Then one of the Inadin produced a flute. A second found an intricate xylophone of wood and gourds, bound with leather. He tapped it experimentally, tightening a cord, while a third reached inside his robe. He tugged a leather thong — at the end was a pocket synthesizer.

The man with the flute opened his veil; his black face was stained blue with sweat-soaked indigo dye. He blew a quick trill on the flute, and they were off.

The rhythm built up, high resonant tones from the buzzing xylophone, the off-scale dipping warble of the flute, the eerie, strangely primeval bass of the synthesizer . . . “He sings about his synthesizer,” Gresham murmured.

“What does he say?”

I humbly adore the acts of the Most High,

Who has given to the synthesizer what is better than a soul,

So that, when it plays, the men are silent,

And their hands cover their veils to hide their emotions.

The troubles of life were pushing me into the tomb,

But thanks to the synthesizer,

God has given me back my life.

 

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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…

But is it really George’s fault? Or is it the Man in the Yellow Hat’s fault, for taking an agent of chaos out of the jungle and trying, against all hope, to civilize him?

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and speaking of jungle…

Download audio file (Bay B Kane-Good Good Sensi.mp3)

Bay B Kane – Good Good Sensi

(Racial corrective: the intro says that I’m of a mixed race marriage. That’s not the case.)

Here are a few excerpts. If you’ve ever cared about the Gerogerigegege, wondered about Toby Keith’s perversions or what that distortion pedal has to do with American race relations, then this article’s for you. Also, K is really, really funny.

Kelefa Sanneh: Often with a subgenre that’s like a noisier version of X – often X is a black music, and the noisier version involves white people. Very recently that could be, adding noise to jungle. But we can go back and talk about distortion and amps. We can talk about rock abstracting itself from blues.

Bidoun: Post-punk abstracting itself from funk.

KS: Right. And often the impulse to make something noisier is to make it less black.

Jace Clayton: I agree completely. Party my mixtapes come from… reversing that process? Certainly by the time my interest in breakcore faded, it was this formulaic, “Okay, here’s the sample, here’s the distorted Amen break.” With the sample being so obviously a black male Jamaican voice serving as a sonic signifier of hyper-masculinity, of violence and danger.

KS: But even there, when you’re talking about a distorted Amen break-what does the distortion add to the break, sonically or culturally? Is it a way of insisting that you’re not overly reverent?

JC: Yeah, definitely.

KS: But in the hands of white producers and DJs, what does it even mean for them to be insisting strenuously that they are not overly reverent of the Amen break? Or to have a punk-rock attitude towards it? I mean, I’m fully prepared to admit that this is part of the appeal of noise music; the racial coding of it is kind of interesting. I think for a generation of white music fans, there is an association of noise with a certain kind of authenticity or pugnacity, related to the conception that that authenticity is what’s missing from commercial black pop music. Until Timbaland or whatever. [Laughter]

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KS: These days, when you say something is “noisy”, that’s another way of saying it’s old-fashioned. In this decade, there’s no reason anything ever has to be lo-fi.

JC: In this decade, noise would be the sine wave wave. If anything, it’s the clean digital sound that is the noisy sound.

KS: Is this the point at which noise converges with its opposite?

JC: Yeah! The sine wave is at once of the cleanest and most piercing of sounds…

KS: Because if a sine wave is noise, what’s the opposite of noise? I guess, silence… if it’s quiet [Laughter]. I mean a lot of those old noise records really sounded like loud silence.

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KS: . . . Obviously things change, and it’s not impossible to imagine a world where noise signifies its opposite. Which would be totally interesting – a world in which, in America, treble signifies black and bass signifies white. [Laughter] But for now, anyway, white people’s attachment to noise seems pretty primal. I’d almost call it primitive. It seems to touch something in them…

I picked up a mesmerizingly good Mohamed Rouicha CD (for 1 euro) in Madrid (Lavapies, c/ Tribulete 9) last month and listened to it nonstop for days. Then it disappeared. A few days later my laptop died (not a light death – very dead). Soonafter that, my MP3 player was stolen.

I’m obliquely reminded of a phrase I read in Richard Skelton’s excellent Landings book yesterday: “All that mattered was without weight or consequence. Nothing lingered or resonated beyond the instance of its own making. Everything listened.”

There is a word for words who have lost their meaning and remain as sound, most commonly preserved in traditional songs. I can’t remember the name of this word.

Here are two Rouicha tracks. I don’t know any of these words – Berber words, Tamazight – but I wish I did, especially in the first one which is essentially a long poem kissed by outar flourishes. The outar is Rouicha’s instrument of choice, a gentle, rustic thing that looks as if it were dug up from the earth.

Download audio file (Mohamed_Rouicha-Harqat_Mensafer.mp3)

Mohamed Rouicha – Harqat Mensafer

Download audio file (Mohamed_Rouicha-Jabnadem.mp3)

Mohamed Rouicha – Jabnadem

But what keeps running through my head is a paraphrase from Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. here: I’m trying to tell America about a dream that I had.

Tomorrow night, Friday the 15th, I’ll be DJing at a party with Gang Gang Dance @ The Music Hall of Williamsburg. GGD is great. I have a lot of new music to unleash. This should be fun.

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on Saturday night…. DUTTY ARTZ is organzing a Haitian aid relief party.

As Matt explains: We’ve decided to throw a last-minute benefit show to help make a financial contribution to the ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. If you’ve followed this at all it is an absolutely harrowing, horrible catastrophe that has befallen a place that was already a very difficult place to live for many people. The show is in only two days so PLEASE email this to your friends in New York, put it on your Facebook, Twitter, etc. and help us get the word out. We as DJs will not be taking any payment from this and the proceeds will be donated to charity. We are currently seeking expert advice on who to donate it to, suggestions are welcome.

DUTTY ARTZ TROPICAL RELIEF FOR HAITI

DJs: DJ Rupture Matt Shadetek Lamin Fofana Feliz Cumbe

THIS Saturday 1/16 10PM Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery $10 (more is welcome). All proceeds donated to Haitian relief

Timeblind on Avatar vs Nirgendwo in Afrika:

Anyway, in case you haven’t seen Avatar, its about a white (American!) dude that goes native and becomes their most awesome leader and achieves an improbable, lo-tech victory (but with soul power! and the animals help them!). Awesome battle sequence ! Good vs. Evil, get it ?

In the real world you live in a complicated global capital network that sometimes deliberately but mostly inadvertiantly leverages injustices so that your locality can exist with the wealth and convienience it enjoys. You cannot opt out. You can’t just choose the right items on the Health Food store shelf.

You can use your influence to convince specific companies to change behavior and you can make the best decision when you personally have a decision to make. Don’t just say “fuck it”.

That’s the resources issue. The other issue is racial and cultural understanding. Most of the people who see Avatar will not be White Americans. But we get it, its supposed to be a character you can relate to.

I saw Avatar on it’s opening night here in New York. At first I wasn’t going to write about it, but in retrospect I should have, for reasons Dan Visel mentions here, referencing the Economist piece I upped yesterday, emphasis mine:

A lot of people wanted to talk about Avatar, and there’s a fair amount to discuss there: how pretty it is, how it works as mass spectacle, the film’s deeply muddled politics, how ecology and religion are connected. What stands out to me is how rarely this happens any more. .. The sheer ubiquity of Avatar changed how it could be discussed: something so big can cut across our individual interest groups, enabling broader conversations.

But the inevitable question arises: what does it mean if the only cultural object that everyone can talk about costs $300 million?

me: i couldnt wait, got it off —-. itd been there since July or something. criminally slept on by us!

Lamin: yeah. the album had very little buzz, considering the fact that it was released by Def Jam and produced by The-Dream (& Tricky Stewart)! my sis mentioned it to me after she heard about it from a cousin in Maryland who’s 14 years old! so yeah, this is what 14 year old girls are listening to in the DMV.

Download audio file (Electrik_Red-P_Is_For_Power.mp3)

Electric Red – P Is For Power

from their debut album, How To Be A Lady Vol. 1 ($5 at Amazon digital!)

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

Download audio file (Khaled-Rai_Arai(DJ_SMS_mix).mp3)

Khaled – Rai Arai (DJ SMS mix)

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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