Month: July 2009

FESMAATIC

Künstlerisch wird die Zukunft eine hochspannende Angelegenheit sein! digitaleevolution djrupture christophvoy spex321

German magazine Spex has a long interview with me in their current issue. On “Digital Evolution”, masterpieces, hard disk failure and forgetting, and music biz economics in the 00s. (Or at least I think that’s what it’s about, we did the interview back in February…)

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it’s true: “DJ /rupture to release new mix album“. title: Solar Life Raft. Co-produced with Matt Shadetek, about 30% of it is original material & remixes from us. Link has some tracklist & other info.

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Jem Cohen just returned from Tangier, where he was doing a special project with Luc Sante! (whose Low Life is a must for New York underbelly reading). Jem kindly brought back a stack of CDs for me, including some hard-to-find 70s requests…

Here are two tracks from the bunch. Fes Maatic, a chaabi group I’d never encountered. Moroccan chaabi bands play like a DJ, all the songs segue into each other, it’s a work of groove and momentum.

I miss proximity to this music.

[audio:Fes_Maatic.mp3]

Fes Maatic

ESKIMO MUSIC

He’s had beefs, fall-outs, and hissyfits galore, been stabbed 14 times, retired at least twice, and never released an album without denouncing it at some point, often before it’s been released.

– Dan Hancox on 10 Essential Wiley tunes

Pretty sure I’m already on record citing him as arguably the most interesting person in music today – producer, lyricist, anarchic bizness force.

Some Wiley tunes will make it onto tonight’s radio show.

Lamin posted recent Wiley heat over at Dutty Artz; here are two instrumentals & a stellar diss track with Riko from a few years back. As alien and captivating as they were when I first heard ’em.

[audio:Wiley – Fire Fly (Bass Mix).mp3]

Wiley – Fire Fly (bass mix)

[audio:Wiley – Shanghai.mp3]

Wiley – Shanghai

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“…it’s not even an exciting intro”

 

 

 

 

THE EDGE OF ONE OF MANY CIRCLES

blackbird

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

– Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

 

Perhaps you didn’t know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program “20/20.”) Perhaps you didn’t know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church’s Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye’s?…

People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There’s a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The “shadowy figures” of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved.

– Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Black Man

BROOKLYN TONITE

“Come, my sweet love”

[audio:dulce amor.MP3]

dulce amor

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“it’s 4AM in the morning”

[audio:2nda de la chida.MP3]

2nda de la chida

thematic cumbias (from a no-info Tepitos mp3 cd-r) on the occasion of tonite’s Dutty Artz party in Brooklyn. As Geko Jones says: “I’m over the bananas, our sh*t is rainforesty.”

This one should be fun… I can vouch that Matt & I have a bunch of new remixes and exclusive tunes to run, Gex & Lamin always bring it, and Zuzuka is meant to be a firecracker.

Dutty (and cheap- $5, then $8) tropikkkal fun on the edge of Brooklyn, sound enhanced by Grimm’s reggae bassbins.

let the CIA know yr coming by hitting Facebook.

CIA HISTORY PART 3

roots reggae rips. 7″ style: http://rootsfromyard.blogspot.com/

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GangstaBabyCIA

CIAFRICA has a new free mixtape. CIA History Part 3. As I mention in the Pitchfork interview:

…I’m also very soon, around the same time, releasing a mix CD– actually I’m mixing it, from these African MCs and singers from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, called CIAfrica. its great because people think… “Oh African music, it’s dancey, it’s happy, nice melodies, very uplifting”. And these guys are abrasive, synthetic, angular, non-dancey lyric-driven music. It’s fantastic. So that’ll be coming out soon too.

that’s for fall. until then, you can check CIA History Part 3 or any of various other free mixes floating around their myspace.

[audio:3) URgencia by MANUSA and PRINCE ABRAHAM for CIAFRICA.mp3]

Manusa & Prince Abraham – Urgencia

[audio:6) THE WICKEED MAN by MESSENGERS for CIAFRICA.mp3]

Messengers – The Wickeed Man

STRONG OPINIONS.

CIA-HISTORY-PART-3

PITCHFORK FEST + NEW YORK TROPICAL

This Sunday, July 19, 2009, at precisely 4:30pm, I will play a set at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. I would tell you to come, but Sunday tickets have been sold out for a month.

So my advice is more specific: gather at ‘Balance Stage’, up close and on time! Especially because it’ll be a short “45 minute set – STRICT set length”. (in Band time, 45 minutes is often enough; in DJ time it passes so quickly.) Which means we will have go in deep, together, from the very beginning, at once and completely.

At first I was a bit worried about being the only DJ at a big 3-day festival. I was gonna invite an MC, or a video artist for projections, or a cellist… Then I decided no. I’m just gonna DJ, as I always do, and if I’m not as exciting to watch as, say, every other act at the festival, then that’s that — you should be dancing anyhow. Life in DJlandia evolves via participation (bouncing around, dutty wine, grinding, etc) not spectatorship, in part because the crowd’s energy & responsiveness to certain tunes or moods actually changes what will get played. A feedback loop. A symbiotic relationship.

Put another way: let’s dance!

OR, it’s better to think of DJs a mediums (rather than performers or Artists or whatever). Grabbing the dictionary…

Medium – (1) a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect (2) a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment — compare mass medium (3) an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthly world and a world of spirits (5) a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish.

but mostly, these days, it’s about cumbia. and our homegrown beats. and Kassav’! (Also – where are the cumbia / Mexican music shops in Chicago?)

A week from today I’ll be back home in BROOKLYN, playing the latest installment of New York Tropical. Think hummingbirds.

PERSIAN BUBBLE & SIMMER

I know what your’re thinking: this blog is nice and all, but it’d be better if you could post a 20-minute piece of musique concrete from Iran.

Mashayekhi 06

Well, here’s 19 minutes and 5 seconds.

[audio:alireza_mashayekhi–east-west_op.45_(1973).mp3]

Alireza Mashayekhi – East-West, Op 45 (1973)

Alireza Mashayekhi is an Iranian composer. He writes troubling ‘philosophy‘ (“the artist should not try to use art as a platform to expound on his social or political opinions”) and makes gripping electroacoustic music.

This piece comes from the excellent 2-CD album, Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006, which devotes one disc to Mashayekhi and another to Ata Ebtekar.

[audio:ata_ebtekar-lovaz.mp3]

Ata Ebtekar – Lovaz

‘Lovaz’ has a Fckbuttonsy middle (epic, pretty noise synths for the post-guitar set) bookended by squirggling analog modulation freakouts.

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RADIO & BEATRESEARCH TONIGHT

Tonight’s radio show – my musical selection, prerecorded, Lamin holding it down on the mic realtime (call him up!). Theme: BOIMA AFTERMATH. On Thursday the Chief and I went up to 116th and hit the African CD shops… Listen to last week’s show w/ Chief Boima here, or catch him live in Europe.

Also this evening, in Cambridge, I’ll join DJ C (in from Chicago!), Wayne & Wax, and DJ Flack for a special impromptu Beatresearch Boston-folk reunion lineup!

I’ll be spinning at 10pm sharp. The event is free, my cumbia is strong.

BeatResearch2

OMEGA

Image

[photo: Orlandia Barria for The Fader issue 62]

The summer issue of The Fader contains my profile on Omega “El Fuerte”. The dark king of Dominican mambo. On newstands now, also available as PDF.

here’s a little jailtime a cappella youtubery from the man.

keywords: omega, mambero, najayo, palacio, preso, carcel, dueño…: