mudd up!

I haven’t played in NYC for awhile, so there are many things to be expressed. On the dancefloor. With Mykki Blanco (who’s in that rich moment where various magazines can’t decide which gendered pronoun to use), Prince Rama, & more. Coolest of all– it’s an 18+ show!

^CARLOS V + OSCAR_1992 + STRYKER^ Present:
DIM 5.0: Fri., May 4. 285 Kent Ave. 10pm. $10.00. Ages 18+

LIVE EXORCISE DANCE PERFORMANCE BY *PRINCE RAMA*
BEATS: DJ RUPTURE <> PRINCE RAMA <> EVA ARIDJIS
<>STRYKER <> MESS KID <> WEIRD MAGIC <>

This week, the 2012 EMP Pop Conference hits New York City. They write:

“What do you get when roughly 300 academics, journalists, and musicians gather to talk about music and the urban jungle?… The participants will explore sounds of the city–the reverberations of people gathered en masse. . .Presenters will pay particular attention to what urban environments have meant for race, gender, and sexuality”

The talks are free and open to the public, but advanced registration is strongly encouraged, and today is your last day to do that… Many, many fascinating talks are scheduled.

I present at 4pm on Friday, in conversation with the brilliant Jayna Brown. I’ll unveil my Sufi Plug Ins project — free music / software / tools based on nonwestern & poetic notions of sound in interaction with alternative interfaces. It’s easiest if you come see them in action. But then there is Julius Eastman! And Berber Auto-Tune! And a brand-new video to debut! And how it all relates to the roundtable’s stated topic of “The Time and Space of Alternative Sonic Blackness,” with professors Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, Brown, and more.

PS: the week/end will conclude with a quick & dirty Mudd Up Book Clubb meeting on Sunday. Short story edition, details soon.

Don’t envy the sloth – sweat it out.

DUTTY ARTZ SWEAT LODGE

Isa GT *LIVE/DJ* from Colombia via UK

DJs:

DJ /Rupture

Geko Jones

Matt Shadetek

Friday Feb. 10th 10PM-4AM

FREE ADMISSION

at The Cove, 108 N. 6th St, Brooklyn NY. Take the L train to Bedford or G to Lorimer and walk. Let the walled gardeners know you’re coming.

[Brian Degraw, Untitled John Lee Malvo, 2005, pencil on paper, 36 x 28cm]

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep radio exciting…

Tune in to Mudd Up! on WFMU next Monday, November 14th, for a show with special guest Brian Degraw, visual artist and musician from Gang Gang Dance! It’s gonna be a good one.

And below you can stream this week’s show — a live FM broadcast (& YouTube/film screening) from Spectacle Theater. New formats to help us unfold.

Big thanks to the behind-the-scenes team who made the 100% Arabica night a success: Bill, Dave, Mike, and Liz from WFMU, Spectacle’s Akiva, Tony, and the theater volunteers whose names I didn’t catch. Generosity mob!

Once we were actually broadcasting live and direct, I got overexcited and bumped up the volume without bothering to check the meters — the the 2nd half of the show has a bit of (nice) distortion, and a few minutes of unintentional overlapping audio chaos. Fidelity realism! Can’t be beat.

Adding the element of visuals and a live audience to the usual radio experience was thrilling — so we’ll return to Spectacle at 7:30pm on Monday December 5th for another live Mudd Up! remote broadcast and film screening. Details soon!

[Image: From "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC]

This Friday afternoon, Lindsay Cuff & I will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories, a free 2-day event exploring the interdepedence between architecture and narrative from a variety of perspectives (architecture, cinema, sound design, comics, etc) as well as examining science and science fiction’s spatial impact on design. Emphasis on stories, emphasis on wonder. It happens simultaneously in London and New York.

Lindsay & I will discuss our experience in Nettle, creating a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai…

Here in NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories goes down at Studio-X, with a mind-expanding lineup brought together by new Studio directors Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley. I mean, what other event could have Nettle talk on the same day as a historian of the iconic Apollo Spacesuit, novelist Hari Kunzru, and architect Bjarke Ingels?

Thrilling Wonder Stories is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so please register in advance.

The Mudd Up Book Clubb marches to Manhattan with a tender, challenging work by one of the most important authors around: Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The book takes Delany’s 30+ years in the porn theaters and gay bars of Times Sq. on the eve of its mid-1990s Disneyification as a grounding point for an extended examination of public space, interclass contact, polymorphous intimate pleasures, the regulation of bodies and behavior, and lots more. Sex & urbanism in Delany’s hands — you can’t go wrong!

The humanity that animates his intelligence is inspiring, as is the deft ease with which Delany flows from frank, considered anecdotes about former lovers & friends to more sociologically-minded writing. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is built from two long essays, which are themselves quite different: the longer one more personal, the 2nd one more theoretical — it includes a powerful section on contact vs networking that is more relevant now than ever, and uses a two-column layout to play with marginality in a direct way and further shake things up.

This is the Clubb’s first nonfiction selection (not to mention our first selection by a black author), and it will give you a lot to think about. The New York Public Library stocks a handful of copies, including a nonlending one up at the Schomburg. The Manhattan location for this Clubb edition is secret, but suffice to say it’s awesome and will be familiar to those who’ve seen Delany doc The Polymath. The tentative date is November 15th 13th. If you are interested, please join the mailing list.

If you only know Delany from his sci-fi or fantasy, then you are in for a real treat! If you don’t know Delany at all, then perhaps short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah or its earlier incarnation, Driftglass, is a good place to start – “The Star Pit” is one of those rare stories that haunts me to no end. (I wouldn’t recommend starting with Dhalgren, only because I know a handful of people who couldn’t get into it and then didn’t investigate Delany any further.)

But Samuel R. Delany’s work has many, many entrances…

OK. Let’s keep those pages turning! For more online reading about this selection, Steve Shaviro wrote an excellent review of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue — indeed, all Steve’s Delany writings are great.

Stay muddy.

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Gil Scott-Heron – Paint It Black

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Fennesz – Paint It Black

[sketch by Asaf Hanuka]

On Monday, May 16th, I will participate in a panel discussion at Google’s NYC office. Topic?

You guessed it: thee Musick Industrie.

The other panelists are: Justin Kalifowitz (President of Downtown Music Publishing, Founder of Songtrust)
Sam Valenti (Founder of Ghostly Interntaional)
Dermot McCormack (Executive Vice President of Digital Media for the MTV Networks Music & Logo Group)
Anthony Volodkin (Founder of Hype Machine)

The talk organizer, Jacky Tran, will moderate.

It’s not open to the public –but I’m allowed to bring a small posse, and our discussion will viewable online as part of their GoogleTalks series.

So if you are interested and available next Monday (things begin around noon), email me or leave a comment below (with your email), I’ll get in touch if there’s space.

And remember: secret google cheat codes are real – but don’t bother Googling it.

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.

You can’t mess with Christmas traditions that start at 160BPM and rise. Dominican merengues navideños are a holiday force!

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Los Rosario – Esto Ta’ Bueno

Any holiday song which concludes with sirens & calls for the Fire Dept. is a ‘success.’

For the current Style/Music issue of the New Museum’s New City Reader newspaper (Daniel Perlin & I co-edited the Music section), I asked one of the smartest music writers around, Carolina Gonzalez (she literally wrote the book on the latino life in NYC!) to guide us through Nuyorican traditions of villancicos, asaltos, and aguinaldos. The results can be picked up at The New Museum, seen on display at a few spots around Manhattan, and downloaded here as a handy PDF.

I’ll post more about our Style/Music issue soon, as it is jam-packed with goodness spanning Luc Sante to DiS magazine! Until then, another holiday merengue stomper to ensure yr Christmas party gets crunk:

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Toros Band – Llego La Navidad

Here’s a screenshot excerpt from Carolina’s article in the newspaper’s PDF version: