mudd up!

We are living in a material world. Here are two fruits of Beyond Digital, a gorgeous CD and a cassette, available for purchase here.

The debut CD of Imanaren is a lovely thing. We re-released this digitally on Dutty Artz, but here, exclusive and for the first time, is a very limited edition of the original physical CD, produced in Morocco by Hassan Wargui. (These CDs don’t play well with all drives, so purchase comes with a download link to the Dutty Artz digital version; you can burn up a lossless CD if yours doesn’t play well.)

For an introduction to Imanaren, read (the amazing) Nina Power’s review in The Wire or check out this video — a brief interview with Wargui followed by the album’s first track.

I’ve also got a few copies of the Palm Wine – Dreamachine / Beyond Digital mix cassette. This is great project initiated by artist Simone Bertuzzi. One side features his field recordings from northern Morocco including excerpts from the Master Musicians of Joujouka Festival. (For in-depth observations on the Jajouka/Joujouka phenomenon, try my essay for The National, “Past Masters.”) The tape’s flip side contains a b2b selection Maga Bo & I assembled while traveling on trains across Morocco. Our contribution is unmixed (it’s like an old school cassette you may have made for friends way back when…). Simone has a detailed writeup about the entire project here. My side starts off with the magical Luzmilla Carpio, and this is a 2-minute excerpt from Side A, Simone’s Dreamachine field recordings:
Palm Wine “Dreamachine mix” [2 min. excerpt] by Palm Wine

Please note: if you’d live outside of the U.S. and would like to order the Palm Wine cassette, please do it directly from the Palm Wine blog. This order form allows for U.S. purchases of the Imanaren + Palm Wine, and rest-of-world purchases of the Imanaren.

Make sure you use the dropdown form to select which item(s) you want and whether your location is US or rest-of-world. Shukran.

prices include shipping

US: Imanaren CD $10.00 USD US: Palm Wine cassette $10.00 USD US: Imanaren CD & Palm wine cassette $15.00 USD rest-of-world: Imanaren CD $15.00 USD

This Wednesday, Gang Gang Dance’s Brian DeGraw stopped by my WFMU show to drop a deep hourlong DJ set. Brian does electronics in GGD and is deadly on the decks, too. Open ears will be rewarded. Now only that, but during the interview we learn that lately Brian has been feeling the tribal guarachero from Mexico! The radio show is now streaming:

Be sure to check out Brian’s visual art as well; he thinks across stylistic & formal boundaries, with consistently fresh results.

Day at the Office from Brian DeGraw.

Seems to me like a nice route through tonight is to begin by catching Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts reading from her new book at the New School [UPDATE: THE NEW SCHOOL IS CLOSED TODAY DUE TO SNOW, READING POSTPONED] and then make our collective way over to Made in Africa — whose special guest DJ, Akwaaba’s BBrave, will stop by next Monday‘s radio show.

Harlem Is Nowhere (the book: excerpt) is out now, two weeks after my Domus mixtape appeared. The New York Times reviewer read her work & couldn’t help but hear music (Auto-Tune no less!):

It reads, in fact, as if Ms. Rhodes-Pitts had taken W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and spliced them together and remixed them, adding bass, Auto-Tuned vocals, acoustic breaks, samples (street sounds, newsreel snippets, her own whispered confessions) and had rapped over the whole flickering collage. It makes a startling and alive sound, one you cock your head at an angle to hear.

Here’s a breakout jam from my Harlem Is Nowhere mixtape. The beat is an exclusive from Timeblind, low-slung, spacious, holding momenum in one hand and stillness in the other. Sharifa and I read excerpts from the 1941 edition of Rajah Rabo’s 5-Star Mutuel Dream book.

This incredible publication listed pages and pages of things you might see, with accompanying 3-digit lottery numbers to bet on if you saw them. The lottery dream book simultaneously quantifies the mundane and wires it into a complex system of hope and mysticism, all with an eye on the money. Money the only thing that moves around a city faster or more completely than its number runners. Illegal uptown gambling created this fantastic by-product, these lean little snapshots of life on the street. This was Rajah Rabo’s landscape of possibilities. And so we receive a strange vision of what one might have seen, seventy years back. In many ways the quotidian is the rarest of all. The thing that gets lost first. So we read it. So we say it.

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DJ Rupture, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Timeblind – Rajah Rabo’s 5-Star Mutuel Dream Book

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Last but not least: if you are reading this and own or have access to a yacht, please let me know. We’ll only need to borrow it for a month or two. Thanks!

I just finished a new hour-long mixtape, made with writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and inspired by the sounds of Harlem. The project is the second edition of the Cities Mixtape series by Milan-based DOMUS, a magazine focusing on design, architecture and urbanism. This mix is titled “Harlem Is Nowhere”, after Sharifa’s new book which, in turn, borrows the phrase from a 1948 essay by Ralph Ellison. You can stream or download the mix here, and read our write-up, which begins:

Once, a group of tourists were asked what came to mind when they heard the word “Harlem”: some said “music” and the others said “riots.” The connection between the two is a story for another time. This Harlem mixtape is born of our own free associations: For Rupture, Francophone songs sold by scowling Africans along 116th, or old soul and R&B memories being hawked alongside the now-thing bootlegs across 125th; for Sharifa, church sounds tumbling onto the streets and distorted strains of jazz heard from a boombox carted around by a wandering neighbor.

originally posted at Dutty Artz

[DJ Rupture in Knoxville Tennessee, presumably photographed by Cooper Neill]

Wanna hear what some of the jams from New York Tropical sound like in an active setting?

Here’s a radio rip of quick mix I did for the BBC which aired on Tom Ravenscroft’s show a few weeks back. 20 minutes of Rut-pure. The weird bit in the middle (when the beat vanishes and we’re left with Moroccan violin + a ripe synthesizer) is an outtake from my upcoming Nettle album, El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai… more on THAT in a bit. But first, THIS:

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DJ Rupture – BBC 6 mix November 2010

DJ RUPTURE BBC 6 MIX TRACKLIST
Kelly Rowland — Like This (/rupture’s 33/45 mix)
Gucci Mane — She Geeked
Timeblind — Ontological Ground of Being (SOOT)
Gil Scott-Heron — New York Is Killing Me
King Abid — Yezz mel Viss
DJ Orion — The Undertow (DUTTY ARTZ)
Toy Selectah — Compay
? – Push: instrumental
Nettle — Assaiya Violin Shining (SOOT)
Rita Indiana — Los Poderes – Kingdom remix (DUTTY ARTZ)
Los Vlamers — Cumbia del Monte: Marquillos rebajada
DJ Rupture, Matt Shadetek, and Chief Boima — Elegy for Mr Peach: Rupture mix (DUTTY ARTZ)

yes! my new mix album, Solar Life Raft, made with Matt Shadetek, is out this week as digitals, in stores next as little boxes of plastic (with cool short story liner notes & artwork).

currently available at places like iTunes (US), Amazon, Boomkat, eMusic…

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plus a world-klass record release party – next week, join myself, Matt Shadetek & Jahdan Blakkamoore, Maluca, and Sonido Martines at the planetarium of The American Museum of Natural History in NYC!!

ONE STEP BEYOND.

The FADER Presents

ONE STEP BEYOND at the American Museum of Natural History

Friday, November 13, 2009

DJ /Rupture
Matt Shadetek Feat. Jahdan Blakkamoore
Maluca
Sonido Martines

9pm – 1am
$25- Price includes admission to the Space Show and a free return visit to the Museum.

Buy tickets in advance here.

Before Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and Uproot and all of that, there was my 1st mixtape, 1 + 1 = 3.

Made in ‘The Toneburst era’ (late 90s Boston), recorded straight to cassette, and sold at our shows, 1 + 1 = 3 is a nice document of what I was up to about 11 years ago (arabic music, hiphop, dancehall, noise, xerox machines)

Wayne & Wax ups an excerpt and a fun interview with me about it. Check it out. He writes, “Even as 1 + 1 = 3 gives a sense of how much he has grown and morphed as a DJ, it still offers some recognizably rupturey maneuvers and seems to prefigure the strange melange of Gold Teeth Thief. Trad middle-eastern sounds meet modern beat science, from slurred boom-bap to minimal dancehall, rollicking jungle to proto-breakcore noise.”

It is strange for me to hear this mix now, in part because I can no longer ID all the tracks! I usually remember what the record artwork looks like, but sometimes the artist/label/track names have escaped me. And in part because my technical reach and narrative pace has expanded since then.

It also makes me think about how our whole way of finding (& mixing) music has changed in the past 10 years or so. When this mixtape came out, in order to get reggae and dancehall I had to trek across Boston’s segregated cityspace out to Blue Hill ave. in Dorchester. Pre MP3 smorgasbord, we would haunt the record shops & tape the radio. Learning paths through music pre-Google, pre-blogosphere, before Ms Internet + Mr MP3 got married and made us all their children.

When interviewers ask me some variation on ‘why Arabic/north African music?’ I tell them that I’ve been listening to it for as long as I can remember (I can only remember as far back as high school: pathetic, I know), that it’s as familiar to me as the other stuff I DJ. Which this excerpt — 9 minutes from the start of side B — illustrates.

And as for Toneburst, it was a Boston-area production crew, including folks like DJ C and myself. “the Toneburst Collective was a loose-knit crew of DJs, electronic musicians, and video-and installation-artists, who together produced approximately 20 large-scale multi-media events in offbeat locations around New England and New York. More carnival than rave or concert, the crew’s productions mixed experimental beats, video, and performance art in unorthodox spaces.”

This month I am spending more time in transit (airplane, bus, taxi, car, subway) or waiting for transit than in my apartment… Nettle @ Brandeis was a blast — a very full schedule too. Bostonist review of live show .

[three fifths of Nettle @ an impromptu concert, from W&W flickr]

Filastine, who joined us on percussion, plays in Boston tonite. Free!

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thanks to all who ordered K-K-Kumbia. there’s been a bit of a lag, but CDs will be sent off today if they havent already gone out.

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& elsewhere, my dutty associates have been upping mixes nonstop, all in prep for a party we are throwing with weekend. I’ll be in D.F. but the rest of the gang is uniting @ Glasslands in Williamsburg for:

and here are the various mixes, all of these DJs will be @ the Dutty ARtz party this friday:

Matt Shadetek – Get Drunk & Lose Your Phone

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Kingdom – mix 4 Lower End Spasm

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Geko Jones – La Nueva Guaracha

weekend heat from the Dutty Artz camp (OUR CAMP):

RCRDLBL offers up: Jahdan Blakkamoore – Go Round Payola (Matt Shadetek’s Bye Haters bassline rmx)

and XLR8R’s just unleashed a JD podcast, Full Hundred.

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Jahdan Blakkamoore- Full Hundred (mixed by Matt Shadetek)

for the DJs/remixers among us, we just released the Jahdan ‘Nice Green’ acappella into the wilderness. Those of you who care about this stuff will know just how difficult it is to find vox at 140bpm…

last but by no means least, Lamin keeps blazing away at the recession rap jams.

my hour-long cumbia mix for Rob Da Bank’s BBC Radio 1 show went out a couple hours ago and will be streamable for a week. PERFECT THING TO HEAT US UP, mixed in freezing New York. Modesty aside, you’ll be hard pressed to find a hotter hour of free cumbia heat floating around…

Go here then click on ‘Listen to Rob Da Bank & Friends show’ and forward til an hour in.
Or try this direct link to the BBC player. Incidentally, the first tune I play after the intro chat w/ Rob is Pesadilla’s version of La Pava Congona…

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Too much sound? Susan Sontag on The Aesthetics of Silence. via Audio Poverty’s blog , AP being a conference-event happening in Berlin Feb 6-8. I will play music one day and chat with Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Neologismachine) & Brian (Awesome Tapes from You Know Where) the next.

also: “According to a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, who is also the guy behind the economic modelling for Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, more than 10 million of the 13 million music tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.”