AUTOTUNE APPRECIATION STARTER KIT

my 10-step guide to the pleasures of Auto-Tune, for the skeptical.

In the current issue of Earplug.

this began as a “Top 10 List” but got more interesting…

excerpt:

#7. Cher, “Believe” (WEA)
This started it all: “Believe” is a song you still hear in supermarkets now, a full ten years after its release. Staying power! When the taut skin and other side-effects of repeat plastic surgery form their own aesthetic, can we think of it in terms of Auto-Tune?

MAKE HAY

first stop: “Sam Cooke Was Right”. Matt Shadetek on what just happened last night. YES.
Pitchfork (PSF)

Friday before last I awoke to find many ‘congrats’ emails in my inbox, for Pitchfork’s 8.8 “Best New Music” review of my new mix CD, Uproot. At the time I didn’t realize quite what that meant, but soon learned… Over CMJ weekend Uproot shot up to #4 in the iTunes Electronic chart (of course, this may mean like 34 sales, who knows?), blogs started spreading it around, and, as this Last.fm screenshot reports:

last fm

The Beatles, popular this week! Rupture stock, up 492 pts! Life is strange.

if you want to hear Uproot, let’s be honest: there’s any number of pirate-booty ZIPs and RARs are floating online. In digital space, popularity is inseparable from ubiquity. Or check the Agriculture’s myspace, their music player has some selections. (A special shout goes to the James & the Agri label, since releasing a 100% licensed mixtape in 2008 is a thankless task involving fun stuff like mountains of paperwork and fees to other labels).

& if you want to buy the darn thing — me and all the artists on Uproot are ‘independent’, which mostly means “in need of cash” — download spots include eMusic / Amazon / iTunes / Other, etc. Physical copies are in stores too. There’s a digital-only companion called “Uproot: The Ingredients” which presents all the tracks I used in their unmixed form — much longer, and quite different, from the mix itself. DJ-friendly shops like Boomkat and Juno have the Ingredients as lossless FLAC or WAV files.

Anyhow, today I woke up to another email, my friend Neil ‘Astral Social Club‘ Campell saying he heartily agrees with my pick of Sheffield UK’s Rare and Racy as one of the best records stores around. Friends who read the internet are better (and faster) than Google Alerts. He’d seen the ‘Rupture Guest List’ on Pitchfork, published sometime last night as we all sat around in prObama post-election amazement and disbelief (more on that later!) Guest List is a weekly interview piece they do, asking artists about their favorite new music, books, movies, etc.

Guest List. includes cumbia talk, César Aira talk, Years of Rice and Salt talk, and talk on why Bob Dylan and The Pixies are like museums. The filmmaker I mention, Bani Khoshnoudi, has a semi-private NYC screening of her latest film this Friday, very exciting.

QUE BAJO

ImageImageImage

mi hermano Geko Jones has started a FREE NYC WEEKLY party dedicated to “afro-colombian & tropical beats and bass”! QUE BUENO. ‘Que Bajo’ begins this Tuesday; I’ll be spinning a special cumbia sonidera set there next week (Nov. 11) as we gather celebrate the debut El Hijo de la Cumbia album.

this week’s Que Bajo guest, Uproot Andy, gifted me this tune. It’s a wonderful afro-colombian song from the country’s salsa hero, Joe Arroyo.

[audio:JoeArroyo_LaTortuga.mp3]

Joe Arroyo – La Tortuga

Image