On the radio tonight, I’ll be hosting Austin’s DJ Orion, performing live in studio! He’s extending the great Texan tradition of keeping cumbia crunk with his latest release, Carajo Colombia. After his DJ set we’ll find time for a quick interview and ticket giveaways to his Que Bajo show @ Santos on Thursday.

Here’s a taste of ‘Carajo Colombia’, you can buy it – setting your own price! – here:

A last-minute note to announce: I’m returning to WNYC’s Soundcheck program at 2pm today, for a live performance and interview with host John Schaefer.

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This Monday, Boston people can catch me doing an “experimental set” at Beat Research, alongside residents Wayne&Wax and DJ Flack. FREE. @ The Enormous Room in Central Square.

Simultaneously, I’ll be hosting my Mudd Up! radio show on WFMU, with special guest DISCO SHAWN!

Cumbia fans will know his as the innovator, along with Oro 11, of the Bersa Discos label and the Tormenta Tropical west coast club nights. A Bay Area native and former Buenos Aires resident, the Cuban-American DJ is coming to share tunes & discuss cumbia’s latest explorations into Remixlandia, what’s poppin over in the Bay, and more…

Bad Santa cumbia villera from the one and only Damas Gratis. Pablo Lescano is the most famous person I know who semi-regularly sends me insane emails. Some, like this recent one, contain amazing music. Hilarious lyrics thick with double entrendres.

Download audio file (Damas_Gratis-Papa_Cruel_www.lacongona.com.mp3)

Damas Gratis – Papa Cruel

[Pablo Lescano of Damas Gratis]

“Give music this holiday season. Pablito Lescano warmly wishes you a merry Christimas and this song is my gift.“

Head over to RCRDLBL to get an exclusive tune from the new cumbia / cumbia digital compilation, put together by the deepest digger I know, Sonido Martines!

Los Destellos – Elsa (Sonido Martines remix feat Fefe)

the jam in question is Sonido himself remixing legendary Peruvian chicha cumbia band, Los Destellos de Enrique Delgado, with vocal assistance by Fefe, a Brazilian firecracker. In one example of how Sonido Martines works, he tracked down Los Destellos, explained to them what was going on in the slippery world of ‘new cumbia’, and with their blessings got permission to flip this remix. Now-thing realness with respect for the foundational musicians!

the comp esta muy wapo… Sonido Martines presents: Nueva Cumbia Argentina! fresh heat from nu-skoolers like El Hijo de la Cumbia, Fauna, and Chancha Via Circuito, and visionary early material from DJ Taz and Damas Gratis, and more! 12″ and digital out now: iTunes / Amazon / Boomkat, etc. K VIVA LA KUMBIA!!

it goes down today, Wednesday Sept. 16 – I’ll be spinning an all-cumbia set at the Treehouse party. Free! It’s a gentle evening for the 9-5 set; I start around 10:30pm, so show up early… It goes down at Littlefield in Gowanus, alongside Treeboy, Gamall, and Raspberry Jones.

When I say all-cumbia, I mean it! Material you can find in many many places, such as Mexican shops in Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc., or via online stateside shops from Discos El Papi & Barba Azul. The point is, cumbia is close. So this set will contain no crunk cumbia, no ‘cumbia digital’, no bloggy remixes.

Expect current Mexican cumbia sonidera, with an emphasis on tracks that shout out Nueva York, like…

Download audio file (Formula_5-LaCumbiaMaestra.mp3)

Formula 5 – La Cumbia Maestra (a re-post but hey)

…alongside more classic material from the 60s 70s & 80s, like:

Download audio file (Andres Landero-Canto a Cartagena (Betty Ochoa de Anillo).mp3)

Andres Landero – Canto a Cartagena (written by Betty Ochoa de Anillo)

And be prepared for potentially cheesy sad love songs, like:

Download audio file (Los_Star_Boys-La_Culpa.mp3)

Los Star Boys – La Culpa (“we had problems, the blame goes to both of us”)

…and, darker still, songs about death:

Download audio file (LUCY GONZALES Y SU COMBO ORENCE – LA LEY PODEROSA.MP3)

Lucy Gonzales y su Combo Orence – La Ley Poderosa

Great lyrics on this one, “The Powerful Law”. I have cumbia songs about Satan, but I don’t play those in public. On a tangentially related note, Spanish uses the same word for eschatology and scatology!

In closing – come through, come early, and enjoy this last one, an instrumental about the Lone Ranger’s scraper (in which we hear the sounds of his horse), from a DJ presumably named after Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix:

Download audio file (D.J. Neo-Guacharaca del Llanero Solitario.mp3)

DJ Neo – Guacharaca del Llanero Solitario

my alter-ego, Jace Clayton, will be performing a free ’special all-Cumbia set’ in Brooklyn a few Wednesdays from now. Gowanus guacharaca! September 16, Treehouse @ Littlefield. An all-cumbia set is the sort of thing that only makes sense in my hometown, so come on through…

Tune in Mudd Up! with DJ Rupture on WFMU 91.1fm tonight at 7PM, as Roberto Ernesto Gyemant aka DJ Beto, the man responsible for putting together those wonderful volumes of 1960s and ’70s “cumbia tropical & calypso funk” from Panama, joins me to talk and share some incredible music. He had a curatorial hand in Soundway Records Panama compilations and the Colombia! Golden Age of Discos Fuentes as well. Deep compilations with informative liner notes, the real deal…

Of course, for those outside our FM broadcast range, WFMU offers live streaming and even has its own free iPhone app!

We (Lamin & I) have been fascinated with the music of Panama ever since our visit from Wayne Marshall and Raquel Z Rivera, editors of the Reggaeton book, broke down Panama’s relationship to Jamaica with some deadly tunes and erudite commentary. (Missed it? It’s streaming here. Subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast if you want downloadable versions of my weekly show: , Mudd Up! RSS.

Listen, get involved, throw in comments, phone in questions. Again, tonight @ 7PM.

For a warmup, check Beto’s mix of hard-to-find musica costeña Colombiana and tipica Panameña, streaming here.

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And if that’s not enough, here’s great CD rip of old school cumbias – although you might not guess it from the cover art featuring two cyber chicks (one in cowhide) and a tiny monkey sporting a baseball cap Memin Pinguin [breakdown on this Mexican-concocted Sambo here]. [via]

Scratchy gems include a Vietnam-themed war/love song with a call-and-response chorus.

Descarga Sonidera

Today, this Friday, Dutty Artz goes to Boston: Jahdan Blakkamoore, Matt Shadetek, and I will be perform at the Institute of Contemporary Art’ s waterfront outside space, along with Nomo.

On Saturday, 2 events in D.F. Mexico City, both free! First, the ‘Cumbias de Caos’ picnic-talk (picnic as a model of sharing) with Mariana from Proyecto Sonidero and myself. Vamos a platicar un poco acerca del caos sonidero a lo largo y ancho de la calle, el internet y sus alrededores. This happens at 7pm in Miscelanea. Hugs to Las Teorias del Caos! The picnic talk will be video-streaming somewhere in interlandia.

Then we gather up our dancing shoes and relocate to the incredible terrace of the Centro Cultural de Espana. I play around midnite maybe? CCE has a great soundsystem. Last time I DJed here things got crazy. We’re going for crazier. (It’s right around the corner from Zocalo, the plaza, notable for its ridiculously large national flag and the smell of frankincense.)

If you haven’t gone to Mexico City, you should… It’s the kind of place where (this happened to me) suddenly you find 12 people in the flat where you’re staying (you’ve invited them up, apparently) at 2 A.M. and one of them is putting together an Afrosound compilation and then you all decide to go eat and the place you arrive at used to be a Chinese restaurant, but that flopped so it turned into yet another Mexican restaurant serving Mexican food in Mexico (this is good thing), but they kept the intensely ‘Oriental’ decoration anyhow (reverse ethnic-ization?), and when you finally return to the apartment you find a freshly cut potato lying on the table. Not a whole potato, just a sliver cross-section. The apartment had had no food or knives in it. One of the girls must have done it but you have no idea which one, or why. Had she been carrying the potato all night? I ask B. to tell us a ghost story and she says “i have one but it’s true” and while she’s telling it A. falls asleep but I’m left up, awake (not for long, let’s face it), because the story was truly awful. I had asked for it.

As if to explain the potato slice & many other things, all of them in fact: “se ve cualquier cosa en Mexico” said my friend Symphony the next day, temporarily partially blind, before he stumbled out of the Tepito ceviche stand in search of a bus to take him home. Gender melt. Also, Mexico City is a nice place to get books in Spanish.

but back the schedule.

Tuesday finds me (celebrating my birthday) in Santiago de Chile, where Andy Moor & I will DJ the opening night of the Santiago International Film Festival. (Andy’s a great DJ!).

On Thursday at the same festival, I’ll be joining Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Andy, & T. Griffin, as we perform live music to a new Jem Cohen film, Mexico City By Chance. Jem has re-edited the material from our D.F. debut a few months back; this recent incarnation is looking lovely. There will be a workshop or talk as well, with Jem and some of the other musicians, but I will be flying back to D.F… to fly back to NYC… to fly to France… but more on that next week.

So. If I fall asleep while talking to you, you know not to be offended.

and Guy as incredible modern dancer / performance artist

Literally minutes after my arrival in Mexico City this spring, we found ourselves in a packed restaurant with fluorescent lighting, and 3 flatscreen TVs all on the same channel. I was eating the best octopus taco I’d ever had. A wrinkled old man walked in, going from table to table carrying an ancient wooded box with ‘Toques’ engraved on it. Scrappy wires attached two metal rods to the box.

He was selling electric shocks. Apparently it’s something you do, sometimes, often when drunk: friends buy a ‘touch’ , hold hands, and everybody gets mildly electrocuted. About 10 minutes after he left a young woman comes in selling books of poetry. I’ve been plenty of places where someone comes in with their homemade chapbook, but she had ‘real’ books from a publishing house.

While neither vendedor ambulante made any sales (to my knowledge), at that moment I fell in love with D.F. Electric shocks and poetry. There has been no turning back. Out of all the places I have ever been to (many, trust me..) this is the place I’m most looking forward to return to.

So I’m pleased to announce that next Friday, I’ll be back in Mexico for a picnic…. “off- and on-line conversation about property, capital, and content, from the capital of chaos.” In this edition of ‘Theories of Chaos’, the invited speakers are Mariana Delgado of Proyecto Sonidero and myself – we’ll be talking about these issues in relation to our other love, cumbia. Needless to say, I’m super excited.

After the nocturnal picnic, we’ll head over to the Centro Cultural de Espana (this event is also free) where I’ll DJ their roofdeck party.

here’s a quiet, melodically intense old cumbia from Los Wawanco, an international assortment of musicians based in Argentina. 50 Years of Partying! announces their website.

Download audio file (LOS WAWANCO – VIENEN LAS BRUJAS.MP3)

Los Wawanco – Vienen Las Brujas

Download audio file (dulce amor.MP3)

dulce amor

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“it’s 4AM in the morning”

Download audio file (2nda de la chida.MP3)

2nda de la chida

thematic cumbias (from a no-info Tepitos mp3 cd-r) on the occasion of tonite’s Dutty Artz party in Brooklyn. As Geko Jones says: “I’m over the bananas, our sh*t is rainforesty.”

This one should be fun… I can vouch that Matt & I have a bunch of new remixes and exclusive tunes to run, Gex & Lamin always bring it, and Zuzuka is meant to be a firecracker.

Dutty (and cheap- $5, then $8) tropikkkal fun on the edge of Brooklyn, sound enhanced by Grimm’s reggae bassbins.

let the CIA know yr coming by hitting Facebook.