Month: March 2011

BOOMBOX ARE US

Last night’s radio show had a nice line pulling through it. Began with some powerful Marrakchi sounds and lifted into the ether from there. As the comments grew increasingly surreal.

Mon. 3/28/11 7:25pm max: hey rupture I was curious as to your thoughts on odd future

Mon. 3/28/11 7:27pm /r: I’D LIKE TO SEE AN “ODD” FUTURE IN WHICH A GROUP OF YOUNG BLACK WOMEN MADE SOME CRAZY ART AND RECEIVED A FRACTION OF THE ATTENTION HEAPED ON ODD FUTURE. #GENDER
. . .
Mon. 3/28/11 8:02pm k:/: will definitely be returning to this show, louder than i can play it in my office. wow. my mind is official blown. thanks much.

Mon. 3/28/11 8:03pm max: No you didn’t misunderstand, get the Audiobook version of Pale Blue Dot if you want Sagan reading Sagan. He doesn’t read the whole thing but theres a solid couple hours of Sagan reading Sagan, it’s pretty awesome even if the info is out of date

Mon. 3/28/11 8:03pm CARL SAGAN?!: Somewhere out there, /r, in the multiverse, that book is waiting for me to find a wormhole so that I can get to it and read it.
. . .
Mon. 3/28/11 8:05pm streets ahead: last night, a cosmologist saved my life

TRACKLIST: Continue reading BOOMBOX ARE US

NEW NEW & INCOMING LITURGY

Radio tonight! Tunes from Morocco plus fresh sounds from Matthewdavid, Egyptrixx, Blawan, Laurel Halo, Lamin Fofana, and more… 7-8pm EST. wfmu.org. 91.1fm NYC.

Then next week, it’s LITURGY! I last saw Liturgy’s founding member Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in Amsterdam. He was reading the new Deleuze Guattari biography and telling me about a gringo who moved to Mexico City to make impossible music for player pianos. Time before that was in Tennessee. Hunter was holding a manifesto he’d written on transcendental black metal, the importance of ‘rupture’, and ‘the blast beat’. Clearly, there’s a lot going on.

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[Hunter Hunt-Hendrix]

The 4-piece are perhaps NYC’s heaviest and most hypnotic live band, it’s a textural, choral, intense experience that ends up feeling like floating. They’ll join me to talk about American transcendentalism, guitar bodies, ritual space, infinite limbs, and more. I honestly don’t know what negro black metal is, but maybe we’ll discuss that, too. Plus they’re bringing in a deep selection of music to share.

GO-GO WASHINGTON D.C. VHS FLASHBACKS

I first heard of Go-go back in the mid-nineties. I was visiting relatives in Virginia and attempting to explain jungle, the music that had me so excited at the time. After listening to my description, one of my aunts said: “Oh, you mean Go-go?”

I’ve since heard fascinating stories about the Washington D.C.-based sound from them, as well as Ian MacKaye and a few other DCers who witnessed Go-go at the heights of its popularity. Percussion-heavy live bands operating like DJs by vamping out current radio hits, long long performances, issues of segregation and public space in the predominantly black scene, the many struggles of a genre that never quite broke through beyond the D.C. area. There was a lot going on…

Earlier this year some of the Anthology of Booty sisters took me to a nice 2nd-hand vinyl shop in DC where I had the chance to sift through old Go-go 12″s. More than anything, they felt like artifacts, little durable reminders of a much larger, harder-to-hold-onto moment. Those 12″s left me wanting to hear more about the histories of Go-go and those of the people and places where it took root.

A 1980s BBC documentary on Go-go was recently uploaded to Youtube. I hope it lingers… Here’s part 1:

NETTLE LIVE: FERAL CHAMBERS

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If you haven’t seen Nettle yet now is your last chance for awhile. We’ve also invited the Seoul-based trio of Cha, Jung, and Sim. The three women are Korean traditional music virtuosos who’ll be sharing their very intense, very far out take on Sinawi and Sanjo ritual music. And Dutty Artz Recording Artiste Lamin Fofana is gonna debut his hybrid live/DJ performance. So come explode with us, this evening will be special.

Nettle
Seungmin Cha, Eunsun Jung, Woonjung Sim
Lamin Fofana (DJ)
Vaudeville Park, 26 Bushwick Ave, Bklyn (L: Graham ave.)
Sat., April 9, 2011 8:30pm $5

ART THOUGHTZ: RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

I enjoy the writings of who Youngman Hennesy here calls “the French science-fiction author Nicolas Bourri… boary… Bory.. Bourriaud” – although St Nic’s thoughts on music and DJ culture fall flat for me, never getting beyond the reheated observation that “DJs are neither consumers nor producers, but a little bit of both!” Here’s a PDF of his Postproduction book.

And here’s Youngman, going in on relational aesthetics. Cut to the wetsuit! I think this is still hilarious even if you haven’t had Serious Conversations About Relational Aesthetics.

THIS LANGUAGE THAT LANGUAGE

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Live in New York City? Read Arabic? I’m looking for someone to help me generate good metadata as I digitize the best of the CDs I brought back from this initial Morocco trip.

It’ll take an afternoon, and will consist of

A) typing up song titles in the original Arabic and

B) translating the song names into English as I

C) serve you tea and cookies (or tacos and horchata) in my studio and gift you whatever music you want

interested? email: nettlephonic at gmail

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TOUR HASSAN SIGHTINGS

I’m a week into this preliminary research trip for Beyond Digital – Rabat, Marrakesh, and tomorrow, Casablanca.

A huge thanks goes out to Marjana, her helpfulness and generosity have made this excursion far more efficient and amazing than would have otherwise been imaginable. Here’s a photo she took of me peering into the distance at Rabat’s Tour Hassan. The Atlantic meets the land in Rabat with a specific kind of rough poetry. I always enjoy seeing how cities deal with the bodies of water that touch them.

jace-tour-hassan-rabat-large

The last time I was in Morocco was twelve years ago. And then only briefly. I feel like I’ve changed more than the country has, which may be true of most places + people with a dozen years between visits.

Musically, this has been a rich trip. Learning a lot! One of today’s discoveries: Izenzaren إزنزرن, a kind of golden era Amazigh Nass el Ghiwane, spiritual godfathers to Oudaden, if that means anything to you… For reasons I have yet to discover, unlike Casa and Rabat, there are no MP3 CDs for sale in Marrakesh. It is all audio CDs! A surprise in today’s increasingly compressed times.

I’ve been recording some late-night radio as well as purchasing CDs — also sharing some music I have with those who want it here. Unfortunately I can’t rip or upload audio right now. For a muddy fix, tune in to my radio show tonight – Monday 7-8pm EST WFMU 91.1fm NYC, and check back here very soon for Maghrebi sounds. In the meantime, Youtube. Here’s Izenzaren: They sing in Amazigh and say YES to vocals through generous delay. Especially around 2:45, when someone sets it to a trippy half-second setting. So many ways to negotiate the relationship between body and voice. The last person I saw to sing through delay like that was Lizzie from Gang Gang.

After some meetings in Rabat, we drove to Marrakesh, where I’ve spent most of the week. Late night radio there (90.5 and 97.1 FM) sounds a bit like this, or at least it did yesterday. Abdelhadi Belkhiate عبد الهادي بالخياط. His ‘oriental’ style is a welcome reminder that the best Arab singers of the 60s and 70s got the best backing bands.

That’s all for now…

NGUZUNGUZU TODAY

nguzu

a quick reminder that L.A. visionaries Nguzunguzu will be performing and talking LIVE on my radio show tonight, 7-8pm EST, 91.1fm WFMU, streaming at wfmu.org.

For a warm-up, here’s their Moments In Love Art of Noise-inspired mixtape, and here’s a great interview courtesy of Mixpak Records.

In addition to hearing them live (a kind of consolation prize for those who didn’t experience them at Dutty Artz’ SWEATLODGE party last Friday), Daniel and Asma will discuss life, wildness, DJing for MIA, building microutopias, and more. Then they go tour Europe and I go research in Morocco.

COMING SOON: black metal transcendentalists Liturgy will be the next guests on Mudd Up!, joining me on Monday April 4th. To discuss choral music, impossible compositions for Mexican player pianos, Hunter’s vision ‘the rupture beat’ (see the Liturgy manifesto!), dissonance & the sublime.

NUBIAN DIGITALS

This time next week I’ll be getting ready to hop aboard Royal Air Maroc and zip over to the top of Africa. 12 hours left on our Beyond Digital: Kickstarter, and the support has been phenomenal.

Here an Arabic-language treat from Nubian singer Ali Hassan Kuban, featuring sweet early Auto-Tune on the vocals! Adapted from a traditional Bedouin song, “Gammal” (‘Camel Driver’) is a good track to play for the Auto-Tune skeptics. How can they resist? From his 2001 album Real Nubian: Cairo Wedding Classics.

Ali Hassan Kuban 2

[Ali Hassan Kuban]

Have a safe journey, my love will travel with you. Come back, let’s be together again soon.

[audio:Ali Hassan Kuban Gammal (feat. Shahin).mp3]

Ali Hassan Kuban – Gammal feat. Shahin Allam