mudd up!

Back from Madrid with a roller-case bearing obscure books and 1 € Maghrebi CD-rs…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Khaled – Rai Arai (DJ SMS mix)

+

speaking of books…

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

A World of Hits, The Economist

the only bad thing about receiving good music late at night is forgetfulness. i shoulda posted this before everybody else, but the internet isn’t (always) a race.

brand new mix from Spoek Mathambo of Sweat X and Playdoe (i first wrote about Sweat X for this Fader piece, they’re back on tour in ye olde Europe right now).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Spoek Mathambo – H.I.V.I.P mix: Dezemba Liazonz (also on zshare)

I love mixes whose tracklists don’t make any sense, but are awesome anyhow

H.I.V.I.P mix tracklist:

CABARET VOLTAIRE – DECAY
SIDELELE – BIG NUZ (SPOEK MATHAMBO ‘BELL HOP’ REFIX )
IZINJA – BIG NUZ
GEENEUS – INTO THE FUTURE
DURBAN FUNK – BUBZIN
KHOLOI – BUJO MUJO
ANGICENGI -
SEDUCER – CNDO FEAT. BIG NUZ
GEENEUS – NIGHT REMIX
DJ SKHOKHO – 04
DJ BONGS – BANGA
GEENEUS – YELLOWTAIL (SPOEK MATHAMBO ‘MONATE FELA’ REFIX)
?? – NO STRINGS ATTACHED
CNDO – TERMINATOR
CABARET VOLTAIRE – VIBRATIONS
RISQUE RYTHUM TEAM – THE JACKING ZONE
DJ SKHOKHO – 08 (SPOEK MATHAMBO ‘AIDS IN THE HOSTEL’ REFIX)

[français]

Spacious and peaceful, gentle Amazigh production from one of the big groups in this style. Banjo, reverb, delay, more reverb, more delay, and those hard-panned drum machines.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Oudaden – track 3

i’ve been jamming to this song for awhile, thinking it was something completely different… turns out I nabbed it from Awesome Tapes. Full k7 here.

Oudaden neglects what appears to be their own blog(s), and some fans neglect kindly maintain what appear to be Oudaden fan blog(s).

It’s interesting to think about the decay of online information – from dead links slowly cutting apart our little connective webs to fierce new spam algorhythms quietly gumming up the sites you visit – or mimicing them. Some hacker specializing in legacy databases breaks into your old WordPress admin board and replaces everything with links to discount pharmaceuticals. 10 years from now? 5? How do the InterNests age?

as we think about degraded webs (allegedly spiders on benzedrine but i’m skeptical)…

let’s listen to more peaceful Moroccan music: faraway-sounding Maalem Mahmoud Gania, also twelve minutes long, as long as it needs to be.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Mahmoud Gania – Essaouira
Gania previously mentioned here.

version française

Moroccan chaabi cd(-r) circa 2005, i lost the case. Violin submerged in FX. Check the flamenco-oid breakdown at 4 minutes in!

the artwork displays two guys wearing identical outfits and four girls wearing schoolgirl/goth/tartan halter-tops and skirts. Everybody looks healthy, young, well-rested.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Fiesta Chaabia medley 1 excerpt

+ + +

Timeblind has at least 173 unreleased tracks in his hard drive(s). You can hear some of them in his new mix, Flora .

+ + +

Odalisqued is less hard to link to than i remember. on post-scarcity, Anne writes :

So what is this when education, real estate, and health care are almost impossible to afford, but art and information are free to take? Does anyone have a name for this? It can’t be post-scarcity when we are living in such material inequality, at least not in the Marcusian sense. Or rather it is a particular type of post-scarcity, when books and music and films seem to appear to us as easily as food from a star-trek-replicator (leaving behind, in so many ways, the traces of the labor involved in their production — no maker’s hand on this machine), but our basic stuff of life is now so difficult to get. I’m nervous all the time, aware of what happens to the least of us. I still believe that the material conditions of one’s life influence one’s work in equal measure with all else, but once I thought freedom in one’s art only came from wealth or poverty: both in some way release us from the machine. Lately this is just anxiety as control.

+ + +

More Maroc. Jil Jilala! I love this song. Banjo & guembri take center stage. This video is a from a great period (I saw them in 2003 and it wasn’t so hot).

Loudmouth cross-cultural outreach has long been a part of Mister Rhymes oeuvre, this we know.

But he just cranked it up a notch, rapping a timely rap about sound finance and geopolitics in light of a derailing US economy. On a lesser note, I get the feeling that he visited Dubai and stayed in the Burj Al Arab, what with the 7-star reference, etc, though he seems to think Arafat isn’t dead.

I’m not including the song title or full artist name because I want you Mudd Up! readers to listen to this track at your leisure — a cease-&-desist letter from Google-Alert wielding major label lawyers would interfere with our contemplation. (shout to Todomundo for the tip!)

autotuned oriental-rap implosion (is the chorus real or ersatz Arabic?)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This brand new single is major because it unites (presumably by force) what I consider to be the two major fields receiving autotune enhancement: namely black American rap/R&B and Maghrebi popular music (where its use spans genres & languages).

There’s a lot more to be said, but it’s late, lets enjoy some autochthonous Algerian autotuneage:

Cheb Abbes – track 6 from the mp3 CD Dub1 sent me (thanks!)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ramzi – track 11 (thanks Andy!)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Maâlem, MC, master of ceremonies…

this cassette rip is a double rescue – I dubbed it to digital before lending the tape to C, who briefly enjoyed the gnawa tape before getting robbed in El Parque de la Ciutadella by a quiet purse-snatcher.

the leader is Mahmoud Gania, one of the more famous members of a famous family of musicians in Essaouira, Morocco.

Maâlem Mahmoud Gania – cassette side

The except is 18 minutes long. A big part of gnawa is how it sidesteps time… i still don’t know. 18, 30 minutes. 4 hours. Sundown to sunup. What do you call something that could almost always go on for longer? Songs have beginnings and ends. These are not songs.

Gnawa music has flourished in the Western imagination completely out-of-scale with its popularity in Morocco, partly because of the basslines which can be appreciated in a dubby/reggae context by Western ears, and partly because of its backstory — the music of African slaves in the Maghreb, colonial music in the truest sense, Afro-Arab, ritual sounds used to cure snakebites & heal & cast out ill spirits in all-night ceremonies, etc.

30 or 40 years ago gnawa was very much looked-down upon in Moroccan society. Nass el Ghiwane’s massive success did a lot to popularize the instrument and dislodge its poor/black/marginal stigma, in a Moroccan context… My bandmate Khalid tells of the difficulty in finding a guembri when he was young, then getting scolded by his mother for having any interest in the music at all.

usually when i post music is it relatively obscure, hard-to-find stuff. Not today. This i picked up at a Spanish supermarket chain. She’s the best!

Nina Simone – See Line Woman (live)

If I could have, say, lunch, and then work on a tune with anybody ever in the whole world, it would prob be Nina Simone. But I can’t, so that’s that.

ok, back to relatively hard-to-find.

I picked this up at Rachid’s Nassiphone shop in BCN last week. Rollicking chaabi marocaine, check the beats! The album — whose title (transliterated Arabic put into French grammatical structures) means Arabic Beats — is buyable at eMusic.

Fawzia Lahrizia et Titou – Loukan Saêftini

Sephora Rai – Alaoui

partly its the way that these flutes go through you, in and around the ruddy beat

and fettah31′s bellydance mashup vid for it

 

short version: free North African music at Central Park Summerstage this Saturday Sunday!

new school princes of Moroccan beats, Fnaïre, make what they call ‘traditional rap’. until hearing their new album, Yed El Henna, i couldn’t get with Maghrebi hiphop — it always sounded like behind the times French rap or slightly more behind the times American rap. but Fnaïre is on it. The pan-Moroccan samples & structures sit inside the music in a comfortable way; the sound has become its own thing. Masala blogs em. check ‘Sah Raoui feat. Salah Edin.’ for the most successful gnawa-hiphop fusion tune i’ve ever heard (and it’s a genre i’m suspicious of!)

this tune, i can almost ID the sample/riff they are using. I have this music… somewhere.

Fnaïre – Tagine Loghate feat. Providence

 

[Fnaïre, myspace foto]

for old-school Moroccan styles, the Orchestre de Tanger is giving a special NYC concert tomorrow. $35, ouch! thankfully, the virtuoso classical Andalusian music ensemble will give a FREE concert this Saturday, as part of the Mediterranean-themed Central Park Summerstage event. Also appearing at that, Hassan Hakmoun, a gnawa fusionist who’ve work i’ve never warmed up to.

[Orchestre de Tanger]

 

its been a few months, or more, since someone commented on one of my maghrebi music posts. that’s ok. I. WONT. STOP.

Nass el Ghiwane – Taghounja

from a 4 CD Fassiphone comp you can cop for 20€ in the right town. Allal Yaala (the man on the left above and below) is responsible for the banjo playing, which cuts straight to the heart. they are like this live – surefooted and unhurried – always opening spaces for Omar’s spoken words. when NeG hit their rhythm and all parts conjoin, the momentum, contagious.

La Gazette du Maroc just published a fascinating interview with one of the major north African expat producers in Paris, Brahim Ounasser, centering around his work with Nass el Ghiwane.

Qu’est-ce qui explique cette ruée vers la musique en ces années-là ?
Les immigrés vivaient majoritairement dans la solitude.

What explains this rush towards the music in these years?
The immigrants lived mainly in loneliness.