I wrote this post a week ago then forgot to push it live. Without further ado:
Cumbia and Auto-Tune – two great tastes that taste great together… It’s from Pesadilla, one of the biggest LA Mexican sonidera groups (their CDs are all over NYC). El Hijo de la Cumbia used to do a lot of production for Pesadilla & remains notorious in the sonidera scene for his forward-thinking beats. El Hijo stopped producing for the big sonidera groups to go solo and will release his debut album on Soot this fall... VERY EXCITING.
more on El Hijo soon, here’s the Pesadilla autotune track:
shouts to Brooklyn bredren Uproot Andy, who just gifted the internets with his Guacharaca Migration mixtape. Andy missed the ‘Knuck if You Buck remix moratorium’ memo that was sent out last year, but it’s a powerful session nonetheless (BROOKLYN STAND TALL). The tape is filled with Andy’s maximal uptempo remixes of latin & african tunes. This excerpt spans his reworkings of Petrona Martinez “La Vida Vale La Pena” and Noite e Dia Ft. Puto Prata vs Quantic “Mana Dança Só”
on the radio tonite: Street Sound Special with Filastine
Wednesday, September 10th, 7pm – 8pm
“Barcelona-based musician Filastine joins DJ Rupture to discuss field recording, street music, and the transformative political possibilities of sound in public space. Filastine will share with us on-site recordings he has made from India to Morocco, not to mention outside the Republican National Convention.”
Filastine is in NYC for Saturday’s Fiesta Soot. He’ll be debuting lots of new material from his upcoming album (i’ve heard it , its great- out in January). Here’s edited footage from a concert in France:
I was hoping to scan some covers and share impressions of my summer reading – but it’s past Labor Day (Americanized MayDay) so summer is being ushered out. Time to get started!:
Shah of Shahs – Ryszard Kapuscinski. This book – about social upheaval, large-scale repression and its lingering impact, wrong-footed modernity, individual heroics and weaknesses that stitch together society – is almost too beautiful. Every page radiates poetic lucidity, even – especially – as he covers some of the more horrible aspects of Iranian life under the Shah leading up through the subsequent revolution. Kapuscinski’s observations spill into now; I can’t imagine a time when this book will not be relevant.
An excerpt from the introduction:
What’s more, you are never sure who has locked you up, since no identifying marks differentiate the various representatives of violence whom you encounter, no uniforms or caps, no armbands or badges–these are simply armed civilians whose authority must be accepted unquestioningly if you care about your life. After a few days, though, we grow used to them and learn to tell them apart. This distinguished-looking man, in his well-made white shirt and carefully matched tie, walking down the street shouldering a rifle is certainly a militiaman in one of the ministries or central offices. On the other hand, this masked boy (a woolen stocking pulled over his head and holes cut out at eyes and mouth) is a local feyadeen no one’s supposed to know by sight or name. We can’t be sure about these people dressed in green U.S. Army fatigue jackets, rushing by in cars, barrels of guns pointed out the windows. They might be from the militia, but then again they might belong to one of the opposition combat groups (religious fantatics, anarchists, last remnants of Savak) hurrying with suicidal determination to carry out an act of sabotage or revenge.
But finally it’s not fun trying to predict just whose ambush is waiting you, whose trap you’ll fall into. People don’t like surprises, so they barricade themselves in their homes at night. My hotel is also locked (at this hour the sound of gunfire mingles with the creaking of shutters rolling down and the slamming shut of gates and doors). No friends will drop by; nothing like that will happen. I have no one to talk to. I’m sitting along looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.
prompted by summer’s end (with the thunderous chaos of Brooklyn carnaval), I’m working on some longer “Summertime Reading” posts (better late than never). In the meantime, this is a quick note to say I’ll be playing a short set at Amsterdam’s Night of the Unexpected Festival this Friday. I go on around 10:40pm. (Wait, this is Holland: I go on precisely at 10:40pm.)
Other performers include the Stephen O’Malley/Pita project, Jaki Liebezeit & Burnt Friedman, Dick el Demasiado, and a performance of Iannis Xenakis’ Mycènes Alpha.
No idea what I will play; it’ll be hands-on and relatively busy, prob about half danceish and other other half in the outer reaches of turntable galaxy.
So much travel has made my brain or body jetlag-agnostic, so we may head over to Bassculture @ OT301 after Unexpected.
I have tried – apparently not hard enough – to find a good source for new Arabic music in NYC. I miss raï! Sheesha bars in Bay Ridge? no problem. Egyptian kebab vendors who make me return to upper-midtown at odd hours to sell me CD-rs & then forget to bring them? Yes. Lemeni bodega owners in Chelsea who tell me all the good music is online, free!, and want to burn me some of it, if only Vista would let them? Sadly, yes. Dusty Lebanese-run cassette shops with Oum, Fairuz, and phonecards? of course. but rai? Not in my path. At least not yet. sigh.
I miss it extra now that crunk has raised/lowered the global synth game stakes! plus, autotune. Nobody autotunes harder than the north Africans.
thanks to everyone who came out for the west coast shows: team hug!
I learned something new on this trip: POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS. large and independent — no, LARGEST — the largest indy used & new bookstore in the world… simply incredible. ( “rad” as the PDX folk like to say.)
if yr in Portland, I recommend the Atlas party. Find Ez & shout “more reggada!”
Accordion lovers of the world unite! Or at least tune in this evening to my radio show from 7-8pm 91.1fm NYC(streamable at wfmu.org as always), as special guest, writer Carolina Gonzalez, will give us a tour of New World accordion styles. Gonzalez co-authored the first guidebook on Latino culture in NYC, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs, and will be breaking out rare vinyl and wonderful stories of the squeezebox as it travels around Latin America.
as reported here & elsewhere, i’ve got a new mix CD called Uproot coming out in October, and the video just went live today, on Pitchfork:
a few years back I saw an amazing video by PanOptic at a DUMBO gallery. When we were brainstorming ideas for the 1st tune on Uproot, I instantly thought of it.
PanOptic, a boutique production company/directors’ collaborative operating out of Soho, very kindly agreed to rework the piece into a music video. Taking inspiration from Kafka’s The Trial, director Gary Breslin developed ideas of a mobile prison – manifested here as the restlessly folding structure which frames the person as he walks through a bleached-out industrial cityscape. The abstract ‘prison’ walls are (partly) night-vision footage of NYC subway tunnels as taken from a moving train… add to that PanOptic’s high-level motion graphics and visual magic, and blam, we’re good to go.
dear West Coast peoples, this is a quick reminder that I’ll be playing at Portland’s Holocene tomorrow night (1st time in Pdx in ages and its only 5 bucks), and at a big Surya Dub party in San Francisco on Saturday.
tell a friend to tell a friend to form an army and march it on through:
So that was a new, very interesting situation: playing to exactly one person instead of DJing to the kinetic volume of a dancing crowd. And that one person liked the cumbia/afro-colombian stuff. After several songs a few more people joined in (not that there were more than 15 or 20 of us) – by the end even Kat was dancing, and Afework Negussie the masenqo player kept passing me tunes from his mp3-thingy to blend in. That night became a strange, reassuring, ego-free ‘open secret’ afterparty in the heart of Flemish country, where our contingent reality was not only possible but present, embodied, aglow.
Sometimes you play a big rave-type event and you make a bag of money but it feels spiritually vacant. Sometimes you play for a handful of people and you don’t simply ‘strike a chord’ as we say in English, you find yourself within one.
