HANG ON...

Tuesday 28 February 2006 at 6:46 pm

...a very busy and wonderful weekend; i come home and the electricity goes out. again.

(repairmen with large cables walk around the building, swearing optimistically.)

   more "soon",

including Walter Benjamin photocopying himself on the office machine.

SEE YOU IN NL! pt. 2

Tuesday 21 February 2006 at 1:17 pm

Lo & behold! a banner ad:

 Sonic Acts this weekend!   

here's some audio blurbology from a handful of Friday night's artists.

    (this motherload of MP3s will only be up for a few days)

- - - - - -

No Lay is a tiger who happens to be one of the U.K.'s top MCs. Apart from Run The Road and whitelabels it's hard to hear her though. I'll be DJing for her & G-Kid, both repping Unorthodox Fam.

              No Lay - Unorthdox Daughter

classic from Run The Road. Soca's in there, right?
(hosted on my flaky server so if it's glitchy, download again later on)

               High Contrast ft. No Lay - Angels & Fly

she started out as a drum&bass/jungle MC. return to roots?

    *     *     *

DJ Scotch Egg isn't a DJ, he makes deliriously fun Gameboy gabba. Along with the rest of his Wrong Music crew, they cram megawatts of new energy and angles into the world of gabba / breakcore / bent circuitry / punk electronics. Some of the liveliest electronic performances I saw last year were Shitmat in Slovenia and Scotch Egg at Overkill in London -- the whole room was dancing/pogoing, and I couldnt' even see Scotch because bouncing bodies covered the stage.

His 2 minute songs remind me of Lightning Bolt. Trapped inside the bodies of 13-year-old Japanese ravers wearing transparent plastic clothing.
  Yes, that good.

              DJ Scotch Egg - Scotch Forest

From his debut album KFC Core CD/12"on Addadat
 note: "The whole record is produced with a gameboy, a loudspeaker and some effects pedals."

    *     *     *

Ghislain Poirer, the heatmaker. Last I heard, both Lady Sovereign and myself were harassing him to use the same new blazing Ghis-beat on our upcoming mixtapes...

2 MPfrees over at his web, and his collabos with TTC and Beans can be heard via the myspace playback thingy.

    *     *     *

I met Gustav in Ljubljana. She sang a song about cops, accompanying herself on accordion and laptop. Her web hosts mp3s & some video. Gustav may not be her real name.

    *     *     *

Serhat Koksal aka 2/5 BZ. Dense, dissonant live audio/visual collages from our favorite Turkish agitator. NO TURISTIK, NO EGZOTIK. (Muslimgauze did many things, but he never set foot in an Arab or Muslim country). Some blog offered 2 unreleased (?) 2/5 BZ albums, which is where I got this mp3 from, since i'm too lazy to rip it from the CD i have.

              2/5 BZ's Istanbul Cut-Up - track 7

    *     *     *

Nettle is us. Abdel on violin & oud, Jenny on cello, me on whatever, and Daniel doing live video.

This song is old. It is not us. It's just me & Aziz Arradi. This song could be considered 'gnawa fusion'. 

              Nettle ft. Aziz Arradi - Untitled (sin título canción hiphop arabe)

    *     *     *

Vex'd is dark industrial-leaning dubstep that i look fwd to hearing on a proper soundsystem. Their album is out on Planet Mu, Mike Paradinas's concept label based around the utopian idea of a world where cows rule the earth, requiring humans to subject all our puny half-baked ideas to full and proper digestion/deconstruction in each chamber of a cow's four-part stomach. Heavy, I know.

              Vex'd - Pop Pop VIP

    *     *     *

OK, I ran out of time!

Look left for The Bug audio. Aaron Spectre's web links to lots of work, which I already talked about here. y'all know what Beans and Hrvatski sound like. This post links to everybody i didnt get to here.

Skepta had to cancel (due to alien abduction), but Chronik & Ears are coming instead, so the full & proper title of their session shall henceforth be something like:

 Matt Shadetek and Sheen present Heavy Meckle feat. Jammer & Chronik & Ears (Shadetek / JahMektheWorld / Slew Dem crew)

  & because the Dutch are well-organized & wired, there will be live internet streaming of most of the festival, from daytime conferences to evening concerts.

"I'M FAMOUS ONLINE"

Monday 20 February 2006 at 11:53 am

• Famous for 15MB!

Warhol down the data lines: a curated webpage selecting 15mb of video / music / anything from 15 artists for download each week.

(family tree: the F15 people are related to the Ek-Ke people, who are making a special DJ /rupture 7" limited to 300 copies! It doesn't exist yet, but when it does, it will sell-out immediately, and cease to exist again. Like it never happened.)

Earth & Sunn 0))) in Bcn on Saturday. 18€ cover meant I was not there. I was "here", listening to songs like this at reasonable volumes, without hundreds of earnest metalheads. I'm feelin' their Hex-era slower-than-(s)Low White Black Americana vibe. Don't forget to eyeball The Wirewool mainpage too.

    *     *     *  difficult times request honest answers

1. Where is the city situated?

2. How is the river spanned?

3. How are the bridges named?

4. What may be been on the border?

5. What are the small bags for?

6. Where are the pleasure resorts?

7. By what is the spirit bordered?

8. How are goods landed at the shores?

9. How old is your body?

10. Who is buried within?

MAGREB MEMORY DEPOT PT. 2

Thursday 16 February 2006 at 01:07 am
more Moroccan chaabi from the 70s & 80s

• Lemchaheb - Eddenya

            Noujoum Ouazza's guitar! ... looking for more of it

• Nass El Ghiwane - Jlani Lefrake

              Allal's banjo will never let you down

•  

                older, more classical material

Lemchaheb from a buyable 4-cd compilation: Maxi Mystique.  & If you didn't get Daouini, Lemchaheb track I posted a few months back, you're in luck.

NeG from an excellent buyable cd of theirs: Senia

last track off a bootleg cd-r comp, buyable at least in Bcn 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE WAS NOT TRUE

Monday 13 February 2006 at 1:05 pm

• Brokeback Mountain turns ugly.

•  Xinlinsupreme keep putting their albums for free on the internet -- and their music is actually good. Great even. Scaldingly beautiful noisy Japanese attuned to a strange lyricism.

                Try Amaryllis for a sweet heavy

(i know it's a bit heretical, but i like 'em better than My Bloody Valentine.)

• "now it's just a sad man talking to his fat cat." Realer than the R.I.P. randomizer

IMAZIGHEN

Wednesday 08 February 2006 at 12:43 pm             today is ethnomusicologicabal day!

Vocoded male-female duo, synths, and a loping Magrebi beat: time for Berber pop! I've never heard music from the Atlas mountains sound like it's in a hurry, and this is no exception. Moroccan but the vox are in Berber, not Arabic - Berbers were there first. The only way to make a culture solid is by ignoring its history, then invoking it.

Their name for themselves is "free people" or "people of noble origin". Imazighen. Everybody else uses a term from the same Greco-Roman root that gives us 'barbarian'.

    Start writing your own history book right now, and don't forget to translate into English!

              ? (Berber duo) - ? (track 2)

from a 5€ CD-r in a slimline case.
If you need more info that the image allows, just swing by the Arabic music shop on calle Joaquin Costa right near where it crosses with calle Carmen.

    *     *     *

w&w goes ethnomusicological w/ a quote from Michael Birenbaum Quintero:

If training publics to consume is a probably unavoidable byproduct of our work [as ethnomusicologists], maybe we should also think about helping musicians understand the demands of cosmopolitan publics so that they can make their own decisions about how they want to deal with issues of authenticity, fusion, etc. This is the ethnomusicological version of Venezuelan anthropologist Daniel Matos' call not to do ethnographies of indigenous groups for studies by the World Bank, but to do ethnography of the World Bank for the benefit of indigenous groups.

    *     *     *

when asked what he thought of Miles Davis' trumpet playing, pianist Cecil Taylor replied: He plays all right for a millionaire.

    *     *     *

Dr Auratheft's got 3 new mixes up. It's like themed radioshows (rather than flashy DJ mixes), one song after the other. Email him for the liner notes. Here's an excerpt from notes for the first mix, Visions of Justice & Empowerment

More than any other instrument, the organ (like the jukebox) was the medium of progress par excellence: seated behind his magic machine, the organ player seemed a cosmonaut, guiding his ensemble through the sonic stratosphere. Sun Ra, Jimmy Smith, ‘Brother’ Jack McDuff, Lonnie Smith, Jackie Mittoo and Byron Lee personified this brand of pop culture - they were true pop stars. In this mix, entitled Visions Of Justice & Empowerment, I have combined the two themes: the idea of sonic fiction and the steaming hot organ or souljazz combo’s of the sixties. I had to kick off with Saturn born futurist Sun Ra: seated behind his Hammond organ, playing the tune of the Batman TV series and accompanied by surf guitar duo Dan & Dale, he introduces the whole concept in an awesome way.

    *     *     *

    The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal...

        The revolution will not make you look 5 pounds thinner...

            There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on instant replay

    *     *     *

...but it's 2006. So there may be instant replays of massified rioters, news segments devoted to cartoon violence & irrationalizing the other, men (always men) who care enough or don't care enough to pick up rocks, flaming boys in the street.

       Break open a stone, out tumbles more silence than noise.

ME ME ME

Monday 06 February 2006 at 11:43 am

my label, Soot, has a new website. and, more importantly, LOTS of projects underway. this March look for: a gorgeous debut album by Filastine, and a deeeeep dubstep EP (on clear vinyl! mastered by Rashad at D&M!) from Timeblind.

Big News: I have joined the ranks of Juelz, Cam'Ron (black dada nihilismus), and Michael Whatshisface!  immortalicized animated and GLOWING,

                  I've giffordized by U Mean Competitor.

Also, he quotes me from our entirely real correspondence on sublingual musculature contraction frequency hacks vis-a-vis Swiss Nazi extras in The Sound of Music.

The video Daniel Perlin & I made is being screened at Saladestar in Barcelona this Saturday as part of Acetone Magazine's project there. And is included on the Sonic Acts DVD that comes with this month's edition of The Wire magazine. DP will be escaping the Whitney's Marxist/UpperEastSide clutches to do live video for us in Amsterdam. Ain't that nice?

This week sees Daniel P reblogging at Eyebeam. He links to many items of note, including an R. Crumb take on P. K. Dick's Valis, which I have to say, utterly normalizes Dick's book, which i read in hotels in England until i seriously started to worry that it was making me crazy and had to stop. Valis includes one of the finer sentences in the English language:

                I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.

Deeply personal, the book is also highly contagious.
A passage chosen at random:

    If it wasn't for Horselover Fat and his encounter with God or Zebra or the Logos, and this other person living in Faty's head but in another century and place, I would dismiss my dreams as nothing. I can remember articles dealing with the people who have settled near the lake; they belong to a mild religious group, somewhat like the Quakers (I was raised as a Quaker); except, it is stated, they held the strong belief that children should not be put in wooden cradles. This was their special heretical thrust. Also - and I can actually see the pages of the written article about them - it is said of them that 'every now and then one or two wizards are born,' which as some bearing on their aversion to wooden cradles; if you put an infant or baby who is a wizard - a future wizard - into a wooden cradle, evidently he will gradually lose his powers.

    Dreams of another life? But where? Gradually the envisioned map of California, which is spurious, fades out, and, with it, the lake, the houses, the roads, the people, the cars, the airport, the clan of mild religious believers with their peculiar aversion to wooden cradles; but for this to fade out, a host of inter-connected dreams spanning year of real elapsed time must fade, too.

    The only connection between this dream landscape and my actual world consists of my red Capri.
    Why does that one element hold true in both worlds?

    It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours. What does this mean in terms of my lake dream which includes a women I never knew for whom I feel a real and comfortable love? Are there two persons in my brain, as there are in Fat's? Partitioned off, but, in my case no disinhibiting symbol accidentally triggered the 'other' one into bursting through the partition and into my personality and my world?

    Are we all like Horselover Fat, but don't know it?
    How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?

    Groggy from my nap I turn on the TV and try to watch a program called 'Dick Clark's Good Ol' Days Part II.' Morons and simps appear in the screen, drool like pinheads and waterheads; zitfaced kids scream in ecstatic approval of total banality. I turn the TV set off. My cat wants to be fed. What cat? In the dreams, my wife and I own no pets; we own a lovely house with a large, well-tended yard in which we spend our weekends. We have a two-car garage. . . suddenly I realize with a distinct jolt that this is an expensive house; in my inter-related dreams I am well-to-do. I live an upper-middleclass life. It´s not me. I'd never live like that; or if I did I'd be acutely uncomfortable.

If you made it through that you are obviously up for more. It's hard to write-off Dick's madnesses because his visions of the future remain -- for all their hyperbolic armature -- so canny & relevant. and so -- Edward W. Soja, on the spatial restructuring of urban governmentality:

    Despite his own attempts to transcend its limitation, a Blade Runner scenario has become indelibly attached to Mike Davis's depiction of the City of Quartz. Drawing both on the novel by Philip K. Dick and the popular film directed by Ridley Scott, the scenario depicts a post-apocalyptic future city which has pushed the carceral exopolis to its ultimate extremes. All the culture of the world appear to be packed together in a smoky urban core throbbing with impending violence. Ethnic and racial boundaries have seemingly melted away in a fractal chaos where there are no longer any safe places or stable identities. It is difficult to tell the difference between citizen and alien, even human and android, for every peripheralized group on earth now lives in the center, melded together in homogenized heterogeneity. At the same time as the Inner City had been globally introverted, the Outer City has moved even further outward into monolithic, barricaded, and isolated worlds that in the novel are described as being "Off-Earth." The bifurcation of cityspace is thus virtually complete.

    .. Evan MacKenzie makes the point that "the words public and private may seem distinct enough - and they are used in popular and political discourse as if they were - but they are not." When seen in strictly dichotomous terms, there is a tendency to see changes in public space simply as a kind of undemocratic transfer to the private domain, resulting in an incontrovertible loss of civic freedom. Such thinking universalizes and homogenizes the public realm - as well as the privatization process - and protects them both from critical examination of how each is also affected by other processes of differention and change. From the ancient agora and forum of the Athenian polis to the present-day postmetropolis, public space has been divertingly romanticized and mythologized in Western urban theory and practice to such an extent that it is difficult to see that it is a fully lived space, subject to being shaped - and reshaped - not only by class conflicts but also by gender, race, ethnicity, and other relations of differential socal and spatial power

 

   

NOW I'M THE JAPANESE WOMAN AGAIN

Friday 03 February 2006 at 7:44 pm

sorry about my sweaty glitchy server -- Mudd Up! is no longer down, and the tech-people inform me the recurring brownout is fixed...

                                 Dream on! I say:

The silences are big, loud things that crowd the space between the pair’s shoulders, plenty of cover for me to disappear into. I walk just a few feet behind the couple for some time, wondering who they are, what they’re thinking. After several hundred yards of following and watching, some kind of internal alarm goes off in my head, a single ringing tone that tells me it’s time to reach out and slit the husband’s throat. He collapses against me and disappears into himself in a wordless sparkle, a smashed ember or defeated videogame character. There's no blood except on my sword and even that seems like a formal convention, just an aesthetic marker indicating use as opposed to any kind of evidence of the murder I’ve just committed.

                                                    -- from Ebog's dreamlog

        *     *     *

                                   Drone on! I say:

     Sunroof @ Vociferous. though the track could easily be 20 minutes longer. ah well...

RISK ARBITRAGE

Thursday 02 February 2006 at 2:55 pm

...reading Edward Soja's Postmetropolis, and (finally) Herzog by Saul Bellow.

          live or die, but don't poison everything

       *

Seb Chan on risk in live performance:

The sense of risk is therefore what makes a live show engaging or not. It is not about the gear used - laptop or not, or the perhaps even the skill of the players, but about whether the audience feels things could go wrong or not.

I've got things to say but no time to say it. A brief, thought-provoking piece from Chan.

       *

Sky Noise's great Paik writeup links to online video and audio. He was down with Schoenburg Cage and Stockhausen before TVs took over.

       *

     is grime turning into UK rap?
     a cartoon version of itself?
     the future of urban la-dee-da?
     all of the above? --

Logan Sama ups the Firecamp mixtape, 68 minutes of crossover wot-u-call-it from Lethal Bizzle & crew. around 17:20 Lethal demonstrates his ability to shriek with the best of them.

meanwhile, across an ocean, the Fader posts an exhausted Jammer & Skepta on the mic.

The gem here may be Plasticman's The Plastician's new tune, Japan. If you know about music you will feel this says Skepta. If you know about Chinese horse-hair fiddles you will feel this i feel compelled to add.

It drops after Skream's 'Request Line' on the 2nd mp3 from his radio session w/ Jam & Skepta. (I just got heavy whitelabels from Skream's latest -- more on that in a minute. let's just say: amens).    

        Shouts to Nick Catchdubs for connecting the dots & Soze Shadetek for filling in the details.