feel sorry for those who haven’t seen Bidoun in its physical form, that magazine-journal-artwork looks good, even if sometimes you have no idea what’s going on.

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Here is a song. A slowed-down cumbia rebajada. The most popular version of this is by Super Grupo Colombia — and, frankly, it annoys me. Here Super Combo Dinamico space things out. Their syrupy screw version pulls new details out from the molasses accordion morass. Todo un exito! Unlike Big Mister President Hugo Chavez, the vocalist dedicates his song to Venezuela and Colombia:

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Super Grupo Dinamico – La Cumbia del Cuervo

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Here is a song. A summer dance HIT from Ghana’s Appietus that’ll be released next week on Akwaaba. Is this a leak? Is this viral marketing? Is broke the new black? What might that mean for us current blacks?

As you contemplate these questions, please consider buying me a book from the Mudd Up! Amazon wishlist. I deserve to be rewarded… for something, surely.

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Appietus – Miss Doctor feat. 4×4

“She just wanna wanna commit a crime.” The mp3′s metadata says: “Copy this song, burn it, pass it around, give your mom a copy, and while we’re at, consider buying it [release date: July 27] if you really enjoy it! Appietus put a lot of work into it.” What DO we pay for?

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LAST BUT NOT LEAST, I just became the 3,975,087th person to watch the following video. Late is better than the new never, which is always. Sample source for the Erick Rincon sublime tuba-enhanced tribal guarachero makeover I posted last week.

…The movies are all in English – the subtitles are in Icelandic. So everyone is watching a subtitled film but me. Everywhere in the world. This is not supposed to be something to cheer about but it is a bland American premium. We may not have health insurance but we have made our language the equivalent of free hot dogs everywhere. For us.

– Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland

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1972 Guinea. retro-optimism.

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Bembeya Jazz National – Armée Guinéenne

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1985 Huasteca, Mexico. Sliding folktones as the fiddler fiddles the guitarist plucks and the singer pushes, yodels his voice around this tale of lost love. It opens at the seashore: he’s jealous of the waves which don’t know what love is… why did you give me life if you had to forget me? En la orilla del mar contemplaba las olas dichosas eran las olas no sabian lo que es amar… Porque me diste vida si habias de olvidarme?

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Trío Huasteco del Pánuco – El fandanguito

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Next Stop… Soweto, around the same time as Bembeya above, and as beautiful.

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Amaqawe Omculo – Jabulani Balaleli (Part 2)

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.

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

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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.

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Manusa & Prince Abraham – Urgencia

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Messengers – The Wickeed Man

STRONG OPINIONS.

A 5 minute piece from William Kentridge. Doctors multiply over a body ribcaging the apparatus of business. Animus. Animation. Smudges define us.

français

me: world music marketing is so crazy right now. on the back of a cd i just got sent:
“a group of parapalegic street musicians who live in and around the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa, Congo
matt: wowwwwwwwwww
me: they make music of astonishing power and beauty.”
matt: man
that’s really crazy
what does that mean?

[King Leopold II caricature, from Vanity Fair 1869]

me: hardcore sick novelty post-Konono
its apparently true
it means in order to sell african music 2 younger market they need sensationalist backstory
matt: yeah that’s a really weird flavor of exploitation
they live in a zoo!
pity sales
me: w/ Konono (also from kinshasa) it was “they make their own amps and it distorts, f#cked up folk-urban”
backstory sales
spectacle sales
matt: yeah
me: the zoo bit is jawdropping
oh yeah, bikes rigged up to be taxis/mobile transport units. on cover of CD
matt: parapalegic zoo resident music
me: made in yet another failed african state undergoing massive crisis, but not so famous as Zimbabwe..
now on sale by Belgian label,.
Sent at 11:21 PM on Tuesday
me: ‘King Leopold Productions” – just kidding. i should post this convo on the blog.
Sent at 11:22 PM on Tuesday
matt: haha yes
it’s very odd out there
Sent at 11:25 PM on Tuesday

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“Today at the dawn of 2009, people in the Congo are still dying at a rate of an estimated 45,000 per month and already 2,700,000 people have died since 2004.

- wikipedia sourced from this New York Times article.

my friend from CIA Africa who lives in Côte d’Ivoire and will be performing in Paris on the 28th and 29th of this month emails:

“OK OK BLACK PRESIDENT no no BLACK FAMILY IN WHITE HOUSE ,
IN ABIDJAN THE NAME OF THE NEW PREsiDENT OF THE WORLD
IS BARACKA FOUSSINI BRAMA , lol ,in MALI BAMAKO BAMA …
in all Africa people remix the name with ethnic name reference…”

today we’re gonna have our cake, and we’re gonna eat our cake.