a big hit! Tamazight lyrics, French hook. This has been bootlegged onto the “Oriental Vibes” vinyl which Broklyn Beats stocked awhile back. Kabyle stormer with international legs.
& here’s one of those 10 minute Berber male & female autotune duets (which i can’t get enough of)
Peroxide locks stick out from her headwrap. The cute mujahid repeats the phrase with machinic fidelity until her batteries run out. “Islam is the light, Islam is the light,” says Mattel’s latest baby blonde squeeze-toy. Or at the least that what concerned parents across Yanquistan heard the the Little Mommy Cuddle ‘n Coo doll saying before Mattel “eliminated that segment of the sound file from future production.” Story here | aqui. (gracias Sonido!)
We live in a noisy world. Basic listening is difficult. Extracting sense from sound is even harder. The manufacturer Mattel blames the alleged proselytization on a misunderstanding caused by distortion and cheap foreign-manufactured electronics. “Because the original soundtrack is compressed into a file that can be played through an inexpensive toy speaker,” says Mattel, “actual sounds may be imprecise or distorted.” What they are saying is that proper audio fidelity would have prevented a collective misinterpretation of religious fidelity. Mass-manufactured gibberish ( “baby babble with no real sentence structure”) was misinterpreted as having meaning. Amidst intentional nonsense and unavoidable noise, a seemingly non-existent signal was heard, and acted upon. Zeal is the word we’re looking for. Or is it exegesis?
“And now I wanna be your dog” sang Iggy Pop, whose rock-styled heresy was repudiated by the New Age gospel group the Stone Roses several years later. The Roses turned Mr.Pop’s statement on end, signing “I wanna be a door” – a compressed poetic declaration of non-sentient desire more in tune with 15th century Gnostics than the hedonistic environment of late 80s Manchester in which the Stone Roses found themselves. “I don’t have to sell my soul, Hizbollah is in me”.
Shehab, either uptown or in Cairo, has a music blog ! nice layout.
+ + +
a friend was visiting some record shops in Texas — digging for crunk cumbia on my behalf. the main place had closed, and a few others turned up empty.
i’m a bit worried. maybe the culture was too viral. You do need some original loops to enter every now and again to keep things bouncing. [try this ZIP for dozens of reggae-soundclash fx lil jon airhorn type samples.] but the AV8-style booty cumbia edits? Perhaps the iterations of iterations of iterations (of accordion loops) went dry. drought…
2 weeks ago we learned that the program that was bringing my band Nettle to the U.S. next March was cancelled – terminated – due to financial crisis. ‘It’s no small irony that a program inspired by 9/11 as a way to (re)connect with the wider world now finds itself without support thanks, if indirectly, to the disastrous policies of the Bush administration.’
It was quite a blow, especially as we needed something like this to make a US trip possible; people with Arabic writing on their passports are having a worse time than ever entering America, even with serious visa sponsorship.
This unpleasant notice gives us renewed determination to put the album out during the week when we should have been doing shows in America, Abdel & Khalid’s (& Wren’s) first time there. Strangely enough, the cancellation gives a new heft to it’s working title: In The Heart of the Heart of the Country . Plus, at some core level, it’s music about friction, at least to me.
THE GOOD NEWS is that i just confirmed a Rupture South American tour for late November/early December. Events in Bolivia (La Paz, El Alto) and Lima, Peru. Details TBA.
[JoaquÃn Torres-GarcÃa]
elsewhere on the continent, Rukula directed me to a full-length, embeddable version of the Musquito animation, thanks!
in London, the shop clerk looks at my Dutty Artz t-shirt and says: “where’d you get that?”
me: “I made it. This is my label. We hired someone in the States to make them.”
him: “Oh, OK. Well I just wanna make one shirt – for me. it’s gonna say: IF YOU’VE GOT A PROBLEM WITH ME, I DON’T CARE, BECAUSE THAT’S YOUR PROBLEM.”
He says it drained of all emotion, like he’s reading a grocery list. I’m startled and look at him to make sure it isn’t some kind of joke. It isn’t. I am in Britain.
I say “OK”.
He says “would you like a bag with that?”
I say “yes, thanks.”
+ +
click on this if you want a t-shirt (or our music!), we have some left:
+ +
AwTaFrAf mostly hangs out in sub-Saharan Africa, so when he heads north, I’m happy. Cassette from Berber country! with extra helpings of reverb and echo underneath that.
w&w: “jace offers less a review than an extended essay on the sounds, significations, & marketing of a west african / “islamic” hip-hop comp”:
Beat Happening, an essay of mine published in U.A.E. daily The National.
[Sister Fa, courtesy Piranha Records]
I played two songs from Many Lessons on the Ramadan/Eit radio show, streamable, makes a nice soundtrack for this article. also available in podcast form.
+ + +
Timeblind (Mr rastObama) blogs the collapse, with the up-close details of someone who plays (played?) the market a bit. also here:
“It hasn’t bled out into the real economy yet, but this stuff is more significant than 9/11 in what its going to do to the real world economy and to the American psyche. . . So anyway I have many positive things to say about the way that social and economic structures can be rebooted, and I’m really excited to see how the western ingenuity adapts and moves forward. I think this is all a positive development, despite what it just did to your parents’ life savings.”
melting horns, Jr’s voice as is trails into silence, gaps – gutted love song becomes the realest kind. Dub-space as container for emotion. Nothing serious can stop echoing.
to quote Matt Shadetek: “Thanks to the people at YouTube for putting us on the front page and getting us thousands of views, dozens of inane comments and spam and friend requests from random people in the past two hours of it being up there. The internet is a wild and wonderful place.”
like i mentioned before, this video is for a tune on my new Uproot mix CD, produced by 2 young’uns from the Dutty Artz camp, Baby Kites & Nokea, and directed by PanOptic. The only thing different is that 60,000 people have seen it in the past 10 hours.
and another T-Pain autotune vid, this time an animation:
I just finished editing 7,000-8,000 words strung across two articles – wait, I only handed in one of them, I have 5,000 words to go. Sigh.
But some stuff needs addressing:
1. a lot of people (read: less than 12) have taken my music and made videos. Here’s the latest, made by kids in Guatamela doing an animation workshop! It’s one of my favorites, for its sweetness.
Menos Basura! Compadres, aquà van algunos ejercicios que hemos preparado con la muchá en el taller de animacion. Seguimos con ello hasta final de septiembre. Practicando, jugando, avanzando. La musiquita es del colega Dj Rupture.
2. the mp3-player that UMemeCompetitor and a few others asked about. It feels like product endorsement, but let’s go. I currently use the Meizu Dane-Elec 4GB thingy. Here’s what I needed in a portable mp3 player:
the ability to play MP3s, WAV/AIFFs, and FLACs. FLAC = lossless compression. FLAC files are about half the size of full-audio (mp3s are roughly a tenth) and support metadata (WAVs/AIFFs dont)
an FM tuner that can also record. This is critical I think iPods/iTouch without FM tuners are pathetic, possibly immoral. Radio! as public space!
charging + transfering data via USB cable. I don’t deal with stupid proprietary plugs.
the tiny, thin Meizu does all that. It costs around $80 for a 4GB version with a big video screen. It has its wonky elements (namely taking minutes to rebuild library after you add new songs), but it does all the above inexpensively. Few other mp3 players do (if you know of alternatives, tell us in the comments). The Meizu is almost too small – these are earbuds, you can get an idea of its size:
& while we’re at it, I use free windows app Foobar2000 to play back audio files. Foobar can natively rip FLACs & mp3s. Its most unexpectedly useful component is the ability to play songs inside ZIP & RAR files.
I’m a nerd, but you’re reading this: you are too. It’s ok.
3. T-Pain vs the Vocoder!!!! (autotune as robot consciousness?)
tomorrow on Mudd Up! radio, tune in for the Eid al-Fitr/Ramadan Special! from breathtaking old recordings of religious music to brand-new celebratory beats from the Muslim world.
upcoming guests in Oct/early November include: banjee bass visionary Kingdom
[Kingdom at home in technicolor]
and the amazing & engaged artist Paul Chan. Check this NYT article on Paul & ‘Waiting For Godot in New Orleans’ for background.
Zeitgeist, people. It’s our age – we may as well haunt it.
[Paul Chan, from nationalphilistine.com]
and funk carioca MPC wizard Cabide DJ, straight from Rio to do a live sampling/baile funk mayhem set. Seems like his homemade ‘fire sampler’ won’t be allowed in the station. Or the country:
