mudd up!

My new mix CD, Porque Soy Sonidero Y Voy A Muchos Lugares (made for this last tour) is now available exclusively at Turntable Lab. An hourlong blend of now-thing summer bump.

DJ Rupture - Porque Soy Sonidero excerpt (Shinehead riffing on Sting into a brand-new DJ Lengua refix)

I’ll have copies with me at live shows as well. Live shows? Like this one.

 

[image: R. Alkadhi]

Amid loose gravel and stray shoes, stains and rubbish, Action sees a grid parsing an Iraq in miniature. Within that microcosm, people wander around as if in a daze, pointing, staring, contemplating in silent disbelief. Action observes these miniature people, some of whom may in turn bend down to study the atrocities on the ground below them. - Rheim Alkadhi, Contemplation of Action

& memories pried from decades-old shellac give rise to an equally real & mythopoetic Baghdad as the one Rheim documents

Kementchedji Alecco - Taqsim

from Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted - Baghdad 1925-1929. This article opens a window on this music. In a short time a city can swing from open to closed, from something fluid & made of multiples to occupied, divided, entrenched. What awaits us?

edit: Rheim just directed my attention towards this excellent post, which has more Iraqi shellac and explains why the Honest Jon’s comp sounds so good:
“For those who are wondering, 78rpm masters have shockingly less surface noise than the final product, the mass-produced gramophone record copy of the master, which often contained loads of garbage, or filler, along with the shellac - Paramount Records used sand and cement in their mix, for instance, making virtually all of their records sound like crap. . . Very few companies exist which still have accessible masters or clean file copies of their original 78s, much less are willing to work with a small label for a release.”

Izza Kizza - Don’t Stop Go! (prod. Koolade)

Koolade is from Croatia! i played in Zagreb (his hometown) once. People asked smart questions. Our hotel stood next to ‘Colonial Cafe’, lil negroes as the logo. After our party there was a rave that i didnt go to - they said there was a big rave scene — it sounds like Koolade might have dipped in from his super duper synths.

from Kizzaland, a free Izza Kizza mixtape by Catchdubs!

[US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs]

San Francisco, Portland, come on out…

on Friday August 22nd I’ll be @ Holocene, Portland, with E3 and Monkeytek. $5!

& on Saturday August 23rd it’s a likkle NYC takeover in San Francisco, with Dave Q of Dub War and myself guesting at the Surya Dub party. Hometeam lineup is large- Ripley, Kush & lots more.

Esoteric romantic mysticism and darkness floating over deep-sea-level of the christian mind.

their own words get it right, why bring in more description when what we crave is experience?

Paavoharju - Italialaisella Laivalla
from the album Laulu Laakson Kukista

…and at another edge of Europe, rembetika, Paavoharju’s inverse, which also touches, even as it slumps forward. The dogma of addiction. Songs in 9.

A. Kostis - Stin Ipóga (In the Basement)

from Mourmoúrika: Songs of the Greek Underworld 1930-1955

más y más

[Pablo Lescano / Damas Gratis.]

Slow Burn, my cumbia feature for the July/August issue of The Fader magazine, is now available online (albeit without the lush full-page photo spreads). Several years of listening and research followed by a whirlwind week running around Buenos Aires gave rise to this article, I hope you enjoy.

To accompany the essay, I did a cumbia mix for Eddie Stats’ weekly column, Ghetto Palms.

Click here to find the downloadable mix along with my tracklist & some notes about what’s what. (and if you facebook or whatever, this page has the mix in its embeddable internest-y glory.)

Y si lees castellaño, aquí tenemos un artículo bastante académico sobre cumbia villera. [spanish-language cumbia villera article, thanks W&W]

In this young new global underground dance whatever scene we’re in I think that we really need to make sure that if we’re gonna engage in a style that we’re doing it on all levels, not just formal (wow this beat pattern is great, I’m gonna put my euro synth bass on it and call it ‘global-fusion’) but on the levels of slang, culture, meaning, people, relationships, beef and history. And some may say: “But it’s too much work to learn all these languages, and I’m on the other side of the world and blee blah bleh” well then I’d say either make some friends who can teach you or maybe you should focus in on something that you can understand and try to develop some depth in it. Basically, not being a tourist is hard work but I think, worth it. - Matt Shadetek

There’s a heavy backend to this post - the role of reggae & reggae signifiers in South America, breakcore guys bringing their swagger and bruised complexity to dubstep production, the new clutch of ‘breakstep’ musicians in Barcelona, crunk synths as the new Amen break, my softcore style, etc etc - but it’s late.

I discovered this Cardopusher album (”Unity Means Power”) when the Japanese label, Murder Channel, wrote me asking for a blurb. Half of it is standard breakcore but when Señor Pusher bends the formula wow happens, such as this jam, crunked out breakstep so good that I don’t mind that it’s soaked in token Jamaican ragga vocal samples. They don’t bother me at all which is strange since my tolerance for that sort of bumbaclott thing, these days, is low. Scud’s “Total Destruction” was released a decade ago, after all.

Last time I was in Bcn with Cauto & co., Cardopusher had recently moved there (from Caracas, Venezuela) but it was late then too, so we didn’t meet up.

Cardopusher - Gaan A Bed

The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation. . . . The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added. -Aira

[César Aira]

back in Yanquistan! MuddUp now resumes its irregular service

big thanks for MuddUp reader Thraiped, who commented “I’m sort of obsessed with César Aira, Argentinian, ridiculously prolific… Most of his stuff is short - I recommend Como me Hice Monja (translated as How I Became a Nun) as a place to start.”

Thraiped’s obsession is now my own, Aira is amazing… and painfully undertranslated. Since this recommendation i’ve worked my way through El Pequeno Monje Buddhista, Las Noches de Flores, and Como Me Hice Monja. All great, surprising, and a fair amount unlike each other.

here’s a bit from this interview, in hasty muddy translation: “The meaning of the word ‘novel’ has expanded so much that it’s ideal in terms of freedom. It doesn’t occur to me to write anything else. I don’t like short story (as a form) because it depends too much on quality; if it’s not good, it doesn’t work. On the other hand, in the novel you can appreciate other things beside the author’s virtuosity, it’s a more relaxed form, let allows for changes of idea, regrets, asymmetries, sinous paths that I think adapt themselves better to my imagination.”

& an excerpt from a nice essay: “El vanguardista crea un procedimiento propio, un canon propio, un modo individual de recomenzar desde cero el trabajo del arte. Lo hace porque en su época, que es la nuestra, los procedimientos tradicionales se presentaron concluidos, ya hechos, y el trabajo del artista se desplazó de la creación de arte a la producción de obras, perdiendo algo que era esencial. Y esto no es ninguna novedad. San Agustín dijo que sólo Dios conoce el mundo, porque él lo hizo. Nosotros no, porque no lo hicimos. El arte entonces sería el intento de llegar al conocimiento a través de la construcción del objeto a conocer; ese objeto no es otro que el mundo. El mundo entendido como un lenguaje. No se trata entonces de conocer sino de actuar. Y creo que lo más sano de las vanguardias, de las que Cage es epítome, es devolver al primer plano la acción, no importa si parece frenética, lúdica, sin dirección, desinteresada de los resultados. Tiene que desinteresarse de los resultados, para seguir siendo acción. “

One has to be disinterested in the results to maintain the action.

Action! fire, gaitas, cumbia, interrupted silence:

Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto - Fuego de Cumbia

Los Gaiteros, folk but fierce, will play in Queens on August 2nd. $20/25 plus you have to go out to Queens (not easy from Brooklyn w/ no car)…

I miss NYC’s tropical months - Britain is cold and grey. Today (Friday) JD & I will be warming tings up in Belfast while bredren Maga Bo rocks New York City’s legendary @ Turntables on the Hudson, accompanied by special guest Blanquito Man pon di mic. Blanquito Man featured in Celso Pina’s cumbia-dub-crossover MEGAHIT ‘Sobre el Rio’, which appeared not only in the ‘Americans, don’t leave home!’ movie Babel, but also on every subsequent cumbia mixtape of Mexican extraction. Just the other day I was listening to one and thinking to myself, wow this is so great, they havent used ‘Sobre el Rio’, then 3 minutes later it came in… at least it gets the chopped & screwed rebajada-ed treament:

Celso Pina - Sobre El Rio (Choppaholix edit)

Maga Bo is about to release an album on Soot called Archipelagoes and its a whopper. He also bunkered up with us to produce and record several tunes on Jah Dan’s forthcoming album.

here’s the 2nd video from Archipelagoes. this tune stars all-female Dakar crew A.L.I.F. He explained the lyrics to me, i think they’re talking about how awesome they are.