mudd up!

Tonight’s radio show – special guest Gervase from London’s Heatwave crew! He’s coming straight from the airport to share “some uk and caribbean sounds – bashment, funky, grime, soca. new tunes. tropical via east london! and we can talk about funky, grime, bassline and so on. that crookers/cudi tune has been no 2 in the charts here for the past few weeks…”

Gabriel Heatwave came on the show back in August 07 (streamable as realaudio) and we’re excited to bring another crew member through. For an appetizing earful, head to their blog.

upcoming guests: Telepathe, Feb. 25.

I’m on the lookout for someone to help out with my WFMU radio show, realtime, about 2 wednesday evenings a month.

Duties involve: helping me move the table from one side of the room to the other, listening to amazing music, taking the PATH train to New Jersey with amazing guests, actively contributing to keeping free local terrestrial radio as vivid as possible, shaking things up, and making sure the needles don’t go into the red too much.

I don’t get paid for it and neither will you, but radio is real magic, invisible waves threading unknown listeners into community & all.

interested parties pls email: rupture45 at wfmu.org

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Tune in to Rob Da Bank’s BBC radio 1 show this weekend to catch a blazing hour of cumbia & new york tropical mixed by yrs truly. details. (I don’t mix on my radio show, I do mix on other people’s.)

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Colombia. I love the cumbia, but i also love it when the guitars go liquid in that African way and we touch the Caribbean. Like in this POWERFUL SONG, liquid and tough, a street vendor declaring his street vendor-ness as the beat says why are you still sitting down? you should be moving! until everyone listens:

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Makina del Karibe – El Vendeor

from the Rough Guide to Colombian Street Party. It’s a nice one!

A taqsim clears the space. It sweeps to the edges of what’s possible in what’s to come. He coughs – clears his throat. Then begins.

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Hassan Aoni al-Ajami – Vocals and Sanaa ‘ud

the Mudd Up! Ramadan special radio show will be moved to next week, this song is an appetizer. Lyrics below.

…because today we have a very special guest on the show: British music journalist Dave Stelfox! Widely regarded as one of the leading writers on reggae, Stelfox covers reggae and regional US hiphop for a number of publications, including The Guardian and Wire. Here’s his farewell ‘This Month in Reggae’ column for P-fork, and a Guardian piece on the end of vinyl production in Jamaica (!)

Today Stelfox will share a special selection of British ‘deejay’ music, “lots of fastchat and maybe a little grime”. Expect: wow-thing tunes, deep crates, and the writerly insight to match.

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lyrics translation :

another big shoutout to our peripatetic South American point-man, Sonido Martines — his latest heads-up comes in the form of a deadly recommendation:

http://africolombia.blogspot.com/

…is EXACTLY the blog I wanted to exist right now, but didnt know existed, until now. The subtitle — Africa – Colombia – Cultura – Música — just about covers it, a treasure trove of mp3s & album cover scans and INFORMATION. Syllart rubbing elbows with Cartegena cumbias & other forms of tropical? si señor. ¡Adelante!

Altruism. Web-hosting fees. If you feel like employing the former to assuage the latter, click that button… AKA i must pay MuddUp!‘s bandwidth, and you can help with a small paypal donation.

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.

OK, back 2 our regular deprogramming.

Bachata Roja: Acoustic Bachatas from the Cabaret Era is a solid comp of the Dominican guitar music that you now hear in its slicked-up contemporary form all over NYC’s Latino barrios. There aren’t any female vocalists on it, and this assortment of love (& lust) songs would unequivocally benefit from a female perspective (ok, maybe it’s not so solid) but if you’re feeling this tune, then the album is worth looking for:

Felix Quintana – Ladrona

I for one am digging (for) Latin Caribbean guitar music. Bachata Roja showcases the old school’s dude romantics and spry unplugged elegance.

Contemporary bachata swirls around the streets & pulses up through the floorboards of where I live, and one of the best moments is when the sound coming from a neighboring window or passing car switches from bachata (which i don’t know at all) to reggae classics (which I know and consider ‘my own’). These wonderful Antillean geographies displaced and collapsed — condensed — into Brooklyn, where like and unlike across at least two languages join hands to bump.