WELCOME TO THE NEW MUDD!

welcome to Mudd Up v1.9! This probably doesn’t look good if you are using IE (in which case you should switch to Firefox). But maybe it doesn’t look good anywhere…So let me know if anything is weird with usability or RSS feeds or whatnot, and i’ll apply my caveman coding skills in attempts to fix/improve/destroy it.

ok. i’m in the middle of a tour with The Ex. suffering through Christmas carols in a Baltimore Starbuxx. In honor of that (the tour not the multinational) i bring you

The Ex – El Tren Blindado

This song is from 1986’s incredible 1936: The Spanish Revolution 7″ which contains a bilingual book which beautiful photos from the anarchists’ archives. Los libros anarquistas son armas contra el fascismo. Fans of Federico Garcia Lorca will find El Tren Blindado particularly endearing because it is based on his arrangement of a popular song. And of course the sweetness of not-quite-in-tune vocals with the not-quite-Spanish accent singing in full Castillian.

“i wanted nothing and don’t want anything to do with order, rank orders and commands. i am as i am, a peasant who learned to read in prson, who experienced pain and death closeby, who was an anarchist without knowing it, and today, now that i know, i am even more anarchist than yesterday when i killed to be free”

– from Nosotros, anarchist daily 1936

The book is a trip if you know Barcelona b/c you’ll recognize several prominent buildings, most of which currently house cellphone shops and places for tourists to either eat pizza or buy pottery.

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And then there is Mavado.

Mavado – Weh Dem A Do: DJ Mad Mash Up

gun me nuh borrow, me money buy, a boy will die

Plaintive gunsong multiplied by DJ Mad‘s club-maxximizing edits: Timberlake, ‘spanish’ guitars, airhorns, old school house samples, sinuous flamencoid claps that Wayne is counting out, whoosing noises, a soundbitten Sean Paul (i think), and the word ‘die’ extended with tunefulness that grips you, alive and ambigous. Did i mention a vocoder (put to the same use as in Arabic pop, greasing the curves between notes you might not find on piano)? In short: sonic DNA slippery as oil but the bastard child can dance. These types of bodies only live on substances that DJs eat.

I’ve got a lot of these 12″s; the reggae-house-club edits in particular can get very strange and unintentionally avant-garde.

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you can’t get mad at any list whose #1 position is occupied by Albanian Folk Iso-Polyphony.

Does the web count as “oral and intangible heritage” yet?

ok. c u in the clubb.