“You’re one of the most interesting people I know!” I tell her, again.
But she doesn’t believe it. She started surveilling her neighbor – to see if his life is as boring as hers is.
+ + +
Rise of the Singing Robots – David Decks on autotune.
I Like Listening to Awesome Tapes from Africa – Andy Moor.
some mudd on each.
this Saturday New York, you’re invited to the opening of “Twentyfirst”, a group (art) show I’ve got a collaborative piece in.
Other artists include: Fritz Haeg – the greatest gardener of our time (no joke !), The Center For Land Use Interpretation, Haegue Yang, RocÃo RodrÃguez Salceda, Mariana Mogilevich, and more.
Twentyfirst @ the Silver Shed on 119th W. 25th st ph.
Says the gallery:
“Jace Clayton and RocÃo RodrÃguez Salceda’s collaborative piece takes on generic file attribution and authorship issues of obliterated audio & visual meta-data, reflecting on the potential of cumulative knowledge and the information ecology of memory, erasure, and the recirculating of digital cultural offerings via global formats of compressed data. Clayton is giving away a limited edition CD containing all of his commercially available audio – each bearing the same title (DJ_Rupture.mp3), as RodrÃguez Salceda prints found images (all titled “foto_02.jpg”) on edible strips of rice paper, for public consumption. “
this is an indicator of my level of busyness. I am just now listening to a CD i personally bought up in Harlem nearly 3 weeks ago, called Amadou Barry – Super Accordeon. It cost $3 and the store where I got it is open 24-hours. They mostly sell phone cards and dvds.
On the ultra-xeroxed cover Mr Barry is wearing a v-neck t-shirt printed with a large picture of a black woman’s foot. She’s in dark heels with a red flower and matching toenail paint. There is no leg. Barry looks worried, startled, purposeful, intent. “Demi-Talon” is what his shirt says.
The poorly-photocopied image has given Amadou Barry a high-contrast bright white aura rimmed by electric blue. The synth with its resonance pushed way up takes precedence over the super accordeon in this song:
[audio:AmadouBarry_ SuperAccordeon.mp3]Amadou Barry – track 8 from Super Accordeon
Here’s a video, audibly taken from a cassette. The sound gets filtered out pretty regularly. Head-cleaner has its uses…
tonite, Tues November 11, Williamburg, I’ll be joining residente Geko Jones @ the new QUE BAJO party. Cumbia fans come through!
I’ll be playing exclusively cumbia colombiana and cumbia sonidera (read: no crunk cumbia, no mashups, etc). Just that sweet slow shuffle.
I’ve been digging deep into sonidera lately, finding a lot of El Hijo de la Cumbia production on CDs floating around the Mexican sonidera scene in Brooklyn shops. They never list the producers, but his style stands out. Here’s one I found last week. Vox by La Contra.
Says El Hijo: “de donde lo conseguistes ? jajajaa ya ni me acordaba de el .. ”
[audio:LaContra_CumbiaDeLaContra.mp3]La Contra – Cumbia de la Contra (prod. El Hijo de la Cumbia)
Princess Music at 6919 5th Ave in Bay Ridge (Bay Ridge: R stop) is the best Arab music shop in Brooklyn. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not good. It simply happens to be the best, because the competition is even worse. Princess has some headless black Sambo/Aunt Jemima style ceramic figurines too, although they’re not for sale – they’re decoration.
Good thing Beur.Fm has internet streaming!
(Beur = verlan for ‘arabe’ ; verlan = we’ll eat this language from our side out)
Beur Fm is a powerful nationwide FM station in France with a satellite broadcast so family back the in the bled can listen in. They have 5 internet streams: the main station, 100% Maroc, 100% Rai, 100% Kabyle, 100% Orientale, and a new one called Ramadan.
Song and artist (metadata) info on all channels except 100% Maroc… That said, I can tell you that the song right now is by Jil Jilala… with Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri on guembri. I recognized his stride immediately… so clear. This moment arrives bookmarked by music I can neither recognize nor remember // beauty dovetails drift, also the way smoke works, hope rolled up and burning. to know little. to listen.
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?
first stop: “Sam Cooke Was Right”. Matt Shadetek on what just happened last night. YES.
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:
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.
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]
I’m voting for Michelle
