mudd up!

Busy season… I’ve been meaning to post about September, when Nettle, Maggie and Juan, and Hassan and Abdellah and I met up in Tangiers Morocco for a week. Until I get the time to explain more about that, here is a video which captures the spirit and sound of what happened:

This September 2011, Hassan Wargui (Imanaren) from south Morocco met the group Nettle from New York City in Tangiers. A week of collaborative songwriting and recording led up to a concert outside the Cinematheque de Tanger in the medina. This is “L’Avion”, one of the songs they wrote during this time.

Imanaren. and their album, out now on Dutty Artz.

Nettle. And their album, out now on Sub Rosa.

Tonight, Monday November 7th, I’ll be hosting a live radio broadcast of my WFMU show at South Williamsburg’s Spectacle Theater, followed by a screening of excellent musical comedy 100% Arabica, starring Khaled and Cheb Mami. Music/youtubery begins at 7:30, film at 9pm, showing up early is a good idea, especially if you want the homemade mint tea and dates… Full info + flyer here.

And then next Monday November 14th, Mudd Up radio returns to the WFMU studios with special guest Brian Degraw of Gang Gang Dance!!

WE LIVE LISTEN IN EXCITING TIMES.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted MP3s on here. In honor of tonight’s live radio broadcast / rai special, here are 3 songs which may make there way into tonight’s setlist:

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Cheb Mami – Ana Mazel [Prince of Raï]

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Hasna El Becharia – Rabi-Lik [Smaa Smaa]

not raï, simply an incredible Algerian musicans stepping inside gnawa and other traditions to great effect.

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Lamine & Anthoy Ray – Marvelous

This one comes from the unlikely 2001 CD Big Men: Raï meets Reggae, which pairs talent like Gregory Isaacs, U Roy, and Chaka Demus and Pliers with Khaled, Warda, Fadela, and more.

Mzien! Next Monday November 7th, live radio & a great, rarely-screened film at a special location in South Williamsburg.

Join us at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater for a live broadcast of my WFMU radio show, “Mudd Up!” from 7:30-9pm, built around a YouTube selection, followed by a screening of the fantastic musical comedy, 100% Arabica. Set in the rough suburbs of Paris, this 1997 film by Algerian director Mahmoud Zemmouri stars raï kings Khaled and Cheb Mami. 100% Arabica uses satire and incredible live music scenes to tell the tale of an up-and-coming raï band that must deal with shady cops, cassette bootlegging kids, a conservative imam, and more.

Released just 2 years after Mathieu Kassovitz’s stark social drama Le Haine (Hate), 100% Arabica joyously offers alternatives to a narrow sociological exploration of urban tension by using the same location and same broad themes to celebrate Arab and African immigrant culture in Paris.

Homemade mint tea and dates will be served ’cause we’re nice like that.

As Pitchfork announced on Friday – We’ll be releasing the new Nettle album on October 25, on avant-garde/experimental powerhouse label Sub Rosa! (Sub Rosa has been publishing quality weird for over 20 years, from archival material by James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp to albums by Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, and Tod Dockstader).

For this album, we imagined a remake of Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, U.A.E. El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai is our soundtrack for that nonexistent film.

I produced and arranged El Resplandor, working with musicians Abdelhak Rahal, Jennifer Jones, Khalid Bennaji, Andy Moor, Brent Arnold, and Lindsay Cuff. Artwork is by Emirati photographer Lamya Gargash, taken from her incredible Presence series documenting “unwanted houses and structures in the United Arab Emirates that have been abandoned or left for demolition.” Architecture writer and Studio X co-director Geoff ‘BLDGBLOG’ Manaugh gave us some mindbending liner notes.

What else can I say? I put a lot of time into making this album & I hope you enjoy it. October 25 is the U.S. date; it should reach shops in Europe about 2 weeks before that.

This Wednesday I’ll be at the Decibel Festival in Seattle, giving a free, all-ages presentation of my setup for concerts with Nettle (laptop/gear/instrument- and vocal-processing): real talk about strategies to make live electronic music more dynamic and flexible.

El Resplandor tracklist:

01 El Resplandor
02 Radio Flower
03 There Is a Hole in the Middle of the World Filled With Languages That Don’t Have Names
04 Espina
05 Empty Quarters
06 Nakhil
07 Simoom (Wasp Wind)
08 Red Masque Ticker
09 El Resplandor: In the Marsh
10 Shining One
11 Khalid’s Song

Translation is work! Necessary work.

Here’s the French language version of our Behind-the-Scenes video for Beyond Digital.

And the gringo-friendly English-language version in case you missed it:

[The poster uses 3 alphabet character sets: Arabic, Tifinagh, Latin]

This Friday we’re presenting Beyond Digital Morocco at the Cinematheque de Tanger, then moving outdoors for a free concert featuring Nettle (here in Morocco Nettle is a trio: myself, Lindsay Cuff, and Brent Arnold) and Hassan Wargui (Imanaren). All happening in Tangiers’ incredible medina.

Nettle is from NYC, and Hassan’s from Souss Berber country in Morocco’s south — we’re using these days to develop and record new songs together. It’s not that music ‘transcends’ language, it’s that music is language, and our motley crew is enjoying its communicative glow. Lindsay’s learning the words (in the Berber language of Tashelhit) to an Archach song we’ll cover; Hassan’s Amazigh banjo lines help us extend ‘Mole in the Ground’ even further; Abdellah’s joining in on rebab and bendir… and things are just getting started.

Here’s a quick video of our first practice together:

RSVP on the Facebook event page if you’d like to let the C.I.A. know you support us. Offline, we’re making event posters at a truly special letterpress studio that’s been open for over half a century.

bonus: late-night afterparty at Morocco Palace (located on a street called ‘the Devil’s Alley’, one block over from Tangiers’ synagogue, which had a congregation of around 200,000 during its heyday) with Adil El Miloudi!!

A special shukran goes to Jared, who is translating song info! With his help we learn that this gorgeous tune by Moroccan singer فتح الله المغاري Fath Allah Lamghari is called رجال الله “Men of God”. This classic (’70s?) version can be found on an album of the same name. Below, a video clip demonstrates what happens when the trusty melody and his toupee get a teevee glitz overhaul.

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فتح الله المغاري Fath Alah Lamghari – رجال الله Men of God

Live in New York City? Read Arabic? I’m looking for someone to help me generate good metadata as I digitize the best of the CDs I brought back from this initial Morocco trip.

It’ll take an afternoon, and will consist of

A) typing up song titles in the original Arabic and

B) translating the song names into English as I

C) serve you tea and cookies (or tacos and horchata) in my studio and gift you whatever music you want

interested? email: nettlephonic at gmail

This time next week I’ll be getting ready to hop aboard Royal Air Maroc and zip over to the top of Africa. 12 hours left on our Beyond Digital: Kickstarter, and the support has been phenomenal.

Here an Arabic-language treat from Nubian singer Ali Hassan Kuban, featuring sweet early Auto-Tune on the vocals! Adapted from a traditional Bedouin song, “Gammal” (‘Camel Driver’) is a good track to play for the Auto-Tune skeptics. How can they resist? From his 2001 album Real Nubian: Cairo Wedding Classics.

[Ali Hassan Kuban]

Have a safe journey, my love will travel with you. Come back, let’s be together again soon.

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Ali Hassan Kuban – Gammal feat. Shahin Allam

Eddie Stats got it right in this week’s Ghetto Palms over at The Fader: “I actually can’t think of a better soundtrack for this moment that’s unfolding in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia than the saaidi hardcore of my longtime (and I mean loooongtime) homegirl DJ Mutamassik.”

You’ll need to scroll down, but here’s an excerpt from Mutamassik on the making of her album — on the conditions in which it was made:

“…Going from a predominantly raw urban experience (see: childbirth on Medicaid in Brooklyn, many etcs.) to a raw, rough, rugged rural experience has taught me many things.

Let me give props where props are due: A decade plus+ in the streets of New York City and Cairo cut my teeth; half that time in Nature, however, has kicked my ass. Not just once, but continuously. This has been a boot camp. If inner city life made me hard, Nature made me harder. [. . .]
{The American gear (which 99% of our gear is, brought over from N.Y. on a ship with the entire $5,000 given to us by the U.S. government for being hard-working, poor and with child) is converted and stabilized by voltage transformers used by the U.S. military in the hairiest parts of Afghanistan–not proud, just real}. There is no central heating. We go deep into the forest to collect firewood, chop trees, burn burn burn. We make fires to stay warm (9 months out of 12). CAVEmen-style. . . Our only form of transportation has been our son’s stroller which we used well after he started walking to haul up large tanks of cooking gas. From it’s beginnings on Atlantic Avenue, and after many brutal years of international service as person, baggage, tank, garbage rickshaw, it has once again been recycled as a safe home for cats. {Note: None of this new or harsh to anyone but us city slickers/urbanites/suburbanites/industrialites}.

We have a relationship to Nature that is mostly not Soft, Ethereal, Romantic as somehow propagated by Dabbling-Vegan-Hallmark-Hippies, but rather Tense, Negotiating, Respectful…Intense. “

Bonus points if you have a copy of WAR BOOTY, her 12″ EP that I released on Soot a decade ago. Now a super sold out collectors item, the original vinyl came with rough cardboard record jackets that had the Arabic word for ‘soot’ branded into them. I lit two kitchens on fire doing it.

Over here at Mudd, I’ve re-upped a classic Oum Koulsom MP3, head here to grab it. Of Koulsom, I wrote:

“…this incandescent Egyptian, whose songs move her listeners with tidal force, leading orchestras (composed of the usual suspects plus Abdel Wahab’s new friend: the electric guitar) in swooning iterations of song and theme, reacting to audience response/requests, cycling through stanzas for hours (Americans wouldn’t call it progress but we are certainly going somewhere, the same words or notes arrive but they mean different each time), emotional eddies make the river flow. Her popularity & impact remains vast, nearly compulsory, undemocratic.”