mudd up!

Are you sharp-minded with catholic tastes? Un(der)employed? Adderal-addled and wanting a plurilinguistic change? Talk to me.

I’m starting a project studio called LOW INCOME TOMORROWLAND and am looking for a studio assistant. Think: deep research. Think: Sufi Plug Ins. Think: there’s no way the future will be boring.

Details here.

For the January edition of Mudd Up Book Clubb, we will be reading an epic and incandescent piece of contemporary Russian fiction: Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. It’s ambitious, totally nuts, capable of generating new emotions, perhaps the first “21st Ct” novel I’ve read.

Ice Trilogy is like a joke without the relief of a punchline. I regret recommending it to friends because suddenly I need to explain what it’s about, and end up sounding crazy… The book opens as a 19th century Russian novel. Then comes a trip to Siberia and an encounter with the Ice. It’s best if you read it. Let’s just say that the traditional arc of 20th century history is left intact but superimposed with a much more urgent momentum: the Brothers and Sisters of Light’s search for blond, blue-eyed people to smash in the chest with an Ice hammer, in hopes that the heart inside will awaken, and speak the language of the heart.

Pulpy, “literary”, and unrepentantly other, Ice Trilogy is a book you read with and against, a work that lingers.

The NYRB translation collects Sorokin’s three books — Bro, Ice, and 23,000 — into a single volume. 700 pages long, and entrancing.

The Mudd Up Book Clubb will meet at 5pm on Sunday January 22nd (TBC) in Manhattan for lively discussion followed by popsicles.

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Past Book Clubb selections:

December 2011 NYC: Lauren Beukes – Zoo City

November 2011 NYC: Samuel R. Delany – Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

September 2011 Tangiers: Juan Goytisolo – Exiled from Everywhere

August 2011: Madrid: Cesar Aira – How I Became a Nun

June 2011: Casablanca: Maureen F. McHugh – Nekropolis

The first show in Mudd Up Radio’s new Wednesday night time slot is now streaming! SOAP BLEACH SOFTENERS. Gentle beginnings. New music from Cauto, Vladislav Delay, Ghanain gospel, Erothug, and, yes, Lana del Rey:

WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule shuffle means that, starting this week, Lamin Fofana will host a show right before me on Wednesdays! We’ll do our best to give you good apocalypse in 2012. Our ice cream comes in 5 flavors: regular black, mudd, noir noir, soft bop, and dust bowl.

December 7, 2011, Mudd Up! w/ DJ Rupture on WFMU – tracklist:

Read the rest of this post »

It’s like this: tonight, Thursday, I will read at the Best Music Writing 2011 event @ Housingworks in Manhattan. Free. Hosted by the New Yorker’s Alex Ross and Daphne Carr, who included my Frieze essay on slowness in music for the book’s 2011 edition. Flyer below.

On Friday and Saturday I’ll be shaking things up at a party I’m incredibly excited about: Tormenta Tropical’s 4 year anniversary! Going down in LA and San Francisco. Bersa Discos hosts Oro 11 and Shawn Reynaldo and I will be playing in both cities, along with Maluca. The LA edition brings in Total Freedom and Mas Exitos. Crazy, right?!

Tormenta Tropical is one of those fantastic parties where you, as a DJ, need to step up your game and play extra well. I’ll be digging deep, smuggling in secret weapons & surprises (& cumbia), so see you on the dancefloor.

Then I redeye home in time for Sunday’s Mudd Up Book Clubb: Zoo City edition back in Manhattan. I need to spend serious time in LA but never manage to be there for more than 15 hours at a stretch.

WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule kicks into effect this week, so tune in tonight to catch my WFMU radio show, Mudd Up!, in its new Wednesday night timeslot. Same hour: 8pm.

The audio from Monday’s live broadcast @ Spectacle Theater was lost to a database glitch, so that show will live on in our hearts and minds — but not as digitized stream of endlessly repeatable sound.

And because the belly of the web is always hungry, here’s a 7-minute excerpt from my 2007 mix, Secret Google Cheat Codes (available on split CD with Filastine, “Shotgun Wedding Volume Six”). Drawing that line from Neko Case to Sister Nancy to Caroline Bergvall to Carolee Schneemann to a little bit of Kat from The Ex singing in Hungarian. Also Yung Joc.

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DJ /rupture – Secret Google Cheat Codes (tracks 10-12)

A reminder: you are invited to Spectacle Theater tonight, Monday December 5th, for an evening of live radio and a screening of Nass El Ghiwane film TRANSES, one of the best musical documentaries ever… and I’m not just saying that because I’ve been obsessed with Moroccan music since forever and did some touring with Nass El Ghiwane back in the day.

TRANSES is a great, poetic introduction to the deliriously deep world of Maghrebi sound — and the social shifts it both anticipates and provokes.

All the best documentaries document – give us a glimpse through a weltanschauung window – rather than explain (there are no voice-overs here, for example), and excellent translations mean that we get to experience the band’s lyrical power as well. So c’mon down! We’ll talk, listen, watch.

several plates spinning

* Tomorrow, I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina, performing at the Duke Coffeehouse.

* Friday Nettle will make our D.C. debut at a special edition of Africa Is Not A Country hosted by DJs Bent and Mothersheister! We have new songs to play, a new album to sell, and hope to see you.

* Saturday, Nettle returns to Brooklyn for an intimate show at Williamsburg gallery space Vaudeville Park. We have four hundred candles and Ian keeps talking about tapestries and/or pillows. ATTENDANCE MANDATORY, NEW NEW YORK. Lamin Fofana will DJ.

* Then on Monday December 5th– the action never stops, does it? — you are invited to Spectacle Theater in south Williamsburg for a live broadcast of my WFMU radio show. Thanks to everyone who made our inaugural 100% Arabica Spectacle broadcast a success. Live FM from our favorite underground theater!

[Nass El Ghiwane]

The December 5th radio show will be built from a YouTube selection of my favorite Moroccan tracks, and will be followed by a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni’s gripping and poetic Nass El Ghiwane documentary film, TRANSES (1981). Nass El Ghiwane, a group of working class musicians from Casablanca, revolutionized Maghrebi music in the 1970s and remain Morocco’s most important band. TRANSES captures them at the height of their power.

[self-portrait in my Transes poster]

Here is an oft-compiled Nass El Ghiwane track, Mahmouma. This version comes from Stern’s epic 18-CD “Africa 50 years” box set (“The most comprehensive compilation of African music ever achieved. . . 183 classic recordings by 183 important artists from 38 countries in North, South, East and West Africa.”)

Sterns cut Mahmouma down to half its length, but the mastering is good:

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Nass El Ghiwane – Mahmouma

[John Francis Peters - Meryem by the sea in Casablanca]

And last but not least, head to Time Magazine’s Lightbox to see “Insha’Allah”, a photoessay by John Francis Peters, taken in Morocco as part of our Beyond Digital project.

On Sunday December 11, the Mudd Up Book Clubb returns to Manhattan, to discuss Lauren Beukes’ 2010 novel Zoo City. If you wanted to throw genre signifiers at it, you could say that it’s new African urban fantasy sci-fi noir with a strong musical component. There is even an accompanying soundtrack , released on African Dope records:

As I wrote in my August post on Zoo City, “It’s weird noir, set in contemporary Johannesburg, featuring an ex-junkie protagonist named Zinzi December and her magic sloth. The unconventional pair is caught in a web of intrigue involving murder, 419 email scams, and a missing kwaito/afropop teen star. In short, it sounds like a book specifically engineered for my peer group.” Check out the full post for more thoughts on Zoo City, or join us on December 11th in New York City for realtime talk.

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Past Book Clubb selections:

November 2011 NYC edition: Samuel R. Delany Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

September 2011 Tangiers edition: Juan Goytisolo – Exiled from Everywhere

August 2011: Madrid edition: Cesar Aira – How I Became a Nun

June 2011: Casablanca edition: Maureen F. McHugh – Nekropolis

Join us for an intimate night of sound & celebration on Saturday, December 3rd @ Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn (L to Graham). Mint tea, dates, and homemade deliciousness will be served.

We are celebrating the release of Nettle’s new album on Sub Rosa, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai. (get it at: iTunes Amazon Boomkat eMusic actual record stores, etc)

“Dubai may be a cipher masquerading as a city, but it’s not a complete blank slate unencumbered by theoretical and contextual baggage, and El Resplandor depicts it as you might expect: ancient and dignified ‘Middle Eastern’ airs buffeted by howls of the ghosts in modernity’s machine. This is not to say that the album is merely conventional, however, for El Resplandor contains some of /Rupture’s most vivid and striking music… provocative and as chilling as anything in the real Shining” – Peter Shapiro, The Wire Nov 2011

Sat. December 3rd: Nettle (live), Lamin Fofana (dj). Vaudeville Park, 26 Bushwick Ave. Bklyn. doors at 8:30pm $8. Come early warm bodies shining ghosts.

in which the ladies of Super Tight get incarcerated for copyright infringement (showing my 90210 clip); face potentially catastrophic replacement by the men of Bronx Juice; receive a curious video message from the M.E.D.E.A Housewives Terrorist Group; learn Jonny Oso’s background in law; and hear a prison guard wax — interruptedly — on generic narrative conventions, among many other developments, plus puppets and some extra meta. “What is a puppet?”