Do you have an old boombox? The rectangular kind that is big, boxy, held together with real screws? With large dials and analog push-buttons? If YES, then I’m interested in it & will pay (non “vintage” prices) for it. If you’d like to donate your crappy old boombox to a very good cause (more on this later, I promise you will not be disappointed) well, that’s cool too.
Dutty Artz newcomer Sam is based in NYC and will help scoop it up, and if you live outside of NYC then we can talk about shipping it.
give us a shout: boombox @ duttyartz dot com
On behalf of myself, my crew, anyone who has ever sported a high-top fade, and the entirety of the 1980s & early 90s, I salute you.
I enjoy the writings of who Youngman Hennesy here calls “the French science-fiction author Nicolas Bourri… boary… Bory.. Bourriaud” – although St Nic’s thoughts on music and DJ culture fall flat for me, never getting beyond the reheated observation that “DJs are neither consumers nor producers, but a little bit of both!” Here’s a PDF of his Postproduction book.
And here’s Youngman, going in on relational aesthetics. Cut to the wetsuit! I think this is still hilarious even if you haven’t had Serious Conversations About Relational Aesthetics.
Over at the Kindle Project, a guest blog post by yours truly, on my Radio GooGoo sound installation project for the Studio Museum in Harlem, which I never recorded or documented. The generosity of the Kindle Project was a real lifesaver & inspiration in the past months; I’ll post more about that soon. Until then, here are two pieces of my write-up for them:
excerpt:
“In 2010 the Studio Museum in Harlem invited me to create an audio installation for the museum’s front rooms, as part of their StudioSound series. My main concern was for the museum staff – the guy who does coatcheck, the people behind the front desk. They have to stand around there all day, so the last thing I wanted to do was make a 10-minute song which they’d be forced to listen to, on repeat, for months. Museum guards are the main audience for museum art. How could I create a constantly changing audio piece that wouldn’t wear out its welcome? “
excerpt:
“When it was up & running, Radio GooGoo cycled between three FM stations/algorithms, one each day:
* A classical station transforms into floating ambience. The results are a gauzy, drifting cloud, which is periodically tuned to the dominant musical scales of North Africa (Arabic, Berber). Classical music receives an enormous amounts of funding. This piece engages ideas of “classical” both as a Western system of listening and a virtuosic performance, but mostly it sounds like Beethoven on zero-gravity painkillers.
* My piece for Hot97 (“blazing hiphop and r&b”) makes the station’s broadcasts sound like a lovesick synthesizer inside a dripping cave. Mostly it’s a lot of atonal, irregularly spaced bleeps with a timbral palette that alludes to classic mid-20th century musique concrete, but at times it resolves into legibility and you’re able to recognize the stacatto main riff of a popular song (albeit replayed on a vocoder). Sometimes the signal with go completely unprocessed for seconds, so listeners can hear the transformations.”
Depending on how you hold it, the New City Reader is either a a temporary newspaper that will be published from October 6, 2010 to January 9, 2011 as part of the Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, or a performance-based editorial residency which happens inside the museum.
I’m guest-editing part of the MUSIC/STYLE section. I have assembled a World-Class Crew of Contributors & am super excited to escort their brilliance into print. The NCR editorial team will meet inside the New Museum today around 6pm. You are welcome to come heckle us, suggest things, share tea + cookies + a mate gourd. (entrance is free after 7pm today)
Past editions of New City Reader can be viewed here, and you can grab the current issue at the museum itself. Follow NCR on Twitter, although Twitter hates wikileaks and censors trending topics in yet another weird devolution of transparency (so much for algorithmic populism). So. Where were we? Shopping for electronics on Canal St? Close. We were on Bowery. Inside a museum round the corner from the flophouse.
New City Reader: Public space, urban space, information space, wrapped up with the finger-smudging timeliness of an experimental weekly.
Questlove + I will be DJing at Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum’s 15th anniversary gala party this Saturday. Big times! Free zombie facepainting! Big tunes! Seriously, I’m a huge Warhol fan and ?uestlove is a living legend who also embraces weird punctuation in his name and Halloween means you can dress extra crazy, so let’s end with a choice Andy quote:
I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
…followed by a picture of me and a video of Joanne watching some guy watch Andy Warhol eat a hamburger (there are a lot of these ):
[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.
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.
[Rocio Rodriguez Salceda - untitled 2010, courtesy of Caption Gallery]
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…
If you’ve visited the Studio Museum in Harlem in the past month or two, chances are you heard my installation wafting down from the front two rooms. It was a soft launch of the piece, Radio GooGoo, which officially opens on July 15th. By the end of its Studio Museum run, Radio GooGoo will have created hundreds of hours of “original” “music”, plus the museum will offer free CDs with an hour of Radio GooGoo. I’ll have more info as well as audio excerpts soon… In the meantime, here’s an official blurb:
StudioSound: DJ /rupture’s Radio GooGoo DJ/Rupture’s Radio GooGoo is a radical audio installation that challenges widely accepted notions of authorship as well as the deep associations attached to musical genres. Radio GooGoo features computer based algorithms that assemble media sounds from a range of radio stations in real-time. Combining and synthesizing these sounds, Radio GooGoo continually broadcasts in the Museum lobby.
I like that they call it ‘radical’ — I would add, importantly, that Radio GooGoo lies at the fertile intersection between ‘radical’ and ‘lazy’; as an Artist, I consider myself an active participant in a venerable lineage of Negro Laziness. I’d write more, but it takes so much work…
+ + +
And my actual radio show was broadcast last night. You can listen back here.
A quick note to say I’m working on Some Stuff for a 3-city interactive art/design festival in France curated by Mark Jenkins, whose artwork this is. Details “soon”. It happens July 2-10 in Bordeaux, Royan, and Pointe du Médoc. Vive La France!
This Sunday, July 19, 2009, at precisely 4:30pm, I will play a set at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. I would tell you to come, but Sunday tickets have been sold out for a month.
So my advice is more specific: gather at ‘Balance Stage’, up close and on time! Especially because it’ll be a short “45 minute set – STRICT set length”. (in Band time, 45 minutes is often enough; in DJ time it passes so quickly.) Which means we will have go in deep, together, from the very beginning, at once and completely.
At first I was a bit worried about being the only DJ at a big 3-day festival. I was gonna invite an MC, or a video artist for projections, or a cellist… Then I decided no. I’m just gonna DJ, as I always do, and if I’m not as exciting to watch as, say, every other act at the festival, then that’s that — you should be dancing anyhow. Life in DJlandia evolves via participation (bouncing around, dutty wine, grinding, etc) not spectatorship, in part because the crowd’s energy & responsiveness to certain tunes or moods actually changes what will get played. A feedback loop. A symbiotic relationship.
Put another way: let’s dance!
OR, it’s better to think of DJs a mediums (rather than performers or Artists or whatever). Grabbing the dictionary…
Medium – (1) a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect (2) a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment — compare mass medium (3) an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthly world and a world of spirits (5) a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish.
but mostly, these days, it’s about cumbia. and our homegrown beats. and Kassav’! (Also – where are the cumbia / Mexican music shops in Chicago?)
A week from today I’ll be back home in BROOKLYN, playing the latest installment of New York Tropical. Think hummingbirds.
Any funds received can only be used to pay web-fees. Rest-assured that I will not spend your generosity on food, shelter, ice cream cones, blin-blineo, or health care. As an American in America, I gotta pay for that stuff out of my own pocket.
